March 01, 2007
Brit Lit Meme
The Telegraph releases a World Book Day poll on the 100 most popular books in G.B. I've not much to say about it except that I notice a suspicious number of movie titles. On the one hand, this is positive, as it suggests movies promote reading. On the other hand, this is negative, as it suggests that movies promote the reading only of books made into movies.
Anyhoo, on to the meme. Standard rules: Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you especially like, strike through the ones you hate and feel free to add comments.
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 - Well, parts of it. And it seems a bit above my likes and dislikes.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8= Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
8= His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - I prefer Far From the Madding Crowd and The Mayor of Casterbridge.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Well, okay, I've not read Titus Andronicus.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - The favorite of a high school girlfriend.
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 - One of these days.
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 - What I was saying yesterday.
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - Ask yourself. If someone was writing as screwy a story for your kid, wouldn't you be a bit worried?
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens "Generally speakin', I don't like boys. How d'ye do, boy?"
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - Why not, I don't know, especially as it has a naval flavor to it. Did you know that two of Jane's brothers rose to become Admirals in the Royal Navy?
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 - 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 See above.
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 - As I said, his best work IMHO.
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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - I really should.
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker Had to for school. Ack.
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 Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Favorite one? "The Musgrave Ritual."
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - Prefer Lord Jim.
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 The early 70's movie versions of this were written by George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman Papers. And he did quite a good job.
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare Why this gets singled out from Shakespeare's other works above, I dunno.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Do read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. She creates a world I would think you'd be very comfortable living in, given your politics.
And, of course, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time, by Mark Haddon. So you will understand why I would make such a gauche and irascible comment like the one above in the first place.
;-)
Pep
Posted by: pep at March 1, 2007 02:54 PMTo show how useless Britain has become, there is not one work from Wodehouse on this list...But of course garbage writers like Kerouac, Plath and Rowling make the cut...Typical.
Posted by: Basil Seal at March 1, 2007 03:40 PMHas Mu Nu just given up on trackbacks?
Posted by: Zendo Deb at March 1, 2007 05:36 PMHey Pep, that is my nic in "real life" because my last name is Pepper. You?
Thanks for the post idea: I have read exactly five of those books, and three of them were forced upon me in high school. Over forty of them I have never even heard of. What is the diff between Narnia and Lion/Witch/Wardrobe? I thought those were the same thing. Whatever.
However, I have read every English translation of the Bible from cover to cover - some several times - except for the Tyndale New Testament, most of which is in the KJV anyway.
Priorities.
Posted by: Hucbald at March 1, 2007 05:37 PMI find it hysterical that Bridget Jones' Diary made it onto the list. ;-)
...but while Fielding is Brit, Fitzgerald was part of early modernist American lit and Dostoyevsky was most definitely Russian.
Posted by: agent bedhead at March 1, 2007 10:08 PMWhat, no Swallows and Amazons ? It has that nautical flavor and explains leading lights and all that good stuff.
Posted by: chuck at March 1, 2007 10:58 PMYou'd like "Cold Comfort Farm," especially if you can't stand DH Lawrence.
Posted by: dillene at March 1, 2007 11:06 PMOur tastes must be very similar. I've read about 90% of those you highlighted, and just a few you didn't.
I therefore think I can say with confidence that you'd like "Prayer for Owen Meany." (Once you force yourself through the first few chapters).
And while I'm not as sure about your tastes on this one, I personally loved it so much that I keep it on my bookshelf waiting for my kids to get old enough to enjoy it too, "Watership down"
Posted by: Robert at March 2, 2007 10:08 AMI've read about 28 on the list. Why are Dune (horrible, don't waste your time) and The Da Vinci Code (haven't read, no need to now) on the list. If you're going to have a science fiction book on there, pick an intelligent one, like Starship Troopers (the movie is an abomination) or Stranger in a Strange Land or something by Arthur C. Clark.
I'm assuming Da Vinci Code is some sort of bad joke -- a lightweight pop-fiction book. Replace with Murder on the Orient Express for a pop-fiction book with a bit more meat on its bones.
Posted by: rbj at March 2, 2007 12:26 PMNo, but one of the Missus' college classmates was the grand-daughter of one of Margaret Mitchell's close friends. We met the woman in Atlanta one time and although she was quite polite, her look said nothing but "Dayum Yankees..."
Posted by: Robbo the LB at March 3, 2007 09:54 AM
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