Literary Lists

Among the various interminable games and lists circulating on Facebook, one in particular has caught my eye this week. The BBC at some stage apparently issued a list of one hundred books that they believe to be of some – unquantified and unspecified – merit. (N.B. several variations on this list have been winging their way through cyberspace, I’m not entirely sure as to the authenticity of the one which reached me; I have been unable to track down a version on the BBC website.) Anyway, the BBC apparently predicted that the majority of people will not have read more than six of them. I thought that Facebook yielded surprisingly diverse types of response.

 Some people seem to be playing a fierce game of one-upmanship. Many claim to have read more than ninety percent of the titles. (For the few who claim to have digested the whole gamut, I feel a certain incredulity: purely because this would involve reading the whole of the Bible.)

There is room for horror as to the number of books that the average person has achieved, and a lot of scathing commentary about falling standards of education.

Another popular response seems to be to bemoan the quality of the books on offer and perhaps comment on the strange juxtaposition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the entire works Shakespeare.

I feel that perhaps the most interesting factor up for discussion should not be what constitutes ‘literature’, but simply how interesting it is that such diverse books appear on the same list. I think it serves to illustrate very neatly that personal choice should be the only regulatory criteria of any list of literary merit, and indeed this one was compiled as a result of a reader poll to determine Britain’s greatest book. (The only flaw in this plan is the fact that the BBC, by issuing such lists, does seem to encourage a rather proscriptive approach to reading as people strive to read the books other people perceive as ‘valuable’.)

For me, as a Hesperette, the most striking feature of the list that I read was the number of titles on the list that were not originally written in English. Here is the list of translated works that appeared: War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, One Hundred Years of Solitude, A Suitable Boy, The Shadow of the Wind, Love in The Time of Cholera, Lolita, Count of Monte Cristo, Germinal, Madame Bovary, The Little Prince, The Three Musketeers, Les Misérables.

I take fourteen percent foreign literature on a reader poll to be a pretty good score. It should also be noted that with a couple of exceptions these books are all pretty hefty works of literature. It would seem that, not only have people persevered with reading these books (Germinal, really?), they also rank them among their favourites. I found this, in general, to be an encouraging situation. (We must, of course, ignore the fact that most people were probably only showing off and that only three languages are represented in translation.)

 

Anyway enough random musings for one day,

 

Back soon,

 

Martha