Not "best" but most known

There are quite a few books out there that most people seem to know at least the basic idea of (i.e. Invisible Man, Treasure Island, Around the World in 80 Days, Swiss Family Robinson) whether they've read them or not. Yet they don't necessarily appear on any of the "scholarly" "must-read," "most influential" or "best literature lists."

Still, it feels as though everyone* knows them for one reason or another.

These are the books that aren't necessarily the "greatest literature" but, in my opinion, they are among the most 'useful' of books to have read (not useful in the utilitarian sense, but useful in the sense that they'll help you understand the most references in other mediums).

What would you call these books that seem to have permeated popular culture?

Can anyone find me a list of such books?

P.S. Of course I understand that there are plenty of books that everyone seems to know and do fall onto many of the "must read lists" (i.e. The Bible, Pride and Prejudice, Moby-Dick, Dracula), but if I had opened with those, I don't think I'd get the responses I was looking for).

TLDR:
I'm looking for a list of books with the most wide-spread pop culture references.

*In English speaking cultures, at least. I can't speak for other cultures.

One Swedish critic said that if you don't know who Phileas Fogg, Passepartout and captain Nemo are, you're far more ignorant than if you haven't read Joyce or Kafka.

One thing that can be noted is that the books are often found in the children's room. Not all of them, but most.

What a cool question!

I'm pretty sure that there isn't a "canonical" list out there to just point two and say "that," but I've taken a swing at making my own "top 20" list below. I've tried to stick to books that "most people" probably haven't read (even if they are on the standard "great literature" lists) . . . hence the inclusion of Cervantes, Melville, and Milton.

Shelley, Frankenstein (in a class by itself . . . the best-"known," least-read book in English)

Cervantes, Don Quixote
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Dumas, The Three Musketeers
Grimm, Fairy Tales
Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
Melville, Moby-Dick
Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Milton, Paradise Lost
Orwell, 1984
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (thank you, Dr. Freud . . . )
Stevenson, Treasure Island
Stoker, Dracula
Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Twain, The Prince and the Pauper
Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days
Wells, The Invisible Man
Wells, War of the Worlds

Agreed, good question. I would say a top ten list would have to include:

- the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories of Arthur Conan Doyle
- Dracula - Bram Stoker
- Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
- Tarzan of the Apes (and its numerous sequels) - Edgar Rice Burroughs

I think of them as "books for the literati"

Rick

There are zillions of such lists, each reflecting the biases of the creator, the time when it was created, and the culture that created it.

One Swedish critic said that if you don't know who Phileas Fogg, Passepartout and captain Nemo are, you're far more ignorant than if you haven't read Joyce or Kafka.

Of course, to know who Phileas Fogg, Passepartout and captain Nemo are, you needn't have ever picked up a book, just gone to the movies.

>6 lilithcat:
Of course. But the question was about books that have been so embedded in the public consciousness that you are expected to recognise allusions to them without even having read them. I thought the quote was a good illustration of the concept.

As for suggesting books, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde builds so heavily on what everyone today knows that it's hardly worth reading it.

Many of the books suggested have been made into films so people think they know them. I agree many are books read or heard in childhood, when parents used to read to their offspring.
I must admit I once dropped a boyfriend because he had never read Winnie the Pooh (there were other cultural differences but that was the catalyst)
I think I might feel the same way about Wind in the Willows. Stories that anthromorphise animals helped to shape attitudes in the nineteen fifties.
As for Treasure Island, along with Swallows and Amazons, that lived in my imagination throughout my youth and I dare not read it again in case it does not have the same appeal.
How about Asterix?

7: Actually, I read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after many years of thinking I knew the story and it was rather different. Of course, the mystery aspect was spoiled, but it's a rather interesting book. (So the point about cultural references can stand but the book is still worth reading.)

>8 oldstick:

I must admit I once dropped a boyfriend because he had never read Winnie the Pooh

I love it! "No Winnie-the-Pooh?!? You're outta here!" :D

> 8 Many of the books suggested have been made into films so people think they know them.

No question . . . in fact, of the books that have been mentioned, I can think of only a handful whose central tropes aren't known primarily from mass media (film, television, radio, comic book) adaptations. Oedipus Rex, 1984, Paradise Lost, and maybe Robinson Crusoe . . .

It be interesting to know, actually, how this phenomenon played out (if it played out) before 1900.

Uncle Tom's Cabin
Peter Pan, which is a totally different experience than the movie. Great writing trumps, in my opinion.

@ 8 Many of the books suggested have been made into films so people think they know them.
That's what got me thinking of this. So many books I read (of the classics) I find I already know a little bit about or I get deja vu because of other media. How many people of my generation out there knew Of Mice and Men because of Looney Tunes satires? A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court has been redone and parodied many times (I grew up on A Kid in King Arthur's Court). All the bastardizations/remakes/satires of Frankenstein and Dracula (when we did Frankenstein in college, several students asked where the hell Igor was). Anything that's been Disney-fied (I had trouble finding a touchstone for Swiss Family Robinson because of all the Disney movie and movie-novelizations touchstones on here).

When I read Uncle Tom's Cabin earlier this year, I was super hyped about it because I grew up on The King and I...anyone who's familiar with both The King and I and Uncle Tom's Cabin can understand why I was confused for a good part of the book!

It's just fascinating to me to see the way different books get absorbed into other media to the point that it becomes a part of a culture's identity!

@ 11 It be interesting to know, actually, how this phenomenon played out (if it played out) before 1900
I'm certain it did in very different (yet altogether familiar) ways! If you grew up agnostic or deist before the 1900s and were intimately familiar with Paradise Lost before reading The Bible, you'd probably find yourself a bit confused reading Genesis and finding so much "missing;" same with The Bible and The Divine Comedy. Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy got so ingrained into culture that I've heard the Catholic Church is still trying to purge doctrine that only originates in these two works and has no basis in The Bible. Not to mention all the references (butchered and otherwise) of the Bible and Shakespeare in other works (other books, plays, poems, tracts, etc).

"all the references, butchered and otherwise of the Bible and Shakespeare. . ." (13)

I think it was Glasheen the scholar-critic of Finnegans Wake who said
that:
Joyce (in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) cites the Bible
a lot; Shakespeare more than the Bible; Swift and Sterne more than Shakespeare; --and "the trashiest popular songs" more than all of the above combined. He certainly had nothing against "the popular". (I have, for example, never seen "Wonʻt you Come Home, Bill Bailey" inside the covers of a book --with the exception of Ulysses.)
But I doubt that
Joyceʻs own work has gotten into the popular mind the way the books mentioned in this thread have.

Popular culture makes great use of the great stories of the past. "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou" being one of the more recent and more successful of Hollywood's excursions into the classics. I confess that my favorite Shakespeare movies are "Forbidden Planet" and "Strange Brew"

Good stories last a long time. Herodotus wrote about vampires in the area around Transylvania in The Histories