Facebook "Well Read" Meme

Speaking of top five, top ten, top 100 etc. Facebook now has a meme going around (like the 25 random things), a list of 100 books. You are supposed to mark whether you've read them or not and make another mark if you intend to read them. There were some annoying inconsistencies in the list, and I was wondering why some books were on there (e.g., the Da Vinci Code).

Here's my list (I would have just pasted the Facebook thing but I think you have to be "friends" or whatever). What do you guys think about the list itself?
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X +
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X +
6 The Bible (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x+
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles *
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller *
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare *
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh *
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X+
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X +
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X+
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X+
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X +
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X +
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X +
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy X
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel *
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X+
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth X +
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon *
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X +
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov *
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X+
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie X+
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X?
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X+
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce *
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath *
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola X
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X
80 Possession - AS Byatt X +
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X+
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X+
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X+
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X+
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo *

Read: 65
Loved: 23 (I liked most of the others as well)
Intend to read: 10

Upon reading this list, I can't help but feel like I am playing that kid's game "some of these things don't belong." It is not a wholly bad list, just a few that, as you said, stand out as not being as good as the others. There are a few that I don't know...

Also, some of those are listed as series, such as Harry Potter, and others, like the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe are listed individually. If I read the first Harry Potter book and found it wanting, do I get credit for the series? Also, why the complete works of Shakespeare? Why should one have to read everything he wrote?

I also do not understand why the Bible should rank over other religious texts, but I am biased on that one.

What do you guys think about the list itself?

It looks like an unholy marriage between Classic British Literature 101 and an "off the top of my head with no discretion" sensibility.

2: Yes, I was annoyed by the separate listings of groups of books and individual members of those groups (like the Narnia books). Also annoyed by the Shakespeare thing - probably most of us have read SOME of his plays/poetry but not all of it.

3: That's probably it. It's a hash between an actual list probably cribbed from a magazine, and someone's personal favorites.

Also, what's the point?

Facebook is pretty weird. There is no point.

I saw a t-shirt for sale that said "I don't even want to know one random thing about you" and almost bought it just on principle!

I think a lot of us here fit in this category:

http://www.amazon.com/Too-Old-MySpace-Young-Medicare/dp/0740771086/ref=sr_1_1?ie...

7: I agree with that book. MySpace is for the young. I hate the advertising and the focus on youth oriented music, film, etc. it hurts my middle-aged eyes.

I'm on MySpace to keep track of what my older son's up to.

I'm on Facebook because friends from college/ high school are on there.

Both of them are pretty irritating.

I think the list is from a BBC poll.

edit: thought I was right, but nope
disregard

Why is the Lion, the Witch, &c listed twice? (once under its own name and once under the series heading. Confusing.)

Got 51% done, but about half the ones left off are never going to be read. By me, anyway.

It seems to me that this list is simply childhood favorites and the books that recent movies were based on- with a few decent books shoehorned in for good measure. Nothing that doesn't fit in on facebook.

What do you guys think of the list?

It's no better and no worse than any other list; although I've read just 30 and can imagine myself reading only 3 more.

Some of them are on there because of pop-culture. For example, LWW, Narnia, HDM, Harry Potter, the Bible, Tolkien's works. These are books that you need to have read to understand pop-culture (which is mostly 30 and under, which is why it seems to foreign to many here) today. The Bible is on there and not any other holy text because of its MASSIVE influence on American culture for the country's entire history.

According to a book group on Ravelry it originated with a reader poll in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/mar/01/topstories3.books

There's also Shakespeare listed separately in addition to the complete works (Hamlet at 98 f'rinstance). Also, Mitch Albom? WTF, seriously?

I got to say at least Twilight's not on it. Yet.

I honestly don't get why Albom is so highly esteemed. I read one of his books, and it wasn't any better than the dozens of other people who write those sort of books.

Mitch Albom makes Nicholas Sparks seem like the Marquis de Sade -- Albom capitalizes on the worst sort of emotional pornography. Then again, he's a radio personality, so that's stock and trade for his kind. Like one of those Dateline NBC "stories" set to print.

Maybe he traded sexual favors for inclusion on that list? I wouldn't put it past such a nakedly manipulative writer to do such a thing.

18: Funniest thing I've read this week. I'm certain that will not change by Friday...

That will probably be the news stories about people stampeded to death at Walmart during Black Friday. America's version of the running of the bulls, only the people are in worse shape and the goal isn't survival, but $30 DVD players made in China that will break in two weeks.

PS: Mitch Albom is still an emotional pornographer, scumbag, and mostly horribly, a radio personality. Ick, ick, and double ick.

I have to thank you for "emotional pornographer". I'm going to remember that.

I interned at the Detroit Free Press this year, and I got several calls from Albom's "assistant". I wonder how much research he actually does himself these days. Needless to say, I didn't get a byline:)

Any emotional pornographer would need a "fluffer." I guess he needs to buttress his sensationalist tripe with the occasional fact.

I could not get 10 pages into Tuesdays with Morrie without feeling my gorge rise. Albom's sports columns are usually pretty good, if he stays away from maudlin philosophical reflection; his novels are unendurable.

I read Five People you meet in Heaven cover to cover. To this day I have no idea how I managed, and I refuse to touch anything the man has written.

Sigh. Albom plays my girlfriend like a fiddle. Love her, though.

Mitch Albom is yet another indication that Satan is alive and well in the 21st century. Dreadful tripe...

No Cliff, Satan would at least have some taste. At least if the Rolling Stones are to be believed.

I think Mitch Albom and Thomas Kinkade are the same person. I bet if you put those two in a room together and Dan Brown walked in, the Universe would implode from the black hole gravitation of suck emanating from those three sub-mediocre hacks. Although I'm sure the Town Hall Teabagging Patriots and Glenn Beck's Gestapo of Rightwing Christian Freedom would all wet themselves with glee for such a brilliant personification of American KKKulture. Where's Sinclair Lewis and a flame thrower when you need one?

Whats really said is the material Brown works with is rather interesting, to me at least, he just manages to be completely incapable of writing an engaging, intelligent, well constructed narrative. In other words, the stories the man writes aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

I agree. I suggest Foucault's Pendulum, since it is about conspiracies and the occult and it's written by Umberto Eco The Illuminatus Trilogy is another tale of conspiracy and paranoia, but far better written than Mr. Brown's tales.