BBC book meme

[steviesun]

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:

How do your reading habits stack up? [bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish]

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter

Comments

[ash1977law]

21/100.
Of course most of the books on this list I'm just not interested in reading due to their dullness of subject matter. I don't care one fig if Mister Darcy falls in love with Emma or Victoria or Miss Piggy.

[steviesun]

I know the feeling. No desire to read Winnie the Pooh. I had better things around me as a children. Like Tin Tin and Astrix.

Ah Pride and Prejudice. Gets better and wittier the more times I read it (three times and counting). Films just can't capture the wit of that books, no matter whether they try or not. Something I try and get across to people who dismiss it as being some namby pamby stuff about rich people falling in love is that actually Austen is poking fun at that stuff as well, it's just that our images of that time these days tend to come from adaptations of her books. The sarcasm is rather lost amongst the white empire line dresses and arguements in the rain. But it's all there in the book, it just takes a few readings of it before you can get over it and see it for the poking fun that it is. I mean seriously, does anyone honestly think Austen actually thought a rich single man only had marriage on his mind?

[steviesun]

Steps down off soap box.

[morbid_sparks]

*doesn't step onto soapboax 'cos I'm studying Pride and Prejudice at the moment and it's really really interesting the way she writes the conventions and shutting up now*

[steviesun]

You haven't read six then?

It's difficult to "recommend" a classic to someone, sadly it mostly seems to be schools and lists like this that encourage people. Because generally books that do become considered classics are generally worth at least trying to read.

[steviesun]

If you read the list again there are books on there that are recent. Lovely bones was part of the richard and judy book club back in 2003. There are a good few from the last ten years actually, it's not just a list of "classics

[ladyfox7oaks]

There are 17 on that list I've read, honestly (Not abridged version or movies of same) and in their entirety...
And yeah- there's still a couple dozen or so that I feel I OUGHT to read...

But tell me- why did they list The Chronicles of Narnia, and then list "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" separately?

[steviesun]

The works of shakespeare AND hamlet. Oh yeah, my number would be down otherwise. I guess you just get to be extra special if you've read the whole series.

[ladyfox7oaks]

Yeah- that was the other one I noticed...

[el_staplador]

I'm not even getting into the 'classics' battle; as someone who has read Paradise Lost for pleasure, no one is going to agree with me...

[steviesun]

Nah go on. You can say anything around here, the worse I'm going to do is agree to disagree, and usually even when I don't hold the same view as yours I respect it.

[__kali__]

How come you never finished Watership Down?

[steviesun]

I don't really remember. It was one of those classics that I started as a child and then got bored with.