BBC literacy thing

[Glaurung]

I feel quite illiterate with this list, but then I realized that most are from English literature, and many of you would have been encouraged to read them at school. I remember the first day at High School when our Literature teacher (Spanish Literature, mind you), asked us, one by one, how many book we had read without it being mandatory for class. When I listed mine, I was scolded for "reading so much English authors". I didn't answer (is not wise to make a smart remark to a teacher), but my favorite genre is Fantasy and Science-Fiction, and Spanish authors on the whole, still wrinkle their noses at it. I just laughed inwardly and the snobbish of it all and how the fact that I had read more books than anyone was overlooked.

Of course it only encouraged me to read even MORE English-speaking authors

I'll bold and italize the ones I've read and watched teh adaptation.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
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
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (why is this on here twice?)
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

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Márquez
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
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón (I started reading it since they gave me a copy for Christmas one year. I couldn't get pass the second chapter :/. And then, the next year the same person game me this book again.)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Émile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
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
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Misérables — Victor Hugo

1. What author do you own the most books by? Robert W. Chambers.

2. What book do you own the most copies of? None. I get one single copy of each book, unless it's on digital format and I have it on several places.

3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? No.

4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with? Um... that's a tough one. Stephen Siward (The Fighting Chance) would be a good choice.

5. What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)? Probably The Hobbit.

6. What was your favorite book when you were ten years old? Books about nature and wildlife. That's what I read back in the day.

7. What is the worst book you've read in the past year? I attempted to read Twilight, I think it's self-explanatory.

8. What is the best book you've read in the past year? "The Fightning Chance" was a story I couldn't drop, was anxious to pick up again as soon as possible, and stayed with me for a long time after finishing it.

9. If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be? Eh... I don't think I could force anyone to do that *shrug*

10. What book would you most like to see made into a movie? Movie adaptations don't usually go well. LotR and Harry Potter are good exceptions to this norm.

11. What book would you least like to see made into a movie? Almost any book. See above.

12. Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character. I hardly ever have those dreams, sadly.

13. What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult? See answer 7.

14. What is the most difficult book you've ever read? I can't think of one right now.

15. What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen? None of them were obscure.

16. Do you prefer the French or the Russians? Eh... I couldn't say.

17. Roth or Updike? Never read either.

18. David Sedaris or Dave Eggers? Never read either.

19. Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer? I think I've only read Shakespeare, so I can't judge.

20. Austen or Eliot? Never read Eliot.

21. What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading? I don't think it's embarrassing not having read this or that book. Life doesn't give me as much time as I'd like to have.

22. What is your favorite novel? Many, but The King in Yellow is worth mentioning.

23. Play? Lady Windermere's Fan.

24. Poem? Not much into poetry.

25. Essay? Not much into essay.

26. Work of nonfiction? Emotional Vampires.

27. Who is your favorite writer? That's a though one. Robert W. Chambers is quite god, despite not being too well known

28. Who is the most overrated writer alive today? Dan Brown seems quite popular, but I've never found anything appealing about his books. Luis Carlos Zafón is a best-seller but, as I said, I couldn't get past the second chapter of one of his novels. Of course, that's just my opinion.

29. What is your desert island book? Anything from Theodore Sturgeon, probably.

30. And... what are you reading right now? The Dreaming Jewels, by Theodore Sturgeon.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I'd love to see a list like that that focused on sic-fi and fantasy.

 

[Novus]

I'd love to see a list like that that focused on sic-fi and fantasy.

http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/lit-SciFi.html
http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/lit-SciFi2.html
http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/lit-contendersSF.html

 

[Fangu]

Creative writing courses have a lot to answer for. I blame them for the fact that so many modern novels seem exactly the same as each other.

Huh. I'm really pleased to see you say that. I know I'm really juvenile with that whole 'I hate institutionalized thinking regarding topics that aren't easy to scientifically pinpoint' thing, and I know I go overboard when I say 'life should be your inspiration, not x amount of other people's work', but I think there's something to it - you can teach the techniques, but in the end you need to just tap into the real world and write something that is original - because it comes from a place of creativity, and not from a place of rules and boundaries and a 'list of clever shit' that someone wrote.

