The Telegraph reported on the results of a survey to determine the top best 50 books of all time. It's interesting how many of them are books with children as narrators. Also, how the hell did the Da Vinci Code get in there? Also, Jodi Picoult! Um...no (We're talking "of all time," here, people!) Also, while I enjoyed the Time Traveler's Wife, I'm not sure the book itself will last through the ages. And it's a little heart-wrenching to see Zadie's White Teeth smiling at me. Here's the list. What do you think?
TOP 50 BOOKS OF ALL TIME
1. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
2. Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S Lewis
4. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
5. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
6. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
7. Animal Farm - George Orwell
8. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
9. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - JK Rowling
10. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
11. The Time Travellers Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
12. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
13. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kasey
14. Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
15. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
16. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
17. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
18. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night -time - Mark Haddon
19. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
20. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
21. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
22. Sons and Lovers - DH Lawrence
23. Anna Kareninia - Leo Tolstoy
24. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
25. Emma - Jane Austen
26. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
27. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
28. My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
29. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
30. A Passage to India - E.M Forster
31. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
32. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
33. Atonement - Ian McEwan
34. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
35. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
36. Middlemarch - George Eliot
37. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
38. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
39. It - Stephen King
40. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
41. Vanity Fair - William Thackeray
42. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
43. The Horse Whisperer - Nicholas Evans
44. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
45. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
46. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
47. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
48. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twin
49. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
50. The Island - Victoria Hislop
TOP 50 BOOKS OF ALL TIME
1. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
2. Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S Lewis
4. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
5. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
6. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
7. Animal Farm - George Orwell
8. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
9. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - JK Rowling
10. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
11. The Time Travellers Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
12. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
13. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kasey
14. Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
15. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
16. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
17. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
18. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night -time - Mark Haddon
19. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
20. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
21. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
22. Sons and Lovers - DH Lawrence
23. Anna Kareninia - Leo Tolstoy
24. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
25. Emma - Jane Austen
26. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
27. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
28. My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
29. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
30. A Passage to India - E.M Forster
31. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
32. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
33. Atonement - Ian McEwan
34. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
35. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
36. Middlemarch - George Eliot
37. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
38. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
39. It - Stephen King
40. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
41. Vanity Fair - William Thackeray
42. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
43. The Horse Whisperer - Nicholas Evans
44. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
45. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
46. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
47. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
48. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twin
49. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
50. The Island - Victoria Hislop
Oh, and, just for fun, let's compare this list to President Bush's reading list from 2006, as published in U.S. News & World Report. I think someone on his press team probably added the book about Islamic women and Camus' The Stranger, don't you?
Here's the Bushy list:
2. Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss (about the late all-star Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder)
3. Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power by Richard Carwardine
4. Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural by Ronald C. White Jr.
5. Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
6. Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks
7. Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky (discussing how polio affected the United States in the mid-20th century)
8. The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth by Leigh Montville
9. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry
10. Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
11. The Stranger by Albert Camus
Maybe instead of reading about baseball and powerful figures, Dude should be figuring out how to stop our children from dying in his war.
11 comments:
Lists like these make me hate lists. Feh!
Bush did not read those books!
There's a lot of damn fluff on this top-50 list.
The Horse Whisperer!?! Shoot me in the face. Please.
And seriously, Middlemarch? It should be called Death March. Did anyone ever enjoy this joyless book?
The Lovely Bones? It's like one of these one-hit wonder songs you hear in the summer. It's on every station, every hour. Then after its summer of fame, whenever you hear it on the radio you feel slightly ashamed of yourself for ever casually liking it.
To Kill a Mockingbird? Here's another name for it: Faulkner-Lite.
To be fair to The Telegraph, the paper did not commission the survey, it merely reported it.
If you read the piece, the poll was "conducted by online retailer Play.com" - in other words, it's one of those joke bits of research that commercial companies do in order to get a bit of free advertising, and which lazy journalists (eager to fill space) fall for every time.
Good to see famous writers like "Mark Twin" and "Ken Kasey", as well as books like "Anna Kareninia", on this list. Obviously compiled by highly literate intellectuals.
How can you diss Middlemarch? I mean, I will admit, there are some slow and difficult sections, but there are some beautiful and wise passages in that book that make all that worth it. Even these line alone:
"If we had keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded in stupidity."
Yowza.
This list doesn't do much for me.
My problem with Bush's list is that the dude doesn't read.
The Da Vinci code?
Zoiks....
It's all either classics or trash.
Plus one or two sensible choices.
Double Zoinks!
The Time Traveler's Wife was fun, but it had more plot holes than a galaxy-sized slice of Swiss cheese.
Where's Dirty Harry? Any list of top novels that doesn't include Dirty Harry can't be considered legitimate.
"I gots to know." Great line.
The list seems pretty standard for its type, but I'm surprised perennial hipster/lit snob faves Gravity's Rainbow and Atlas Shrugged didn't make the cut.
Post a Comment