Last week we discussed titles of books which were purported to be those considered by the BBC  ‘100 books you ought to read if you were an informed person’. Since then, the source of that list has been questioned as being the BBC, and in fact may be so…

And yes, it’s true I’ve not read anything by Stephen King, save for the first half of The Shining. There are a large number of books one will never read because there’s only so many which can be got to before one dies. Perhaps some of my “To Be Read Shelf” will be got to soon, but in the meantime I’ll continue with Rhys’s book…

1. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen (Although if you read one JA book, you’ve read them all.)
2. The Lord of the Rings — JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë
4. The “Harry Potter” series — JK Rowling
5. The Bible — Various
6. Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë
7. Nineteen Eighty Four — George Orwell
8. His Dark Materials — Philip Pullman (Published as “The Golden Compass” in North America. Hardly made me an atheist – hell, the books are _based_ on the fact there is a god. The dumb-dumbs who want to ban it who have never read it should at least know it promotes heresy, not atheism.)
9. Tess of the d’Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy (If not for Dickens, Hardy would be the worst in the literary universe)
10. “The Complete Works of Shakespeare” — William Shakespeare
11. The Hobbit — JRR Tolkien
12. The Time Traveller’s Wife — Audrey Niffenegger; (An AWESOME book, so there, take that. Read it. Read It. READ IT!)
13. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
14. John Steinbeck (every novel EXCEPT Grapes of Wrath)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha — Arthur Golden
16. Animal Farm — George Orwell
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
18. Anne of Green Gables
19. Far from the Madding Crowd — Thomas Hardy (Yuck)
20. The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood (Read this book immediately, you fool! Okay, have you read it now? No? WHY NOT?)
21. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen (supra.)
22. A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens (Dickens is so awful, it’s what they’d use to torture me if I was in Guantánamo)
23. Of Mice and Men– John Steinbeck
24. Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas (Don’t make the mistake of accidentally buying the abridged version the first time around)
25. Moby Dick — Herman Melville; (Melville wins the contest for writing a book that sucks more than Hardy and Dickens combined. What a waste of paper, ink, time, etc).
26. Notes from a Small Island — Bill Bryson
27. The Inferno — Dante;
28. A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web — EB White
30. The Five People You Meet in Heaven — Mitch Albom (A whole bag of awesome)
31. The Little Prince — Antoine De Saint-Exupery
32. Watership Down — Richard Adams
33. A Town like Alice — Nevil Shute (plus practically every other Nevil Shute novel, although I have never managed to finish “On The Beach”, which I think is his least best book)
34. Hamlet — William Shakespeare
35. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — Roald Dahl
36. Les Miserables — Victor Hugo (the FULL version, which starts when JVJ is but a boy, about 10,000 pages before the point in the story where the musical begins.

So I guess I’ve got 36.

There’s also a ton of good books that should have been on this list instead of crap like, oh, say, Moby Dick. My fave books are: The Bridge at Andau (Michener), The Razor’s Edge (Maugham), Good Omens (Pratchet/Gaiman), The Stand (King) (yes, screw you), The Great Escape (Brickhill), The Chronicles of Amber (Zelazny) (really a compilation of 10 novels, the first 5 are best, the last five are akin to SW Eps I — III), Maus, The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas), pretty much most of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels, Stephen King’s short stories (uh, King), Deadly Lessons (Russell), The First Humdrumming Book of Horror Stories edited by Ian Alexander Martin Even Though It Contains No Mention of Me Unlike Another Book In This List.

One would however think the something like the complete works of Shakespeare would count as more than one book though? I’m not counting that one myself as I have read quite a few of the plays, but certainly not the whole lot.

I have noticed a lack of Fleming and many other contemporary authors, there does appear top be a degree of pretension in the list they have provided. I mean, where is The Imagineer or Deadbeats in that list?