But then again I come from a place where someone in authority killed all my love for writing many years ago, so I need to be obnoxious towards the institutionalization of anything artsy. (Oh my god is that where Snow comes from? That self-protecting refusal to listen to anyone trying to teach him shit? Hahaha!!)

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/lit-SciFi.html
http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/lit-SciFi2.html
http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/lit-contendersSF.html

Thank you!! Now I have something to guide my reading.

 

[Ghost X]

@Lic: The reason why novels are all the same is much the same as why movies are the same, and nothing to do with creative writing courses. There is actually a lot of good story ideas in the world, but film producers and book publishers bank on things they know that work. That is why movies and novels are all the same. This is why I've started boycotting films that don't need to be made and/or those that appear to be shit .

 

[Clement Rage]

I'm going to agree with Aaron about Terry Goodkind. I read four of his books and frankly he's pretty average. Below average, even. His world-building leaves a lot to be desired.

His early books are okay, but then he suddenly writes books that basically amount to the Midlands (a loose confederation of linked states) versus the Imperial Order (A vast empire which consists largely of evil communist rapists (seriously)). They start amounting to him shouting "FREE MARKET LIBERTARIAN CAPITALISM IS THE ONLY VIABLE ECONOMIC MODEL!" for 600 pages.

 

[Ⓐaron]

NPR did a top 100 sci-fi novels list which is pretty great for the most part, though there are a few novels/series on it that I think don't belong.

And yeah, Goodkind went from a mediocre fantasy writer to a downright terrible one because he sold his plot for message. Naked Empire is apparently the worst example of this but it started with Faith of the Fallen apparently. As I was never able to complete any of his novels I can't confirm this for certain though.

 

[Fangu]

@Lic: The reason why novels are all the same is much the same as why movies are the same, and nothing to do with creative writing courses. There is actually a lot of good story ideas in the world, but film producers and book publishers bank on things they know that work. That is why movies and novels are all the same. This is why I've started boycotting films that don't need to be made and/or those that appear to be shit .

Yeah, but writing courses usually don't teach the tropes themselves, only techniques, plus handing out examples of what they themselves (or some community) believe to be good literature. They might subconsciously award works that respond to certain tropes though. Plus recommend techniques that has been tried and tested before - AKA "your lead must do such and such", until someone comes along and find a way to make the opposite work - and it's this 'finding a way' that gets dropped when creative writing classes insists on steering the students too much.

When it comes to writing certain genres though (like paperback soft cover novels) I can totally see why a writer would make conscious choices depending on what they think the reader wants to read to sell more books. But creative writing classes are often directed to writers wanting to write original and good work, not just to cash out.

There's a thing that's not been mentioned in this context in this thread, and that's the editors. I'm inclined to believe editors are more conscious about the reader base, and might tell the writer to bend in certain ways to create a work that they think will sell.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Rest assured, someone at some stage of the process knows what they're playing to, whether that be the writer, editor or both.

Speaking of tropes, I find Chekhov's Gun fucking stupid -- sometimes the gun is just above the mantle to tell us this person likes guns.

 

[Fangu]

Speaking of tropes, I find Chekhov's Gun fucking stupid -- sometimes the gun is just above the mantle to tell us this person likes guns.

Yeah, things like that.

I forgot to highlight something in my post - someone came up with the term general osmosis in this context, and I think that's a brilliant term. This term points out how a lot of our choices and how we end up using well known tropes, aren't always conscious - maybe more so the opposite. When we imagine a scene in our heads, or choose to describe a landscape, there's years and years of TV shows and movies and pages upon pages that's formed how we (as Westerners - that's a whole different subsection to this debate) 'see' this scene in our inner eye.

tl;dr even our subconscious choices are trope based. Writing classes, if they aren't already, should teach students how to strip their ideas for tropes. Deconstructing as some people call it. The problem is, those tropes are probably related to the techniques they're teaching, and so they would have no class to sell.

Also I'm really talking about things I don't really know, so I might stand corrected. I have never taken a writing class in my life (save for the fiction part of my Norwegian classes all through school).

