Without the pressure of feeling as though I needed to share my list alongside everybody else, I spent some time trying to figure out where this list really came from. Most importantly, there’s no such list on the BBC website. However, there is a similar list that the BBC published in 2003, with many of the same books in a different order.

There are interesting differences between the 2003 BBC list and the 2009-2011 Facebook version — both in terms of the list itself and the context provided with each. The Facebook version alleges that the “BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books,” while the original site only states that the BBC “began the search for the nation’s favorite novel, and … asked you to nominate your favourite books.” Variations also exist among the versions of the instructions that accompany the list, adding or removing formatting, asterisks, comments, and so on to indicate the variety of ways in which the individual has consumed the book.

Whoever compiled the list I’m using consolidated books in a series but also left individual books from the same series. For example, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe made the BBC list at #9, while both the book (#36) and the series (#33) made the list on Facebook.

What’s most thought-provoking to me, though, is how a list of books sorted by popularity among Britons at a particular point in time has been transformed into an apparent challenge from an authority figure and a competition within our social circles. How very American…

Verbatim, the instructions making their way around Facebook:
Instructions: 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. 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, and underline the ones for which you’ve seen the movies.

My list (after the jump):

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
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 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
23 Bleak House- Charles Dickens
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
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
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
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 (current book)
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

36/100 — I may not have read all the books, but I’ve read the right ones, so I win, obviously.

Update: I changed my mind. You can now follow @AndrewBecraft on Twitter.

Historical Tweets combines witty writing with an appropriate sense of the absurd. For example, what result would Twitter’s arbitrary length limitation place on a lovably prolix writer like Joyce?

Indeed.

The characters, story, and even snippets of McCarthy’s “pretentious, mannered style” (my words) have stuck with me over the last three months, and I find myself considering whether the novel may not be, in fact, utter crap. I hate being wrong, but positive comparisons to The Grapes of Wrath continue presenting themselves unbidden from the back of my mind.

Perhaps it’s time to set aside the wonderful writer Elizabeth’s Hand’s less-than-wonderful post-apocalyptic Glimmering and give The Road a second chance.

After my flight over from London the night before, the only place still serving food was Eddie Rocket’s. Much less photogenic than a moist Joyce. When I ordered my veggie burger and fries, it just felt wrong that this was going to be my first meal on the Emerald Isle. But when the burger arrived with beets on it, the fries were served by the Polish waitstaff in a bowl (with knife and fork), and a crowd of Spaniards piled into the booth behind me, I felt a long way from home.

And that’s a good thing.

McCarthy’s writing is full of incomplete sentences and anastrophe, completely lacks quotation marks, and frequently embeds dialogue in the middle of paragraphs. What truly annoys me, though, is McCarthy’s inconsistent use of apostrophes for contractions. Each of these conventions is a barrier to straightforward reading (though I finished The Road in only a few hours). If they made me stop and think about the language, characters, or plot, I wouldn’t object, but they’re merely distracting.

Naturally, this apocalyptic abomination is being made into a “major motion picture.”

I think what bothers me most is how much attention McCarthy and The road have gotten. With more praise and “book of the year” awards than God’s own Bible, you’d think McCarthy had done something deeply original. Well, he hasn’t. Writers like Joyce experimented with alternatives to standard dialogue punctuation, but I would argue that time has proven their experiments a failure.

And there are far superior works that address how we as humans might react to the end of our civilization and the impending extinction of our species. Two of my favorite examples appear at the end of Elizabeth Hand‘s Saffron and Brimstone. “Echo” and “The Saffron Gatherers” explore similar themes of survival amidst the loss of hope without resorting to needless typographical devices.

Thankfully, I’m not the only one who’s annoyed and even a little angry about The Road‘s undeserved success.

The Bibliophile Baker:

What really irritates me is his apparent aversion to punctuation. For a while I was trying to decide why some words deserve apostrophes, and others don’t, but I think I finally figured it out: he puts apostrophe’s for contractions of words + had, but not words + not. i.e. He’d use some markings, but he didnt use others. This to me is both annoying and pretentious.

Bibliobibuli has an excellent analysis of the specific patterns, along with a roundup of the punctuational criticism from around the ‘net.

Literary Kicks may respect Oprah, but nevertheless has some more well-constructed analysis of McCarthy’s assault on the English language.

And with that, I’m hereby inaugurating my list of…

Writers I Would Like to Punch in the Face

• Cormac McCarthy, for being a pretentious twat.
• Philip Pullman, who doesn’t seem capable of creating a sympathetic character, even in books ostensibly written for pre-adults.
• Michael Crichton, whose varied and single-minded obsessions in each book (chaos theory! quantum mechanics! the Japanese!) seemed about as relevant as an elevator operating manual to a Kalahari bushman.

Having actually met enough reasonably well-known writers to think that there’s a greater-than-zero chance that I might also meet those on this list, I should of course note that I’m a pacifist and wouldn’t think of really punching these guys in the nose. Well, maybe Michael Crichton, since if I met him now he’d have to be a zombie…

• Cormac McCarthy: The Road
• Seamus Heaney: Electric Light
• Mary Oliver: Red Bird
• Frank Herbert: Heretics of Dune

• Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
• When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone by Galway Kinnell
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
• Collected Poems, 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot
• The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke
• Poems, 1965-1975 by Seamus Heaney
• I and Thou by Martin Buber
• The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo
• Writing the Australian Crawl by William Stafford
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
• Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

• Matthew Arnold: The Portable Matthew Arnold
• Wendell Berry: The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
• Robert Bly: Eating the Honey of Words
• Billy Collins: The Trouble with Poetry
• Emily Dickinson: Collected Poems
• Kilala Kitamoto: LEGO book museum Vol. 1
• W.S. Merwin: Selected Poems
• William Stafford: The Way It Is
• William Stafford: Writing the Australian Crawl
• David Wagoner: Dry Sun, Dry Wind (First Edition)

We parked around the corner and walked through the rain, only to see that the store was crowded with people, spilling out onto the sidewalk. I suspected that this was the tail end of a poetry reading, but hey, the cash register was open and people were still looking over the shelves (an inventory of 9,000+ books of poetry, according to their Web site), so I thought I could sneak in and grab the book I’ve been trying to find — one of Wagoner’s collections published after the Collected I have. (Fine, call me a Wagoner fanboy/groupie — he’s a great guy, and I love his poetry.)

Anyway, I pick up the book and make my way back to the front of the store, noticing for the first time that the center of attention seems to be someone other than the cashier. Crap!, I think, It’s the poet herself! (I’d been hoping the reading was an open-mic or something, I guess.) I didn’t recognize her based on any book jacket photos I’ve seen, but then I wouldn’t be able to recognize most of the poets I read (mainly in journals). I edged close enough to read the name on the cover of the books stacked next to her. I pride myself in knowing the national and local poetry scenes reasonably well, but her name still didn’t ring a bell. Now I was in the awkward position of being in line to have a book signed by someone I didn’t know, or to blow past her to buy the book I really wanted.

I opted for a strategic retreat instead. So, back to the shelves, wending my way through the chairs neatly aligned to face the back of the store, back to the front, through all the poetry aficionados looking shy as they asked to have their books signed, out into the rain and cigarette smoke.

I think there’s a poem in all that somewhere…