Reading Challenge: BBC's 100 Book To Read (Before You Die)

I've been eyeing different reading lists recently, as a way of guiding me towards what to read next. Sometimes I look at my bookcase and feel so lost because I have so many books that I haven't read but don't know where to start. I probably don't have all the books that are on this list, but I've decided to add another reading challenge to my "goals" this year.

This is definitely going to be a work in progress but I've decided to tackle the BBC's 100 Books To Read Before You Die list. It'd be a massive success if I did finish the entire list this year, but I'm expecting this to expand over quite a number of years.

There are a few of these lists lying around but the BBC one just seemed right to start off with. They've listed books that are very popular and well-known. It also means I can read a range of genres, especially the classics that I tend to neglect.

So far I can cross off the following on the 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 (I'm not sure whether to cross this off or not because I did study it during high school. Thoughts?)


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


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 Caroll


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 (In French)


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'm aiming to read at least one a month, but I'll update this list a couple of months down the track.