Many people have been passing a list of books around saying that BBC believes most people have only ever read six out of the hundred . Wherever it is from, it is rather an interesting social phenomena, as many viral Internet things are.
Curious, I did a quick Google search. It turned up nothing besides others who marked the list. Doing a search on BBC initially only produced a couple of lists of 100 favourites and a mention of children reading six books over the summer holidays.
Determined, I tried again, this time selecting the first 6 books of the list as my search words. An article referencing the top ten books from 2007 was the first thing I uncovered. All ten books mentioned matched the first 10 books on the list.
Unfortunately, further searches failed to turn up the original Top 100 list of 2007, if that is indeed what the article references. Still, although the origins of the "6 out of 100" story remain obscure, it is highly unlikely that BBC considers such a thing as people's favourites are usually widely read.
It makes sense that the list would be of favourites, for it is an extremely eclectic list - Enid Blyton is a children's writer.
Having now expounded upon my meager attempts to solve the mystery here is my own check-offs of the list. Books that are in bold are ones that I have read. Those with an X are ones I liked a good bit.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling Jury is still out as to whether I like the series or not
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Total: 8
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Not all, but several
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
Total: 2
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 1/2 - 3/4
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X "Beware the Jabberwock my friend...
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
Total: 3 1/2
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma-Jane Austen liked, but no so much as her others
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
Total: 6
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 - LM Montgomery X
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
Total: 2
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens liked, yet didn't
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Total: 3
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas Another liked, but didn't
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - Bits
Total: 1
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome X (Unfortunately I've only read part of the series)
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Total: 4
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (I don't think so)
Total: 4
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery Liked but didn't
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams Again liked but didn't
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - On Facebook, I said i had read this, but upon reflection, I think it is still only excerpts, so I shall subtract it from here.
Total: 7
Final Tally: 39/100 (and bits)
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