BBC Big Read

[Wavid]

Didn't watch the programme meself, but have skimmed through the list of books. Doesnt look like they have been put in any order yet though:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bigread

Some on there I had never heard of, also some that appalled me.

What really annoyed me though: what the hell is Kane And Abel by Jeffrey Bloody Archer doing there? And so many by Terry Pratchett!!!

[amner]

Five by Pratchett and five by Dickens. Make of that what you will.

Abhorrent an individual as he is, I couldn't help but chuckle at Brian Sewell on the programme ("Pratchett, who is Pratchett?").

.

[Colyngbourne]

I was also appalled by the Terry Pratchett and also the Jacqueline Wilson entries, and of course the inevitable JKR. The programme was a great mish-mash of snippets about the books and talking heads but barely a quote from any book got heard. It was all bits of footage from adaptations (the Little Women one had to be seen to be believed). I am seriously worried as to which 20 will make it to the autumn vote.

Colyngbourne

[amner]

The 100:

1984, George Orwell
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
Dune, Frank Herbert
Emma, Jane Austen
Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Holes, Louis Sachar
I Capture The Castle
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
Katherine, Anya Seton
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
The Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien
Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
Magician, Raymond E Feist
The Magus, John Fowles
Matilda, Roald Dahl
Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Mort, Terry Pratchett
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
Perfume, Patrick Süskind
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
The Ragged Trousered Philantrhopists
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
The Stand, Stephen King
The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Tess Of The D'urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
To Kill A Mockingbird
A Town Like Alice
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Twits, Roald Dahl
Ulysses, James Joyce
Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Wind In The Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë


how many have you read?

.

[amner]

Just checked.

28

28! Is that all?

.

[NottyImp]

One less than that. Life really is too short...

[Colyngbourne]

46, I think.

Colyngbourne

[Wavid]

18. Pathetic. Thank god for Roald Dahl, thats all I say.

What on earth is "Artemis Fowl"?

[Colyngbourne]

'Artemis Fowl' is one of the latest trendy hits for the intelligent 9 yr old + age-group. The eponymous fellow is a 12 yr old master criminal battling an 'other world' of fairies/elves/trolls who are a full functioning but hidden modern society with high-tech weaponry. Capt. Holly Short of the LEPrecon unit is his adversary. They are very well written and witty books with a nicely heartless youth and a kick-ass fairy at their centre; there are three books in the series so far. But not worthy of making it into the top 100, IMO, as much as I love books for teenagers and young adults.

Colyngbourne

[Wavid]

Much as we have been slagging it off, I have been making efforts to register us here as a reading group at the Big Read website.

The blasted thing wont work at the moment, but it should see some more members, hopefully.

[Colyngbourne]

Does that mean we have a chance to win the 100 books? If so, I'm dibbsying for the Patrick Suskind, if we win.

Colyngbourne

[Wavid]

yes, we do. And we might get to be on TV!!

Might.

[Colyngbourne]

Nu-huh! Hope not, in that case!

Colyngbourne

[Wavid]

I also put a message on their (very slow and VERY crap) message board about this site, and have had a bit of interest - so everyone BE NICE to the new people!

Don't let Amner talk to them and scare them off! :wink:

[Colyngbourne]

Yes, I just read it - very slow and very crappy message board, isn't it?

[Wavid]

The trouble is that when you use the creme de la creme of internet message boards (thats this one, obviously) slumming it on others doesnt come easy!!!! :D

[NottyImp]

These (ie this one and Impnet) are very good - fast and featureful.

[Lucoid]

I've read 42 of those, but really can't understand why most of them made it onto the list.

[joy]

I've read 47, and I must say the ones I have read on the list were all pretty good books, so I can't complain about it too much. There were quite a few though I'd never heard of, and some I've started but never managed to get into (like Lord of the Rings!)

