The BBC book list update

I have been steadily making my way through the BBC Big Read Challenge that I set for myself a little over a year ago. At the time, I had read 47 out of 100 books that the BBC said were "must reads." Since then I've read about four feet of books (I'm up to 69 books read) and I've learned that the BBC really doesn't give a toasted crumpet about what you "should" read. The list that circulated on Facebook is actually from the Guardian (a UK paper), and is a list of the top 100 "most popular" books. The BBC does have its own list, but it's also a popular book list. I was a bit...let's call it "annoyed" when I discovered that mix up.

But I've kept on readin on. I've also read quite a few other books not on this list, as I have gotten to the point in the last few months where some of the books don't appeal to me or haven't been available at the library. Many of these books have been great, and I'm happy I've read them since I otherwise wouldn't have (Cloud Atlas, A Prayer for Owen Meaney, Possession). Others though (Oliver Twist, Tess of the D'urberfields, Brideshead Revisited, I'm looking at you.) have been not so breezy to get through. One book I just picked up to read, A Suitable Boy, is oh, just the longest book written in English at just over 1,200 pages. Damn, is the weather that bad in England that this is a most popular book??

I'm tempted to download a few audio books to just listen to as I work, but that feels like cheating to me. And I don't really like to listen to books. I tried out one book on my Droid phone Kindle app, but (no offense Kindle lovers) I also don't really don't like reading books on a screen since I look at a computer all day for work. There is something that is almost ritualistic for me about picking up a book, finding my place and feeling the dry pages turn under my fingers as a story unfolds on the pages.

For what it's worth, here is my updated progress. The books with a little square behind them are ones I have read since taking up my challenge. I'm not going to hit my kinda sorta goal to be done by the end of 2010, but I'm pretty close!


Have Read
1. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
2. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry 
3. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
4. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
5. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
6. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
7. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
8. Animal Farm - George Orwell
9. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
10. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
11. Atonement - Ian McEwan
12. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
13. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
14. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
15. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
16. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
17. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
18. Charlotte's Web - EB White
19. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
20. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
21. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
22. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
23. Dracula - Bram Stoker
24. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
25. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
26. Hamlet - Shakespeare
27. Harry Potter series
28. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
29. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
30. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
31. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
32. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
33. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
34. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
35. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
36. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
37. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
38. Nineteen eightyfour - George Orwell
39. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
40. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
41. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude
43. Possession - AS Byatt
44. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
45. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
46. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
47. The Bible
48. The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
49. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
50. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
51. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
52. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
53. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
54. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
55. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
56. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
57. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
58. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
59. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
60. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
61. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
62. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
63. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
64. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
65. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
66. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
67. Watership Down - Richard Adams
68. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
69. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

To Read
1. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
2. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
3. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
4. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
5. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
6. Complete Works of Shakespeare
7. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
8. Dune - Frank Herbert
9. Emma - Jane Austen
10. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
11. Germinal - Emile Zola
12. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
13. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
14. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
15. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
16. Middlemarch - George Eliot
17. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
18. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
19. Persuasion - Jane Austen
20. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
21. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
22. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
23. The Five People You Meet In Heaven
24. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
25. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupe
26. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
27. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
28. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
29. Ulysses - James Joyce
30. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
31. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne