The Grauniad reports on the top 100 books, as decided by a BBC poll. I was gratified to discover that I've read 51 of them, so clearly I get my intellectual tosser badge for 2003. I was also rather pleased to have pointed out to me that Donna Tartt's The Secret History is on the list, because it's one of (if not the) best book ever. And I will read Anna Karenina one day, promise. Why did the His Dark Materials trilogy only get one entry while J. K. Rowling got one for each Harry Potter book, I wonder? Oh, and every time Gabriel Garcia Marquez turns up on one of these lists he should be replaced by one of Louis de Bernieres' Cochadebajo books, ideally The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts.
On I wrote BBC's top 100 books, on the subject of Uncategorized.
sparkes
G.
The answer to your question- the Pullman books have been published as a bind-up, the Potter ones haven’t. It probably worked in Pullman’s favour in that his vote wasn’t split. I thought the programme was, not to put too fine a point on it, utter bilge. It seemed to delight in making authors look foolish- as if hazarding a guess about what percentage of the books had blue covers (or some such facile statistic) made the slightest difference. I am not interested in this- I am interested in what makes these books inspiring and thought-provoking. Every member of the production staff of that programme should be sacked, particularly the person who thought it was a good idea to have Teenage Dirtbag playing all the way through. P.S. Working in the publishing caper means that I was given the list on Friday afternoon. Any thoughts that we might have had about this being a serious programme were resolved by two things- firstly the fact that the list, provided by the BBC, was riddled with errors (Alice in Wonderland by C.S. Lewis, for one) and the second that it contained a book by Jeffrey Archer.
Nick
When García Márquez shows up, it always seems to be for either ‘Cien años de soledad’ or ‘El amor en los tiempos del cólera’ (which always makes me think ‘Huh? A García Márquez book with a happy-ish ending?’ and get confused) or, as in this case, both. I think this is a shame, because his novellas are a lot better. Have you read ‘Crónica de una muerte anunciada’ or ‘El coronel no tiene quien le escriba‘?I don’t know why it’s always ‘Corelli’ that shows up for de Bernières, either—perhaps people haven’t read the Cochadebajo trilogy. They’re certainly the best fiction about Latin America written by a non-Latin-American that I’ve ever come across.
I agree that the program was rubbish. Who on earth got to pick the music for each segment?I also agree that the stupid stats where a little off putting. I would have been far more interested in a segment about Douglas Adams than the ‘he was the youngest published author on the list’ crap.Talking of which I get to my real point. The number of childrens books on the list. Many of the childrens books that appeared in the list over 20 years old I read as a child. I enjoyed them as a child and but they wouldn’t appear in my alltime favourite books.Do people in this country stop reading after the onset of pubity? Only this can explain the appearence of books that todays children have never heard of on the list.I was also suprised about the lack of popular books on the list. Unless every one that voted had either not read a book in the last 20 years, was a pretentous t**t, or voted to impress I would that thought that Tony Parsons, Nick Hornby, Ben Elton and even bloody Alan Titchmarsh would have appeared on the list somewhere.