Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Underestimated by the BBC

According to the BBC it has decreed that a majority of us are terribly under-read, which has be wondering if the us refereed to is America. I mean here in the land of the free the newspaper is only printed at a 8th grade reading level, what ever do you mean we are under-read and going illiterate?  Of a list of 100 books, they state that most people have not read more than 6 books found on this list. Here's our chance to prove them wrong!

** The Mad Scientist did a quick search on the net for the article where this originated from and well, I did not find it.  But if you happen to run across it please send me the link **

BBC MeMe Instructions:
•Copy this list.
•Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
•Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
•Tag other book nerds.
•Highlight the ones that you own but haven't read. They are probably in your TBR stack/on your shelf at the back because someone said you should read them.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker (required)
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Read - 26
Started or read excerpts - 8
Own - 18

I found this list at The Wolf's Den and I was intrigued to see where I fall in this.
Who would not want to see where they stand when it came to the BBC and what they think?
As I went through the list and did my directions it is very clear that they should hear some of what I think.
Selections were named more then once, and why would a series count as one entry.
Vicki caught onto this as well.  
(I completed my list before I seen what she had to say about all of this.)
Should I even mention the number of books that this brain has never hear of?
Or the books I have no desire to read?
Or what about the number of books I have read.
The Mad Scientist has plenty to think about this!
Dear BBC....
May as it might be, it would be improper of The Mad Scientist to really say what she thinks.

Dears, how do you fair on this list and really what do you think?

10 comments:

  1. Absolutely fabulous post. I'll be doing this and tagging you when I'm finished.

    Jen

    ReplyDelete
  2. 72 ... counting the repeats. With a tad liberal an interpretatuion on things like "Complete Works of Shakespeare"

    At the same time ... this list should have included different boos, if you ask me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I've got 35 so far, but I've made it one of my goals to read the whole list. I love book lists!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I was at 46, but that was leaving out several things like "the complete works of Shakespeare" because although I've read a lot, i can't definitively say the complete works.

    I can't remember if it was a commentator on my blog post about this or someone else but apparently this is some kind of bastardized re-do of a BBC article from a few years ago listing peoples top 100 reads. And if you check, that out you'll see there are a handful of changes to the list (like listing the series separately.
    Rhiannon
    TheDiaryofaBookworm.com

    ReplyDelete
  5. I remember this list floating around about a year ago, and I guess it's making the rounds again. The list is actually from the Guardian (which is British, but not the BBC, for anyone who doesn't know)

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/01/news

    It's 100 "books you can't live without" based on 2,000 people's top ten lists. Which is why some of it is weird, say this group of people put "Chronicles of Narnia" on their favorites list, and another group put "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe"... etc. No one edited for doubles. Nowhere I've seen has a source for where the "6 books" rumor started.

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  6. Lindsay my dear thanks so much for clearing up the air on that. I'm always weary about lists going around but honestly I couldn't help my hatted head with seeing where I stand.

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  7. Way to go everyone. I'm so happy to see that everyone has out read me on this list! Hats off to you ladies for sure.

    Simply marvelous.

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  8. Brilliant seriously sexy cool Santa ya got there ;)

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  9. I count 52 on the list, i can definitely count the complete works of shakespeare, i've read all of his stuff a million times, hes one of my all time favorites :)

    ReplyDelete

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