BBC's Challenge.

British Broadcasting Commission made the outrageous claim that very few had read more than six of the greatest books ever written.  Here's the list - and I really do dispute some of these being on this list - Possession for instance - gosh that book was bad! - but I definitely dispute that I've only read six of them.

OK, here's their list, and the ones highlighted in bold are ones that I've read, and the ones in italics are the ones I've started but not being able to finish, and the ones with asterisks are the ones I absolutely adore, rated out of three:

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 (all) ***
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 May Alcott *** (I read it as a kid, so don't blame me)
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 Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger *
19 The Time Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell *** (I was a teenager)
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 ***
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh *
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 *** (The kid thing again!)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini  **
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - William Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA 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 Martell
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  *** (the kid thing again)
74 Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson **
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath  * (my angry teenager phase!)
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 Colour 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
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  ***  (The kid thing again, but this time not ashamed of it)
92 The Little Prince _ Antoine de Saint Exupery ***  (Ditto)
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 & the Chocolate factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo