Here’s what happened: the seemingly endless succession of Facebook memes had produced one intended to measure how well-read you are in terms of a list of 100 classic works. It read:
The BBC believes most people will have read, on average, only 6 of the 100 books listed here. How do your reading habits stack up? Look at the list and put an ‘x’ or a ‘*’, or otherwise highlight the ones you have read. Tag some people.
Geek that I am, I dutifully went down the list and checked off the 25 of them that I had read, and posted it in a Facebook note with the added comment
This list is a bit Brit-centric. Not that it ignores American classics or anything, but I count no fewer than four Jane Austen books on here and six by Dickens, whereas I see but two Steinbecks, one Fitzgerald, and zero Hemingway. Plus, as Hemingway would point out, only chicks read Jane Austen.
… On the one hand, I’ve read just 1/4 of these classics, which seems kind of pathetic for someone who claims to be educated. With that in mind, I’m still four times more well-read than the BBC gives me credit for being – so suck on that, crumpet monkeys!
That’s where the controversy began. And it didn’t even have to do with my comment about Jane Austen, nor my calling the major press outlet of the land of my forefathers “crumpet monkeys.”
In the series of comments that followed, my friend Pia suggested that the list was actually a BBC survey of best-loved books. That set me to googling, and it turned out that she was generally correct. The BBC list, which became known as “The Big Read,” was published in 2003 and represented the result of “an online survey of more than 2,000 book lovers.”
But there’s more. Danish blogger Kristjan Wager did some digging and noticed very significant discrepancies between the original “Big Read” list and the list disseminated on Facebook:
No matter how hard I look, I can’t find the [Facebook] list anywhere at the BBC website. What I could find was BBC’s The Big Read… which little resembles the list used in the [meme] – in fact, only 57 on the original list made it to the new list used in the meme.
Still a mystery is the allegation that the average person will only have read six out of the 100 books on the list. I’m still curious about the origin of that statistic, and now I also wonder which list it was referencing.
Since the Facebook meme list was largely derived from a British poll of books’ popularity, I thought it would be worthwhile to find a better list. My old friend Lisa pointed me to the one below from, of all sources, the College Board, on whose site it is called 101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers. And, in case you’re wondering, no – I don’t simply like this list better because I’ve read more of what’s on it.
Now all I have to do is find a way to condense the presentation of this list, since this post has already required too much scrolling down…
The College Board’s 101 Books
Items I have read are in bold type; asterisks indicate ones for which I have read a self-proclaimed worthy alternative by the same author, specified afterward.
- (unknown authors), Beowulf
- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
- James Agee, A Death in the Family
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
- James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
- Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
- Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
- Albert Camus, The Stranger
- Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
- Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
- Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
- Kate Chopin, The Awakening
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
- Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
- Dante, Inferno
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
- Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers *
- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays
- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying *
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury *
- Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
- Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
- William Golding, Lord of the Flies
- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms *
- Homer, The Iliad
- Homer, The Odyssey
- Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame *
- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
- Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
- Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
- Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
- Jack London, The Call of the Wild
- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
- Gabriel García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
- Arthur Miller, The Crucible
- Toni Morrison, Beloved
- Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
- Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
- George Orwell, Animal Farm
- Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
- Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales **
- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
- Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
- Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
- Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
- George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
- Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Sophocles, Antigone
- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
- William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
- Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons *
- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Voltaire, Candide
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
- Alice Walker, The Color Purple
- Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
- Eudora Welty, Collected Stories
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
- Richard Wright, Native Son
Self-Proclaimed Worthy Substitutes Read
- 25. The Count of Monte Cristo
- 29. and 30. Absalom, Absalom!
- 40. The Sun Also Rises
- 43. Les Misérables
- 90. A Month in the Country
Poe’s Selected Tales got a double asterisk because I don’t know which tales were selected. I do know that I have read at least “The Cask of Admontillado,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Raven,” and “Eldorado,” so the hell with it – I’m giving myself credit for that one.
That puts my super-official tally at 32, for the edification of any sticklers out there. It’s 37 if I count my self-proclaimed worthy substitutes… and I do, dammit. It’s worth noting that my tally was considerably lower before I went to college. I wonder what the College Board would think about that.
Care to share your number in the comments (not that number, you sick horndogs – your reading tally from the list)? Any thoughts on the efficacy of this list as a yardstick for how well-read we are or aren’t? Feel like mocking me for my status as a literary lightweight? Go ahead, I can take it.
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Tags: BBC, college, College Board, education, Facebook, Kristjan Wager, lists, literature, memes, tests
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Several of my commenters have pointed out that the list now claimed to be from the BBC was originally printed in the Guardian and was based on a poll for World Book Day 2007. My post has been updated to reflect this.
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I’ve read 14 from this list and intend to read at least 10 of these before summer ends. Which i’m quite proud of considering I’m not even a freshman in highschool yet.
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Nice going, Rebecca – that’s impressive! Good luck with your ten-more goal.
My only advice: avoid Beowulf. It’s boring as all hell.
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Twelve for me, but I just started reading the classics. There are a few more that I may have read in high school, but I don’t really remember if I read the whole book or just faked it and got the credit.
And Derek, as for Beowulf, it was a tough read, but once you get into the story, it’s quite good. Either way, Crichton’s 13th Warrior was written to make Beowulf seem more entertaining, after a friend was teaching a class called “The Bores of English Literature” and Beowulf was at the top of that list.
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