Awhile back, we all passed a “100 books” list around Facebook. The game is called the “BBC meme” (it’s a mistranslation of the BBC Big Read List, which is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/ and which is actually kind of cool). The lists quickly became “tell what you’ve read of this [randomly recycled/ redundant/ misspelled] list of 100 books.” The implication was that the books were a relevant segment of literary canon, so we say therefore something relevant about our own selves by noting which (or how many) we’d read.
I love books, but lists annoy me for two reasons: First, because “Score out of 100″ doesn’t tell much about a person (Why have they read Lolita but not Slaughterhouse Five?); it just uses a book tally as a status symbol, without any comment on content. So the fact of reading becomes self-aggrandazing if not exclusionary: if we’re competing, we want our “score” to be higher, so we’ll be secretly happy when we’ve read books someone else hasn’t. And what’s the fun in that? Aren’t books for sharing?
Secondly, because I have bad taste in books. As a demonstration, I went through the “official” list, replacing books I hadn’t read with whatever ones came to mind. This was annoying and didn’t really impress anyone on Facebook, even though I thought it was a pretty nice, “Literary Canon for American Women born in the 1970′s.” It is a pretty honest summary of my taste in books. I can’t remember why I picked The Hundred Dresses, but I did and I’m glad I did, because it’s a story about status, acquisition, exclusion and creativity, all its own.
My own quasi-Facebook-BBC list, with Free-associated substitutions as appropriate:
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
3 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Member of the Wedding — Carson McCullers
6 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Cats’ Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
9 Baby Island – Carol Ryrie Brink
10Book of Three (and all Chronicles of Prydain) — Lloyd Alexander
11 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
12 The Apocrypha
13 Slaughterhouse Five — Kurt Vonnegut
14 Midsummer Night’s Dream — Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
17 The Ramayana
18 The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 Sea Glass – Anita Shreve
20 Stories – Katherine Mansfield
21 Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 The Quick Red Fox (and all Travis McGee) – John D. McDonald
24 Exodus – Leon Uris
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (all of these) – Douglas Adams
26 Evelina – Fanny Burney
27 A Streetcar named Desire – Tennessee Williams
28 Mrs. Mike – Benedict and Nancy Freeman
29 The Iliad – Homer
30 My Antonia – Willa Cather
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 Complete Poems — Emily Dickinson
33 Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
34 The Velvet Room – Zilpha Keatley Snyder
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – C.S. Lewis
37 The Andromeda Strain – Michael Crichton
38 Paradise Lost – John Milton
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Peter Rabbit – Beatrix Potter
41 The Seven Little Postmen – Margaret Wise Brown
42 Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
45 A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 The Scarlet Letter … Nathaniel Hawthorne
48 The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 The River Midnight – Lilian Natel
51 The House on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros
52 The Bean Trees – Barbara Kingsolver
53 The Memoirs of Cleopatra – Margaret George
54 A Wind in the Door — Madeleine L’Engle
55 The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Series (all) — Alexander McCall Smith
56 The Egg and I – Betty McDonald
57 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 My Side of the Mountain … Jean Craighead George
60 Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston
61 Of Mice and Men / Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
62 Cinnamon Gardens – Shyam Selvadurai
63 The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 A Year in Provence – Peter Mayle
66 The Princess Bride – William Golding
67 The Carpetbaggers – Harold Robbins
68 The Accidental Tourist – Anne Tyler
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Ahab’s Wife – Sena Nasland
72 Away – Jane Urquhart
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 The Other Boleyn Girl – Philippa Gregory
75 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 The Good Earth – Pearl Buck
78 Flora’s Suitcase – Dalia Rabinovich
79 It – Stephen King
80 The Chocolate War – Robert Cormier
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 The Stories – John Cheever
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 Jitterbug Perfume – Tom Robbins
85 Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
86 A Little Princess – Frances Hodgson Burnett
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 Jesus’ Son – Denis Johnson
89 Ramona Quimby, Age 8 – Beverly Cleary
90 The Republic – Plato
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Hundred Dresses – Eleanor Estes
93 The Waves – Virginia Woolf
94 Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH … Robert C. O’Brien
95 The Stranger – Camus
96 Poetry and Tales — Edgar Allan Poe
97 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
98 Hamlet –– Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
