Reading list meme

[altivo]

I'm sure I've done this before, but it's interesting how the list morphs as it keeps circulating. This has a very heavy slant toward British authors, but I do not believe the list originated with the BBC as claimed.

Latest version from Corelog.

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

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (all)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials/The Golden Compass - 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 Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller'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 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 Berniere

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

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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

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 - 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

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo





If I counted this right, I've read 40 out of 100. Of course, there are duplications in there, which is one of the reasons I doubt that the BBC is the originator. It seems that people keep taking things out and putting their own favorites in as they circulate the thing.

Comments

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I got 25. Unsurprising really. I would probably find most of thost books increadibly dry. The subject matter of most of them probably just does not appeal to me.

[altivo]

Actually, more than half of those are pretty good quality reading and not "dry" at all. Some are drivel that has been pasted into the list, though. And why it has duplications like "Complete Works of Shakespeare" and also Hamlet or "Chronicles of Narnia" and also The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe I don't understand.

Putting the bible or all of Shakespeare on a list like this one makes no sense whatsoever. Hardly anyone reads the entirety of either one. I have in fact done both and do not recommend either particularly. But there are highlights that no one should miss in each.

Provenance (not a town in France)

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

You're right to be skeptical. I knew I'd looked into this a good while ago, when I first became aware of the list, but had to re-do the search. First I encountered How Do Meme's Start? A Case Study: 100 Books in Facebook, which isn't so related but might be interesting. It does note that the BBC's Big Reads list in 2003 overlaps the present list by about 2/3rds.

In the comments, there is a link to the real source of this list, The Guardian: Books you can't live without: the top 100. The Guardian's list matches the list you and many others checked, and doesn't mention the BBC.

I'm just going into all this detail in a vain effort to cover up how few books on the list I've read, I fear. Though, if you count the books I've typeset in the last couple of years, my total goes up by half. I do kinda read these things as I typeset them, kinda. *sheepish grin*

Re: Provenance (not a town in France)

[altivo]

As I recall from my days as an admin secretary, it's impossible to type without reading. Boy have I read a lot of boring drivel as a result of that. ;p

Now you've given me an opportunity to rag on your employer for something. The large print galley proofs they send to the Library of Congress always have "Title by Author" on the title page and the place of publication is in Maine. But the final copy invariably has the "by" removed and the place of publication listed first is in Michigan. This means that every single CIP record is wrong and must be manually corrected. Grr.

Re: Provenance (not a town in France)

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

Ack! That's not good. I'll see what I can do. I know the CIP applications are sent from the Maine office (yes, we still have one) weeks before we've typeset the book (have to, or else the LoC couldn't get us the CIP in time). My guess is that they're using the same process they've always used without any review since...maybe since my employer bought them. We (meaning the project editors and compositors) aren't supposed to touch the CIPs, just place them on Page 4, so they need to be correct when I get them.

We're putting CIPs in as a convenience. If you have to manually correct each one, that isn't very convenient is it?

Re: Provenance (not a town in France)

[altivo]

Yep, it's not too convenient. And the rule that you should not alter the CIP from what you receive is absolutely correct. The idea is to give the L of C the right information to begin with. ;D We rarely use the printed CIP any more, though tiny libraries may still do so. We use the digital copy in MARC format that was generated at the Library of Congress and placed into OCLC. If that has major errors when compared to the actual title page, we can't always correct them in the online record due to OCLC policy (which parallels the one that says you shouldn't change them in the printed copy.)

The "by" is just a minor irritation. But when the CIP says "XYZ Press" and the title page says "ABC Publications" that's a major issue, and can result in the creation of duplicate records in OCLC that have to be cleaned up later by a manual process. If at all possible, the CIP application should reflect the real appearance of the printed title page and I suspect that really can be predicted. There have clearly been some policy changes on that, and someone doesn't understand that procedures have to change to match.

Re: Provenance (not a town in France)

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the further explanation. That fills in some holes in my understanding. I remember using WorldCat for some research over the years and I'll try to go there to look some of these up to see what you're using (WorldCat will work, right? It's from OCLC...)

They sure could send the LoC a very close representation of the title page, since all the title pages look the same. They could use a typewriter to present it, but it will always have TITLE / AUTHOR / IMPRINT / CORPORATE LOGO (with cities) on it in the end.

Re: Provenance (not a town in France)

[altivo]

Yes, Worldcat will do to see what happens. You need to check between the time the CIP is generated at the Library of Congress and the time when the actual printed book is released to libraries and dealers. In theory, once the actual book reaches LC or another privileged library, they will correct the record to match the actual title page.

You can probably see the problem just by comparing the CIP on the back of the title page to what appears on the front, as far as that goes. If the CIP says "by authorname" and the front of the page has no "by" then the forms sent in did not match what is being put on the actual physical page. Likewise the city and name of the publisher.

Re: Provenance (not a town in France)

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

For the city, you want to use the first city listed on the title page (in this case, Detroit), yes? It has Waterville, Maine, but it's the fifth city listed.

In theory, once the actual book reaches LC or another privileged library, they will correct the record to match the actual title page.

I'm sure they would, when there is time, but so many of these are genre fiction, which usually isn't a high priority, at least I think that's true.

Re: Provenance (not a town in France)

[altivo]

Correct. The CIP often lists Waterville, ME when the title page now lists Detroit. This difference actually affects the MARC record in several places, some of which you don't see in Worldcat.

Thorndike used to put Waterville on the title page, and I guess whoever files the CIP forms has never been told to change that.

Wheeler's name still appears on the title page of their books, but Thorndike doesn't always seem to be there. If the only name on the front of the title page is Gale, then the CIP form should also say Gale is the publisher, rather than Wheeler or Thorndike.

Compared with the prices of Gale reference books, though, this is a pretty small complaint. I hardly meant to suggest that you undertake the fixing.

Re: Provenance (not a town in France)

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I'm not working really hard on it. I'm getting lots of little things done in between posts. :) But it appeals to both the geeky, shoulda-been-a-librarian part of me and the "It's wrong and it must be corrected!" part of me.

I suspect you're absolutely correct about the person who files the CIP forms not being told to change anything. I probably shouldn't say any more than that.

Also, I might be able to get this fixed, or at least pass it on to the people who can fix it. I can't fix the prices, unfortunately.

Re: Provenance (not a town in France)

[altivo]

Yeah, I know you can't fix the prices. Probably no one can. They are part of what looks to be an imminent crash and shakeout in the whole publishing industry, I'd say. Several commentators have referred to it as "The Death Spiral" in which the combined management policies and economies of major publishers, bookstores, and to a lesser extent, libraries, have turned into a feedback loop that is strangling the life out of print publishing. At the same time, it is making any potential fixes very difficult to apply.