[wshaw]

Hmm... I actually think it's heartening that there are so many children's books on the list. Forced to read 'em because of having children, I was at first pleasantly surprised how much better children's books have become since I was a nipper. (And I come from a time when Kaye Webb at Puffin was publishing some great stuff). But I'm also coming to believe that in the UK at least children's books are currently far, far more adventurous than modern adult literature - both in style and in subject matter. And they're capturing the popular imagination too.

[Wavid]

And I suppose its for the books that people haven't heard of that the list really can be of use.

if you see a title you don't recognise, plug it into Amazon and see what the description says, you might find a gem that you wouldn't have done otherwise.

[gil]

35, in my case.

Like the rest of you, I feel that some of the list is tripe (and some that I've read are in the tripe category), some is from genres I don't care to read - many of which, like Pride & Prejudice and Middlemarch have been serialised on tv or made into movies, and I know what I'm missing - and some are children's books that were published after I stopped being a child.

Having said that, I do like both Harry Potter and the Arthur Ransome books.

This kind of list, generated by popular demand, is pretty unreliable. I have a large book collection - some 4500 at last count - I've read all but a few at least once (bear in mind I'm rather old), and still get books out of the library every few weeks. I could build a "best 100" several times over without including about half of the BBC's list.

A few missing authors, in my opinion (correct me if I didn't notice them on the list):
William Boyd
Iain Banks
William Gibson
James Thurber
C S Forester
Patrick O'Brian

[Lucoid]

I agree that it's unreliable - it annoys me that so many of the entries were by the same authors, though obviously these must be the writers who dominate the public's consciousness. I feel it would have been nice to see a wider variety represented. Perhaps a rule stating that only one book from each author could enter the list would have made it more interesting, though then it wouldn't be a true reflection of the nation's favourite 100 books, I suppose.

[NottyImp]

When they do it for music, you should see the shocking things that happen.

[gil]

I keep forgetting that it was the 100 MOST POPULAR books, but even that is unreliable. People lie, as few are going to own up to Mills and Boon, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Ms Cartland, Cowboy Novels etc. - I'm surprised Jeffrey Archer was there - while everyone feels happy about quoting some worthy book they may have seen serialised on TV. There is nothing pejorative in my choice of books no-one will own up to. In particular, JA and BTB write compelling page-turners. It's just that, like SF, they have a sort of lowbrow reputation.

[youjustmightlikeit]

Lighten up everybody, its only a bit of fun.

[the exile]

40 but I like Sci-fi so around 39 are by Pratchett, Herbert or Tolkien.
(Damn!, can't seem to lift my forehead up). 8)

[rick green]

I've only read 17 cover to cover. Some nine or so more I didn't finish. I must get cracking!
:oops:

[Nabokov]

37, although my early years of Roald Dahl probably bumped that up to look better than it is. That said, I have never touched a Harry Potter novel (or Pratchett).

Another five or so are on my 'to read' list.

[davidp]

I thought the Waterstones Top 100 was better.(see below) I think it was from the twentieth Century only. I've read 47 from this list but only 36 from the other.
Ulysses being 4th is just silly. There must've been pretentious people calling that their favourite who hadn't read it. I reckon if every person in England that had actually read it voted for it, it still wouldn't be 4th.


http://home.comcast.net/~antaylor1/waterstones100.html

[amner]

What awful formatting. Try this:

