The British Think I'm Stupid. Or Do They...?

There's a meme rolling around Facebook in which the BBC is accused of thinking that the average person has only read six of the one hundred books listed below.  People are responding to it with the self-righteous indignation of Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, which is a little unfair as I can't find a single reference to the BBC's original indictment of our intelligence (if it exists at all).

However, it does get me thinking.  I feel a little smug about my intelligence at times, despite having no chess champion trophies or honorary seats at Oxford to show for it.  And I like to think I'm reasonably well-read.  But in the last few years, as I spend more and more time either finger-twitching in front of the TV or cramming my thoughts into 140 characters, I've noticed my reading habits have withered as much as my stock portfolio.  I still love to read, but never seem to make time to do it.

So I decided to take the test anyway, to see if I'd officially atrophied to the point of being an amorphous blob and let my brain fall into disuse.

Here are the instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'X' (and bold) after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star/asterisk/Bonds (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
5) Put a # (and italics) by those you've started but not finished.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible #
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman *
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X+
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare #
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
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 X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
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  (but I did like the movie)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X (isn't this a repeat?)
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 X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X (I thought this would only include good books...)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
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 X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan *  (been trying to read this for years...)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X+
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - X+
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 - X+
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X
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 - X+
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt * (See: Atonement, above)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X+
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X+
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 X
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 (barf)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle #
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams *
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X+
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total read = 37
Total started but not finished = 4
Total I still want to read = 7

A flawed list, no doubt.  There's some obvious stuff that isn't listed, and a few that have no right being on the list.  But the numbers don't lie, and it looks like there's hope for me yet.  Either that or I my pace out of the starting gate was brisk and I'm just coasting now.

And in the meantime, all you haters out there should lay off of the BBC.  They did bring us Monty Python, Dr. Who, and The Office, you know...

(P.S.  I think we should come up with an alternative list that better reflects reality.  Something that includes Middlesex, The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay and As I Lay Dying but leave out everything Mitch Albom over wrote.  Leave me something in the comments and we'll try to correct the meme.  WOLVERINES!!!)

Comments

[always home and uncool]

I listen to BBC One on the Sirus XM. That gives me extra credit, right?

[Marti from Seattle]

Sorry, but with a toddler, if Dr. Suess isn't on the "must read" list, well then I'm just not reading it! Nothing excites me like a good page turner. Might I suggest "Cat In The Hat".

[Kathy]

I'm suspicious of all these "books you must read" lists. (Actually, there is a pretty good guide called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and the selections are far more varied than the ones above.

[Kate (http://lipstickdaily.com)]

Funny, just blogged about the same thing today... having received the list on FB. (http://lipstickdaily.com)

Maybe we should be looking at a "Top 100" list from Asia or India... since they are kicking our *$$ in educational testing standards these days.

Agree with you re: love for Hobbit, Harry Potter and the Count of Monte Cristo. Maybe we should start a NEW list... with more good books: The Pearl, The Old Man & the Sea, My Antonia to name a few.

[ilinap]

I know how much you like Jane Austen.

Can we also exclude Nicholas Sparks from the new list? How does that crap get published, man?

[Fuiru]

The fact that Murakami Haruki ain't on the list makes it bunk, in my opinion.

[Whit]

I believe I'm at 37 as well. Some of those books I've gone out of my way to avoid.

[the weirdgirl]

Every time I see this meme it has a different set of books on it. The last one was full of Terry Pratchett novels. Which, yeah, I read but do they belong up there with Faulkner? And where are the rest of Steinbeck's books?

[opret]

I like to read the classical books so much. I always download books using http://rapid4me.com - rapidshare search engine aftewords I upload it into my ebook and can read.