seawasp ([info]seawasp) wrote,
@ 2009-02-23 18:48:00
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Baa Baa Meme Werewolf, BBC 100 Books
The BBC allegedly believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Me, I'll strike through the ones I either never have any intention of reading, or wish I hadn't, too.



1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling ... but that's SEVEN books right there!
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible I've read a lot of pieces but not all of it.
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman So far I've only read the Golden Compass.
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 - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - GeorgeEliot
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 Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - LeoTolstoy
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 --- WTF? You just had The Chronicles of Narnia up a few spaces back...?
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 - L.M.Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding ... if only there was a way to make the "strike" blood-red, flashing, and like fire to denote my loathing.
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 - DonnaTartt
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
80. Possession - A.S. Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - DavidMitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - KazuoIshiguro
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
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... and once again WTF? The Complete WORKS of Will were up there before.
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo



I've read a lot more than six.

(19 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]von_krag
2009-02-24 12:14 am UTC (link)
A very psudo lit major list. I'm surprised Falkner isn't on it & WTF on The Da Vinci Code? Ah well it takes all kinds I guess.

(Reply to this)


[info]slrose
2009-02-24 12:18 am UTC (link)
I've read 42 (counting series that I've read a substantial amount of. 4 1/2 volumes of Harry Potter, for example.)

(Reply to this)


[info]dhole
2009-02-24 12:24 am UTC (link)
I decided not to do this as soon as it was clear that the compiler of the list doesn't know what a book is.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]akicif
2009-02-24 12:48 am UTC (link)
It's not from the BBC: it's a summary of the 2000-odd top ten lists collected in the UK during the run-up to World Book Day 2007 - which goes some way to explaining the duplication and the lumping of series in together.

(ETR: trackpad droppings)

Edited at 2009-02-24 12:50 am UTC

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]melchar
2009-02-24 12:48 am UTC (link)
Hmmph =- I've only read 48 of them - but they are all in the 'called classics and shoved at you' in school variety - or the modern 'popular' fiction ['Color Purple'? 'Bridget Jones Diary'?]

Shakespeare is on it twice because it's worth it. ^_^ And There should be different grades of credit for '3 Musketeers' and 'Count of Monte Cristo'. I've seen a 123 page pb for '3' and a less than 200 page 'Count'. I sought out and read the 712 page '3' - and found a 1300 page 'Count' to read [in high school - because those books were way cool].

(Reply to this)


[info]dsrtao
2009-02-24 12:58 am UTC (link)
Read 46. Not a particularly good list.

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[info]hipgnosis6
2009-02-24 02:01 am UTC (link)
Spotted this on my friends-of-friends.... and must say, they really think most people have read just six of these? I've read 37 and read more than six titles on this list as requirements for high school English.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]roseembolism
2009-02-24 07:06 pm UTC (link)
No they don't, actually. This list has very little to do with the BBC one.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]hipgnosis6
2009-02-25 09:49 pm UTC (link)
Hm. That's not what the OP implies.

> The BBC allegedly believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]roseembolism
2009-02-26 07:11 am UTC (link)
I'm just going by the Googling I did. If you can find an alternative BBC list, I'd more than like to see it.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]seawasp
2009-02-26 06:45 pm UTC (link)
Yes, but the OP is not the OP, so to speak. This is a meme taken from someone who took it from someone etc., etc., so the provenance is iffy at best.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]howardtayler
2009-02-24 07:00 am UTC (link)
Forty-one. Yeah, it's not a great list. There are some "important" books there I haven't read, but that doesn't mean much.

(Reply to this)


[info]kengr
2009-02-24 09:57 am UTC (link)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding ... if only there was a way to make the "strike" blood-red, flashing, and like fire to denote my loathing.

There is, but it's *really* bad html. :-)

(Reply to this)


[info]roseembolism
2009-02-24 07:11 pm UTC (link)
For anyone that's curious, here's the actual BBC list, which has nothing to do with "only read 6".

The Big Read: the BBC's list of 100 most loved novels, as submitted by the public.

Given that this was based on a popularity poll from readers, I highly doubt anyone at the BBC believes the readers will have only read six of these novels.

(Reply to this)

Something of interest perhaps?
[info]c_dublu
2009-02-24 10:59 pm UTC (link)
I see the Lord of the Rings is high on your list and the Narnia book rates as well. I think I have a book you would be interested in and I want to bring it to your attention. Please visit this website:

http://www.eloquentbooks.com/TheRingOfKnowledge.html

(Reply to this) (Thread)
Do NOT do that. Anywhere. Ever.
[info]seawasp
2009-02-25 12:36 am UTC (link)

"WOM" on your journal, I presume, means "word of mouth". Yes, that's an excellent way to market a book.

Spamming journals of people you don't know is NOT Word of Mouth. Or if it is, it's the kind that IS bad publicity. It's the kind that makes you look not merely amateurish, but pushy and intrusive. This is my journal. Commenting on it is presumed to mean that you're going to comment on what I've written. Instead, your comment showed (A) that you didn't even understand the posted message (it's not MY list, I'm just repeating a meme and pointing out the one's I've read, and the order of the books isn't relevant), and (B) you weren't actually interested -- or certainly don't APPEAR interested -- in what I write in my journal, just in finding an excuse to point to your book.

A real word-of-mouth campaign is MUCH harder to do. It requires a lot of personal contact, a lot of work, travel, unceasing effort -- preferably not just by you but by a lot of friends and family who can simultaneously push your book while convincing people that this is NOT what you're doing -- obviously a difficult thing to manage. Even an E-WOM (electronic word of mouth) campaign is much harder. If you want to do that, you have to become part of multiple online communities FIRST -- long before you start "pushing" your book -- and be a respected contributor to them so that people have a reason to listen to you and to CARE about your book. So, for instance, in this particular case you'd have had to start reading my journal, participate in comments on the journal, show you were following along and had an interest in what I was doing, etc., for a long time, and THEN bring up your book and ask if I was willing to look at it, etc.

Speaking as a published author myself (three books from Baen already out, three more under contract), you also need to understand that in real publication, there is one ABSOLUTE, ironclad, invoilable rule: Money flows FROM the publisher TO the author. Never, ever does it go the other way.

I hope that you will refrain from doing this sort of thing again, as it will gain you nothing and lose you much.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
Re: Do NOT do that. Anywhere. Ever.
[info]tekalynn
2009-02-25 01:16 am UTC (link)
Thank you.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
Re: Something of interest perhaps?
[info]tekalynn
2009-02-25 01:19 am UTC (link)
Please listen to what [info]seawasp says. He has a lot of experience, and he's right.

Good luck with your book, and I hope you find a way to market that works to sell your book and doesn't turn off your potential readers.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]wizwom
2009-02-25 11:30 am UTC (link)
2, 5, 6, 8, 13, 14, 16, 18, 22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32, 33, 36, 40, 41, 49, 52, 61, 73, 87, 89, 91, 94, 98, 99
Although, to be honest, except for the SF and Shakespeare I doubt I would have read them if not for English courses. 28% but that's better than your score.

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