Jump on the Meme: BBC Top 100 Books on Facebook

Today I was sucked into an Facebook meme based on a topsy-turvey, idiosyncratic to say the least, list of books purported to have been created by the BBC.  Good fun, some nice connection and conversation with friends today…but I’m relieved to know that the list, which haphazardly includes separate entries for The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, isn’t actually the list from the BBC’s The Big Read Top 100…although it’s close!  A blogger broke it all down for us in her post “How Do Memes Start?  A Case Study: 100 Books in Facebook”.

Here’s my Books! Note from today.  Just goes to show, I will put off notes requests on FB until the moment has passed, but send me one with a list of books in a nice, round number like 100…I’ll fill it out in a heartbeat and then blog about it!

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (read Fellowship of the Ring, then trailed off…prefer the movies!)

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (this is inexplicable to me!)

6 The Bible (many times over…so many boring sermons growing up!)

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (too sad…story freaks me out!)

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 (Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Henry V, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Richard III, Romeo & Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, etc., etc., many sonnets…but, no, not the complete works)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (can’t wait for the movie!)

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

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

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

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

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 – A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (too much hype for me!)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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 (I have read On Chesil Beach, Enduring Love and Amsterdam)

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 Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – 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

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 – Emile 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 – E.B. 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 Miserables – Victor Hugo

Final Count: 48 read, 22 skimmed/excerpted/sampled/abandoned for whatever reasons…fun!

Turn on The Writer’s Almanac, Hon!

This morning is tranquil and leafy green here in my friend Catharine’s living room on Providence Street in Baltimore, Maryland.  It’s 5:32 a.m., and I’m wide awake.  Aaron and I arrived back in the States this week for a month long summer stay reconnecting with our friend-family on the East Coast and our extended families in Ohio and Kentucky, and we’re both still jet lagged.  It’s been three years since we’ve been back, three summers since packing up the vintage Harlequin dishes and the hundreds of books and the cats and the corgi and moving to The Netherlands, and I’m realizing my internal pendulum that swings mightily from family ties to individual independence has swung back again towards balance.  I need to respect both my need to be away and foreign with my very real need to be here and rooted in all my lives, not just my new one in Europe.

Aaron is in the opposite denim IKEA armchair clicking away on his Netbook and I am here in the matching armchair thinking about the episode of The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor we listened to yesterday morning.  Coffee mugs steaming, I had jumped when I heard Catharine shout from her bedroom upstairs that The Writer’s Almanac was on, telling me to hit the green button on her Bose radio in the architect-designed kitchen cum living room extension.  While I scuttled over to the machine, Catharine’s voice floated behind me saying, “Whenever I hear The Writer’s Almanac, I think of you…in my mind we’re in your kitchen in Ithaca, New York and we all stop to listen to the poetry.”  There’s a pleasurable wistfulness there in her voice and in my memory of those exact moments in Upstate New York, and I thought to myself that it is a wonderful thing to have good friends and shared poetry to help remind you who you are and where you have been.

As always, June 24th’s broadcast was full of discoveries and directions for reading, while including a rather incongruent bit about Jack Dempsey the boxer, which must have been thrown in for a further dash of Americana.  Catharine agrees that Dempsey was an odd addition to the literary line-up, and now I’m wondering if that kind of willful digression is standard for the program whenever there’s a dearth of writers’ birthdays and I’ve just never noticed before.  Other birthdays included St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic and poet from the 1500s, and Ambrose Bierce, the American short story writer who was born in 1842 in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio, our home state, and who at the age of 71, full of heartbreak and cynicism, took off from San Fransisco to Mexico during Pancho Villa’s revolution and was never heard from or seen again.  These names are now humming in my brain, so when we head to Daedalus Books later today with our friend Patrick, after a brunch at Miss Shirley’s Cafe in the nearby Hampden neighborhood, I’ll be hoping for book-synchronicity again with the right book showing up in front of me at the right time.  Maybe this time, though, I’ll be helped out by a Baltimorian bookseller: “What can I getcha, hon?  Some Dark Night of the Soul or The Devil’s Dictionary?”