How to Make a List

Kylie posted a list from the BBC of books they think everybody should read. They also claim that most people have only read 6. That seems a little pretentious to me but that’s the BBC for you. The list is also very anglocentric.

BBC List
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
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 M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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 Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
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 Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM 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 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
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
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
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 - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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 - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



I prefer this list. It’s far more international and has more great literature than pop trends. They also don’t number it because only somebody with serious problems would put Da Vinci Code above Hamlet.

Norwegian Book Club’s 100 Best Books of All Time
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Fairy tales – Hans Christian Andersen
Epic of Gilgamesh – Anonymous
Book of Job – Anonymous
Mahabharata – Vyasa
Njal's Saga – Anonymous
One Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, a trilogy – Samuel Beckett
The Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Poems – Paul Celan
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
Stories – Anton Chekhov
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Possessed – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Medea – Euripides
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
Gypsy Ballads – Federico García Lorca
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Goethe's Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands – João Guimarães Rosa
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Iliad – Homer
Odyssey – Homer
A Doll's House – Henrik Ibsen
Ulysses – James Joyce
Stories – Franz Kafka
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Castle – Franz Kafka
Shakuntala – Kālidāsa
The Sound of the Mountain – Yasunari Kawabata
Zorba the Greek – Nikos Kazantzakis
Sons and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence
Independent People – Halldór Laxness
Poems – Giacomo Leopardi
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
Pippi Longstocking – Astrid Lindgren
A Madman's Diary – Lu Xun
Children of Gebelawi – Naguib Mahfouz
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Essays – Michel de Montaigne
History – Elsa Morante
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Metamorphoses – Ovid
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
Tales – Edgar Allan Poe
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel – François Rabelais
Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo
Masnavi – Rumi
Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
Bostan – Saadi
Season of Migration to the North – Tayeb Salih
Blindness – José Saramago
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
King Lear – William Shakespeare
Othello – William Shakespeare
Oedipus the King – Sophocles
The Red and the Black – Stendhal
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
Confessions of Zeno – Italo Svevo
Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Ramayana – Valmiki
Aeneid – Virgil
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar



Then there is this list. Very French but it has some great books that the BBC thinks are worse than the Da Vinci Code.

Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
1 The Stranger – Albert Camus
2 Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
3 The Trial – Franz Kafka
4 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
5 Man’s Fate – André Malraux
6 Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
7 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
8 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
9 Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier
10 Froth on the Daydream – Boris Vian
11 The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir
12 Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
13 Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre
14 The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
15 The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
16 Paroles – Jacques Prévert
17 Alcools – Guillaume Apollinaire
18 The Blue Lotus – Hergé
19 The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
20 Tristes Tropiques – Claude Lévi-Strauss
21 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
22 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
23 Asterix the Gaul – René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
24 The Bald Soprano – Eugène Ionesco
25 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality – Sigmund Freud
26 The Abyss – Marguerite Yourcenar
27 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
28 Ulysses – James Joyce
29 The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
30 The Counterfeiters – André Gide
31 The Horseman on the Roof – Jean Giono
32 Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
33 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
34 The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
35 Thérèse Desqueyroux – François Mauriac
36 Zazie in the Metro – Raymond Queneau
37 Confusion of Feelings – Stefan Zweig
38 Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
39 Lady Chatterley's Lover – D. H. Lawrence
40 The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
41 Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
42 Le Silence de la mer – Vercors
43 Life: A User's Manual – Georges Perec
44 The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
45 Under the Sun of Satan – Georges Bernanos
46 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
47 The Joke – Milan Kundera
48 A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
49 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
50 Nadja – André Breton
51 Aurélien – Louis Aragon
52 The Satin Slipper – Paul Claudel
53 Six Characters in Search of an Author – Luigi Pirandello
54 The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui – Bertolt Brecht
55 Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique – Michel Tournier
56 The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
57 If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
58 The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
59 Les Vrilles de la vigne – Colette
60 Capitale de la douleur – Paul Éluard
61 Martin Eden – Jack London
62 Ballad of the Salt Sea – Hugo Pratt
63 Writing Degree Zero – Roland Barthes
64 The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
65 The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
66 The Order of Things – Michel Foucault
67 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
68 The Wonderful Adventures of Nils – Selma Lagerlöf
69 A Room of One's Own – Virginia Woolf
70 The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
71 The Ravishing of Lol Stein – Marguerite Duras
72 The Interrogation – J. M. G. Le Clézio
73 Tropisms – Nathalie Sarraute
74 Journal, 1887–1910 – Jules Renard
75 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
76 Écrits – Jacques Lacan
77 The Theatre and its Double – Antonin Artaud
78 Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
79 Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
80 Moravagine – Blaise Cendrars
81 The General of the Dead Army – Ismail Kadare
82 Sophie's Choice – William Styron
83 Gypsy Ballads – Federico García Lorca
84 The Strange Case of Peter the Lett – Georges Simenon
85 Our Lady of the Flowers – Jean Genet
86 The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
87 Fureur et mystère – René Char
88 The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
89 No Orchids For Miss Blandish – James Hadley Chase
90 Blake and Mortimer – Edgar P. Jacobs
91 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Rainer Maria Rilke
92 Second Thoughts – Michel Butor
93 The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt
94 The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
95 The Rosy Crucifixion – Henry Miller
96 The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
97 Amers – Saint-John Perse
98 Gaston – André Franquin
99 Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
100 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie