Four-eyes

So, after an earlier bout of my lashing out at the ninnies on Amazon, I was tagged in a note that had a list of 100 books by the BBC, of which they believe most people have read six titles, on average.

That statistic sounds terrible at face value, but it’s actually worse if you study the list closely. I went back to the BBC website for the source of the list and found, as I’d suspected, that the 100 books were not called BBC’s Best 100 Books or some similarly lofty title. They were simply a list of the nation’s best-loved novels, as nominated by readers - which explains how the Da Vinci Code managed to get on the list in the first place. (The only place it should be is on the Shit List)

But I digress. The reason the 6-out-of-100 statistic is even more horrifying is that this is already a list adulterated by contemporary piffle like Philip Pullman’s stilted storytelling and Mitch Albom’s cotton-candy words. And yet, after discounting the piffle that even a six-grader could read, people only managed to read 6 of these books on average? (And yes, I have contemplated the possibility that the majority of the books that made up the population mean of 6 could have been quality, boring shit like Jane Austen and Joseph Heller, but I don’t believe in Santa Claus anymore and will bet you anything that an overwhelming 1 out of the 6 had been Bridget Jones’s Diary)

What the heck else have they been reading, then? Wait - have they been reading?

In any case, I will republish the meme I was tagged in, complete with the running commentary that I did not want to annoy people with in the original post on Facebook.

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Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (The dude spent a whole chapter describing the shire and at least a paragraph talking about the hobbits’ hairy feet. If you thought the movie was long and over-indulgent…)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (My sweetly ambitious father bought the unabridged version for me when I was eight and I couldn’t understand a thing, so I came back when I was 11 and finally got through it, banishing my secret fear that I was an illiterate git)

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible (I belong to a certain category of Christians who know the salient parts used frequently in theological debates - the same parts produced by atheists with a triumphant flourish (“If your god is so loving how come he says he’s a jealous god? Hah!”). But I will be damned (eep) if I could tell you who begat whom. I skipped all those bits. Also, I don’t think I finished the Book of Revelation - all the stuff about chaos and the horned beast just wigged me out. If I wanted to scare myself, I’d read The Shining. Also, most people should hesitate to say that they’ve read the whole Bible. That is the last book you want to fudge the truth about)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (All I know about this book is that there is a lot of tragedy and lovelornness and somebody jumps off a cliff…or was it someone called Heathcliff? Anyway. Sound like a downer)

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (Am I the only one who thinks that Orwell practically bludgeons the reader around the head with his message?)

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (I’ve always had a problem with the animal manifestation of your soul that supposed to be an extension of you in Pullman’s trilogy. If you go to the can, does your animal companion go, too?)

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (When I was a wee girl, my piano teacher gave me a graphic novel version of the book. I vaguely recall an old broad who wore her wedding dress every day and a wedding cake covered in cobwebs. WTF, Dickens, WTF)

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (I loved this book in its unabridged glory growing up, but I tried to re-read it last year and realised that it was awful and mawkish. It’s really like going back to eating KFC after you’ve spent a few years eating Cornish game hen)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (You know how descendants of authors might be entitled to royalties from the authors’ works in some situations? I wonder if that principle works in reverse - whether Mr Heller’s descendants will give me back the hour of my life I wasted on the first part of this book)

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I studied Othello for ‘A’ Levels and had a tupping good time. Hurhur)

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 (I have nothing bad to say about this book. Nothing. For weeks after, I swanned around, saying things like “Fiddle-dee-dee” and “Well, ah do declare!”)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (42! I love this book, even though parts of it were probably written when Adams was stoned out of his mind and giggling loudly with Stephen Fry)

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Short of planting yourself alone at a bar with a bottle of vodka, this is the quickest way to feel depressed and devoid of all hope in life)

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 (My key take-away from this book was this sumo tactic in one of the scenes called the swinging door or something, where you let your blubber-filled opponent charge you and at the last moment, you step aside. Driven by the sheer momentum of lard, your opponent will rush past the spot you were in and throw himself out of the ring, thereby losing. I’d wondered how to use it in prefect-board politics at the time in high school, but was disappointed to learn that no one was interested in sumo-wrestling, figurative or otherwise)

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Yeah, I know. My bad.)

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 (I’m not sure about madding, but the book itself was maddening and I could not get far away enough from it)

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (I always use the three-toed sloth to invoke the comic imagery of laziness for when I write at work, and this book is the reason)

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 (Maybe I didn’t stay long enough for the steamy scenes, but they didn’t happen early enough in the book if they’d happened at all, and I got bored)

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 (I have to admit, this book made being British, neurotic and chubby look good. It also inspired the Englishman Phase for about a year)

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 (This book was one of his most lacklustre, which is still brilliant by everyone else’s standards. Only Bryson can make repeated accounts of walking through the drab countryside and muck of Britain entertaining)

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 (I only started on it because it was so dirty that it was banned in its day. I guess they hadn’t seen The Kardashians then)

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (I think I spent the bulk of this book worrying about whether I would go to heaven. Once there, I don’t suppose I’d be too picky about whom I meet)

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

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20 books down, and quite a number of them that I’m not very proud of. It’s alright, though. I write good.