BBC Top 100 Books vs. Facebook Meme

First of all there is a facebook meme running around claiming to be attached to the BBC list. But it seems to have been doctored, it took of a lot of literary books and replaced them with books that have been made into popular American Movies. I guess whoever started it didn't think Americans would read "Good Omens" by Pratchet and Gaiman, British Authors. (I did.)

Also most people on facebook probably count watching the movie as "reading" it.

Also the facebook meme contends that the "average" person would have only read 6 of the 100 listed. This is not what the BBC List is about, it was just looking for the most popular book in the UK.

I guess I'll play along and even use the Facebook list instead of the BBC original list.

Top 100 Books by BBC - X those I've read.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -
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 - X
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 - x (Lower case x this time...)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger-X
19 The Time Traveler’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- x (Lower case X again...)
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky-
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -X
34 Emma-Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
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 - X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - X
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 -
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -X
53 Cold Comfort Farm
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 - Mark Haddon - X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
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 (Lower case X, I think everyone skims over the middle of this book.)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce- X
76 The Inferno – Dante- X
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 -X
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
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
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 -
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

Ok the facebook list is stupid. It lumps a lot of things into "Series". For example, the BBC lists individual Harry Potter books and Shakespeare plays.

There are also weird inconsistencies on the list. For example, "The Complete Works of Bill" are listed as well as Hamlet. As well as The Chronicles of Narnia and the individual L,W&Wardrobe book.

I X'd 48 of them (3 of which were lower case). Drat less than half...

I decided to google this before posting, here is an interesting article on this Facebook list and its migration away from the original.