Book meme and rant

[altariel]

Books I've read in bold. Books I've started and not (yet?) finished in italics.

1984 - George Orwell
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
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 (reading it at the moment)
Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22 - Joseph L Heller
The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Charlie & Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
The Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M Auel
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (I doubt I'll go back to this)
The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexander Dumas
Crime and Punishment - Fyoder 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 & Neil Gaiman
Goodnight Mr 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
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Holes - Louis Sacher
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
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 Garcia Marquez
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
Nightwatch - Terry Pratchett
Noughts and Crosses - Malorie Blackman
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Perfume - Patrick Suskind
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Princess Diaries - Meg Cabot
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Shell Seekers - Rosamund 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'Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCollough
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Twits - Roald Dahl
Ulysses - James Joyce
Vicky Angel - Jacqueline Wilson
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I swear I'll finish this)
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 Bronte





After the TV show with this list was shown on BBC2, The Big Read Debate was shown on BBC4. This is a version of the rant I posted to a mailing list after watching it. It was a round table debate chaired by Andrew Marr, with guests including John Carey, Germaine Greer, Michael Rosen, and one or two others. This is a rant. I haven't bothered to turn it into a polished piece of prose because I'm lazy.

Rant

The debate had me ranting with two minutes. Not just the sight of Germaine Greer being stupidly, stupidly wrong about Tolkien (this time she finally admitted that she'd never even read LoTR), there was also the bit where television was compared unfavourably to books (grrr... and this from a set of people making part of their livings as television pundits).

But the bit that really got my goat was when John Carey claimed that Birdsong and Captain Corelli's Mandolin weren't romances, and then the panel went on to have a go at Georgette Heyer (who also wrote a book about a love story unfolding against a backdrop of war and gave a very well-regarded account of a famous battle (Waterloo). To give Greer her due, she did defend Heyer here. I hate blatantly wrong double standards perpetrated by media-styled intellectuals. Grr, again.

I was amused when one of the panellists remarked that he was shocked that there was virtually nothing to represent the modern literary novel - and got to howl my usual rant about the modern literary novel ("That's because it's shite!"). But the funniest moment was right at the start when Andrew Marr (the presenter) asked the assembled worthies whether any of them had read The Stand. None of them had. Which strikes me that they should have tried to get a more eclectically-read set of panellists!

Comments

[klose.livejournal.com]

Ooh, nice list. I've actually read some of those! (It does vaguely remind me of my school book list, though...)

I just finished reading Brave New World a few days ago. Brilliant book, that.

Re:

[altariel.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting list, isn't it? It was a big poll done in the UK recently, to find the country's best loved books.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I think that people rang in or emailed with the specific book of their choice.

Feel free to copy the list! There's tons of stuff about the poll at the BBC website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/index.shtml

Another way of analysing this list

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Brian says of this list

"I read 12 while I was at achool, 6 since I left school, and I've seen a further 18 as TV or movie adaptations"

Bear in mind Brian doesn't like reading fiction much

Re: Another way of analysing this list

[altariel.livejournal.com]

That's an excellent way of reading the list.