 

[Ⓐaron]

The Top Ten Books People Lie About Reading

The list itself is a lie, though; there are actually eleven books listed.

Of these I have read Nineteen Eighty Four and Moby Dick in their entirety. I have started several others (On the Origin of Species, Les Miserables, The Wealth of Nations, The Art of War, The Prince, Ulysses) but not finished them. One of these days I intend to do so, particularly with Ulysses, The Wealth of Nations, and The Art of War. The only Rand I've ever read is Anthem and that was enough to convince me I didn't need to read any more. Of the others, I'll probably try reading them someday.

 

[Clement Rage]

I've read The Art of War and The Prince

On creative writing, people keep saying 'learn the rules before you can break them', which I never fully subscribed to, even though I understand why they have to say it.

 

[Octo]

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - are you kidding? Not even the fucking pope has read the bible. It's badly written and full of plot holes
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
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
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (why is this on here twice?)
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

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Márquez
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
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Émile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -Does scrooge mcduck dount?
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
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
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl- adaptation the Gene Wilder version not shitty Tim shitty Burton.
100 Les Misérables — Victor Hugo

1. What author do you own the most books by? Tolkien... or Rich Hall

2. What book do you own the most copies of? The novelisation of Ghost Busters

3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? nope.

4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with? Don't know if it counts because it wouldnt be if not for the films....Thorin Oakenshield hnnng

5. What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)? The Hobbit I guess.

6. What was your favorite book when you were ten years old? I don't know. I was even less of a reader then than I am now.

7. What is the worst book you've read in the past year? I dont remember.

8. What is the best book you've read in the past year? I Partridge: We need to talk about Alan. By Alan Partridge

9. If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be? The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain. Or anything by Nancy Friday, the world needs a better understanding of female sexuality.

10. What book would you most like to see made into a movie? Something by Kurt Vonnegut.

11. What book would you least like to see made into a movie? I dunno, another one of those boring fantasy/sci fi things.

12. Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.Sadly my dreams aren't that kind to me.

13. What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult? I dunno, probably some chick lit crap of my mothers, I was in search of porn

14. What is the most difficult book you've ever read? Trainspotting

15. What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen? I've only seen Macbeth.

16. Do you prefer the French or the Russians? Not even going to pretend to have an opinion.

17. Roth or Updike? see above

18. David Sedaris or Dave Eggers? see above

19. Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer? see above

20. Austen or Eliot? see above

21. What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading? I'm not keeping score, nor do I think I should be embarrassed.

22. What is your favorite novel? I don't have a favourite.

23. Play?

24. Poem? Anything by John Hegley.

25. Essay?

26. Work of nonfiction? I dunno, the Dictionary?

27. Who is your favorite writer? Don't have a favourite. I like Vonnegut, Twain. People with a sense of humour.

28. Who is the most overrated writer alive today? Jk Rowling, George RR Martin. Dan Brown. Or perhaps they're just overpurchased.

29. What is your desert island book? Something that falls open on the dirty parts.

30. And... what are you reading right now? The Hobbit again.
__________________

 

[Kermitu Kleric Katie]

The Top Ten Books People Lie About Reading

The list itself is a lie, though; there are actually eleven books listed.

Of these I have read Nineteen Eighty Four and Moby Dick in their entirety. I have started several others (On the Origin of Species, Les Miserables, The Wealth of Nations, The Art of War, The Prince, Ulysses) but not finished them. One of these days I intend to do so, particularly with Ulysses, The Wealth of Nations, and The Art of War. The only Rand I've ever read is Anthem and that was enough to convince me I didn't need to read any more. Of the others, I'll probably try reading them someday.

From that list, I haven't read Atlas Shrugged and don't ever intend to, as with on the Origin of Species. I haven't read Les Miserables or Victor Hugo, but I had to read A Tale of Two Cities in English last year. I haven't read 1984, but I hope to get around to it eventually. I've read Moby Dick twice, and I've read an excerpt from The Prince for Engish before. I haven't even heard of the rest of those books.