BBC 100 Books - My Progress

As part of my 30 Before 30 challenge, I'm working my way through this list of 100 books, of which the BBC reckons most people have read just 6. I'm posting this now to give me somewhere to record my progress and cross them off as I go along.

Part of my personal library.

NB: My initial intention was to read all the top 50 on the list below, but, having studied it in more detail and noted that the tomes that are War and Peace and Crime and Punishment are both in the top 50, I've now decided to be more realistic and merely take the number of books I've read out of the total 100 to over 50 - i.e. I can choose books out of the second half of the list to up my total. I've also added a list at the bottom for other books I feel I ought to have read, but that are not in the BBC's list. I'm not going to feel too guilty about substituting some of these for some of the entries on the BBC list (e.g. the Bible), so these can count towards my total too.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen 2. Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien 3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte 4. Harry Potter series (all), J.K. Rowling 5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee - finished 16/4/15 6. The Bible [probably not going to read this - will substitute for one on my own 'must-read' list below] 7. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte 8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell 9. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman 10. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens 11. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott 12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy 13. Catch-22, Joseph Heller - finished 19/2/15 14. Complete works of Shakespeare 15. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier 16. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien 17. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks 18. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger - finished 14/5/15 19. The Time Traveller's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger 20. Middlemarch, George Eliot 21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell 22. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald 23. Bleak House, Charles Dickens 24. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams 26. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh 27. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28. Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck 29. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll 30. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Graeme 31. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy - CURRENTLY READING 32. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens 33. Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis 34. Emma, Jane Austen 35. Persuasion, Jane Austen 36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis 37. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini 38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Berniere - PARTIALLY READ 39. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden - FINISHED 1/8/15 40. Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne 41. Animal Farm, George Orwell 42. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown 43. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving 45. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins 46. Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery 47. Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy 48. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood 49. Lord of the Flies, William Golding 50. Atonement, Ian McEwan 51. Life of Pi, Yann Martel 52. Dune, Frank Herbert 53. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons 54. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen 55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth 56. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens 58. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley 59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon 60. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck 62. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov 63. The Secret History, Donna Tartt 64. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold 65. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas 66. On the Road, Jack Kerouac 67. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy 68. Bridet Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding 69. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie 70. Moby Dick, Herman Melville 71. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens - finished 18/3/15 72. Dracula, Bram Stoker 73. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson 74. Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson 75. Ulysses, James Joyce 76. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath 77. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome 78. Germinal, Emile Zola 79. Vanity Fair, William Thackeray 80. Possession, A.S. Byatt 81. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens 82. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell 83. The Colour Purple, Alice Walker 84. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro 85. Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert - finished 26/6/15 86. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry 87. Charlotte's Web, EB White 88. The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Alborn 89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan DoyleT 90. The Faraway Tree Collection, Enid Blyton 91. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad 92. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery 93. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks 94. Watership Down, Richard Adams 95. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole 96. A Town Like Alice, Neville Shute 97. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas 98. Hamlet, William Shakespeare 99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl 100. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

Top 50: 33/50

Top 100: 50/100

Other books I need to read I'm putting these here too as I think they should have been on the above list. Some are taken from this list of top 100 from the Telegraph. I'm letting myself substitute some of the books on the list above for some of these.

101. The Beach, Alex Garland 102. The Man in the Iron Mask, Alexandre Dumas 103. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien 104. Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee 105. Dr Zhivago, Boris Pasternak 106. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift 107. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark 108. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle 109. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley 110. Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis 111. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins 112. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster 113. Brighton Rock, Graham Greene 114. The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse 115. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe 116. To Let, John Galsworthy 117. Enigma, Robert Harris 118. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (partially read) 119. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel 120. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte

Let me know if there are any novels you think I should add to this list!