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Have I Read: BBC’s Top 100 Books You Need to Read Before You Die
Hi everyone! I started a series a few months ago of me “reacting” to book lists that are “must reads” or “top 100 best” style lists, and last time I reacted to NPR’s Top 100 Fantasy and Sci-Fi. Today, I’m adding another list to this series with BBC’s Top 100 Books You Need to Read Before You Die. After looking through this list, I definitely think it needs to be renamed to classics you should read, or maybe “have you read every book by Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, with some contemporary books thrown in?”
- Bold titles are books I have read
- Italic and underlined titles are books that I would like to read eventually but don’t own
- A single asterisk (*) denotes books/series I’m currently reading
- Double asterisks (**) denotes books I own and plan to read
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien*
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling (series)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Bible
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- 1984 by George Orwell
- His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (series)**
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Complete Works of Shakespeare
- Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tokien
- Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll**
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (series)
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli’s Manodlin by Louis De Berniere
- Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
- Winnie-The-Pooh by A.A. Milne
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
- The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
- Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Atonement by Ian Mcewan
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
- The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
- Midnight Children by Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens**
- Dracula by Bram Stoker**
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnet
- Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
- Germinal by Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession by A. S. Byatt
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
- The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
- The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
- Watership Down by Richard Adams*
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
This list kind of irritated me because there was nothing really consistent as to why some books were selected – it seems like whoever made this list wrote down every classic they could think of then realized when they were still shy of 100 just started adding in other books. What are your thoughts on this list?
Melting Pages 
I felt exactly the same when I looked through this list -Classics are important, but there are LOADS and LOADS of other books also worth mentioning.
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Exactly! It actually kinda frustrated me that that was pretty much all this list was, to the point where I may make a discussion post about it because I have lots of thoughts lol
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Yes to a discussion post!!
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I worked on it a bit today and I think I got wayyyy off topic because there’s just SO MUCH to unpack with this!
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I’m looking forward to it!
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I think it is a weird list, mainly classics and than randomly Bridget jones’s diary?
Still happy to say I read around 40 of these haha!
(www.evelynreads.com)
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Good for you! Yeah, it’s definitely a weird list and I have no idea what their criteria was for adding books to this list. There are so many other books out there that I would say you should read that aren’t all Charles Dickens!
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exactly!
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The list does seem a bit classic heavy. I have read a handful of them. I see On The Road on this list, and that was a painful reading experience.
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I find most classics to be painful, but mainly because I find the writing style to be difficult to grasp.
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I totally agree, it does seem like they ran out of classics to add.
I’m also sort of the opinion that too many classics in a short amount of time reduces your appreciation of the genre?
– Emma xxx
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Yes! And it’s fairly elitist/pompous to say the only books worth reading are classics, because there are so many other great books that deserve recognition and praise.
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A lot of these are similar to the Rory Gilmore reading list, but if i recall correctly, it had more feminist books on it as well.
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I agree that it’s mostly classics. There are so many books that are just as good, that should also be mentioned! Also, the bible isn’t a book that everyone will read because it’s religious!
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Exactly! I was so shocked when I saw the bible was on this list! I’m not religious at all and I have no intentions of reading the bible, and I feel like it’s a little christian-centric to say you should read the bible before you die. Other religious texts are just as important to their religions and cultures!
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I take umbrage with quite a few books on that list. 😉 Like #42.
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