I lifted this from the blog of a friend of mine, and it came with the disclaimer that “The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?”

Because I have stopped believing anything I read on the Internet that can’t be substantiated, I’m not sure that I buy into this claim, but it was fun to go through the list and figure out what I had already read. I’ll be honest, this post is mostly for me, as a way to track how well I am doing at my goal to read the “classics”. What’s your total?

Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. I’m going to count both those I’ve read in physical form, and those I’ve listened to int he form of audiobooks.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible (definitely never cover to cover)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X (Definitely one of my favorite books of all time)
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot X (I believe this book should be required for all engaged couples )

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
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 X
34 Emma – Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X (Absolutely fantastic! Another favorite of all time)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X
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 X
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 X
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 Nighttime – 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 X
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 X (Ohhh, another favorite. This list makes me so happy.)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession

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 – EB White X
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 X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

TOTAL: 26. Quite sad actually. Makes me want to start reading! Maybe I’ll revisit this list in a year or so and see if I’ve made any progress.

The other night I signed off early to crawl into bed and snuggle up with a good book. I ran my fingers over Salt: A World History, Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing, and Lies My Teacher Told Me, all of which I am in the middle of reading. It would be a nice feeling to finish a book.

Except, none of those were what I was needing. They were either too silly, or too clinical. I didn’t want history, I didn’t want chick-lit. I wanted to float lazily in a river of words that would rush around me, almost to the point where I feel overwhelmed. And who better to accomplish this than Virgina Woolf?

The Hours has long been on my list of top 10 favorite movies, and I instinctively knew that my little heart would love the book even more.

Have you read Virgina Woolf? It’s an experience unlike almost anything else. If I were to film a commercial for one of her books, for this one in particular, it would begin on a crowded London street. Shoppers, motorcars, men, women and children would be zooming past the camera. The viewer would almost feel overcome by the intensity of the sights and sounds on the screen. The camera would move quickly from one individual to another, giving a quick glimpse into their mind. Just as you start to connect with that person, the shot would move to the right, to another passerby.

And then suddenly, everything would slow. The crowd would part slowly and Mrs. Dalloway would be seen, with the sun shining on her face. She would be holding her flowers, the new gloves she has purchased, and we would hear her questioning herself, her ability to host her party (although you as a viewer would understand that questioning her hostess abilities isn’t all she is doing). And then suddenly, it would all start back up again. The sights and sounds would once again overwhelm you. The pattern would repeat over, and over.

That is what reading Virginia Wool is like for me, and I revel in the experience. Are you a Virgina Woolf fan?