The Lord Of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
1984 - George Orwell
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Ulysses - James Joyce
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
Wild Swans - Jung Chang
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Lord Of The Flies - William Golding
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Wind In The Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Winnie The Pooh - A.A. Milne
The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Outsider - Albert Camus
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
The Trial - Franz Kafka
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
The Diary Of Anne Frank - Anne Frank
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Sons And Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
If This Is A Man - Primo Levi
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu - Marcel Proust
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck
Beloved - Toni Morrison
Possession - A.S. Byatt
The Heart Of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
A Passage To India - E.M. Forster
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder
The Name Of The Rose - Umberto Eco
Love In A Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Remains Of The Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being - Milan Kundera
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Howard's End - E.M. Forster
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
Dune - Frank Herbert
A Prayer For Owen Meany - John Irvine
Perfume - Patrick Süskind
Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
Cider With Rosie - Laurie Lee
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Testament Of Youth - Vera Brittain
The Magus - John Fowles
Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist - Robert Tressell
The Master And Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Tales From The City - Armistead Maupin
The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernières
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
A Room With A View - E.M. Forster
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
It - Stephen King
The Power And The Glory - Graham Greene
The Stand - Stephen King
All Quiet On The Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle
Matilda - Roald Dahl
American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
A Brief History Of Time - Stephen Hawking
James And The Giant Peach - Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
The Bonfire Of The Vanities - Tom Wolfe
Complete Cookery Course - Delia Smith
An Evil Cradling - Brian Keenan
The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence
Down And Out In Paris And London - George Orwell
2001 - A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
The Tin Drum - Günter Grass
A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Long Walk To Freedom - Nelson Mandela
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton
The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell
Cry The Beloved Country - Alan Paton
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
The Van - Roddy Doyle
The BFG - Roald Dahl
Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
The Horse Whisperer - Nicholas Evans

[davidp]

Amner,
It was appalling wasn't it, and actually frightened me a bit, which is why I went for the link instead!

[gil]

In my opinion, the Waterstones list is so fashionably chattering class that the "members of the public" were probably self-selecting and relatively few in number. Not that I disagree with most of the stuff on the list, though Anthony Burgess is disproportionately mentioned. I was pleased to see Iain Banks so high up in the list, but I don't really believe it.

[amner]

Going back to the website from whence it came, I notice this list is 10 years old.

EDIT:In January 1997, Waterstone's announced the results of its Books of the Century poll to find out what the public considered to be the hundred greatest books of the twentieth century.

Oh, and by the way, THE HORSE WHISPERER!?


Lists, eh?

[John Self]

In my opinion, the Waterstones list is so fashionably chattering class that the "members of the public" were probably self-selecting and relatively few in number.

Yes they were self-selecting, in that people weren't actually stopped in the street on a random sample basis and asked for their favourite books. You picked up a leaflet in the shops and filled it in if you wanted to vote. The BBC Big Read poll was self-selecting too.

The Waterstone's one was run by Waterstone's and Channel 4, which would certainly skew it toward a particular demographic, though I wouldn't use the term chattering class myself. :roll:

Ulysses being 4th is just silly. There must've been pretentious people calling that their favourite who hadn't read it.

Not so. I voted in the Waterstone's poll and unlike the BBC poll, which asked for your favourite book, the W's poll (carried out in 1996) asked for what you thought was the greatest book of the 20th century. Hence the high rankings for the widely unread Joyce and Proust. I didn't vote for either, but I could have done so perfectly sincerely, since even though I have never been able to get through Ulysses (and haven't tried Proust), I am given to understand by many people whose opinions I respect that they are among the greatest novels ever written.

[davidp]

Not so. I voted in the Waterstone's poll and unlike the BBC poll, which asked for your favourite book, the W's poll (carried out in 1996) asked for what you thought was the greatest book of the 20th century. Hence the high rankings for the widely unread Joyce and Proust. I didn't vote for either, but I could have done so perfectly sincerely, since even though I have never been able to get through Ulysses (and haven't tried Proust), I am given to understand by many people whose opinions I respect that they are among the greatest novels ever written.

That's a fair point, but I'm still not entirely convinced.

[Peronel]

I have read 26 of the BBC list and 18 from Waterstone's.

I feel that the Waterstone's list was more diverse, not subject to fleeting popular fads as the BBC list (hey, I love HP as much as the next girl, but let's not go nuts, people).

I was impressed to see three of my favourite books on the Waterstone list (It, The Stand, and High Fidelity). Impressed and surprised, I must admit, since I was booed out of my first year English class for saying It was the greatest novel I'd read.