Earlier this year the BBC set out to find Britain's best-loved book. Not the best book,
or the greatest book, or the best-loved British book, but Britain's best-loved book.
This seemed to upset the residents of literary academia. 'Where's Don Quixote?' Germaine Greer asked. Well if you're reading this Germaine, read the rubric love.
Go Harry, go Harry...
More than 140,000 people nominated their favourites, over 7,000 books in all,
and in May the Top 100 was announced - and it could have been a lot worse.
OK, everyone was disappointed that some of their favourites were missing.
In my case they include Fahrenheit 451, Billy Liar, The World According To Garp,
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Remains of the Day, Candide, and pretty much everything by E.M. Forster and Graham Greene.
And where was Gulliver's Travels? Did someone forget to put it on a syllabus?
But there was a wide variety of good books in there alongside Jeffrey Archer.
Thirty of the top hundred were children's books, although it looked a lot more, probably because the Beeb seemed to make more of an effort to get kids to vote than adults.
The beauty of lists like this lies in the discovery of wonderful things you hadn't heard of before. In that respect I found the list a bit disappointing at first because the only books
I didn't know were the most recent children's books and a couple of fantasy novels.
But the discovery of Holes by Louis Sachar made it all worthwhile - what a brilliant book!Then in October, the
TV show arrived, revealing the order of the Top 100,
and viewers were asked to choose from the Top 21...
The Top 21
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First of all, why twenty-one? Originally it was going to be a Top Ten as with Great Britons last year, so what changed? I suspect that the BBC were worried that to go with a top ten almost completely devoid of real literary merit would turn the whole project into a laughing stock. But why not a top twenty? Perhaps something heavyweight came twenty-first - almost certainly War and Peace. (Or rather twenty-sixth, after The Hobbit and the other three Harry Potter books were relegated from the top 21 by the one book per author rule.)
The infuriating thing is that if the Beeb had featured the top twenty-four then A Prayer for Owen Meany would have got in, along with Middlemarch and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. We wuz robbed. Oh how I longed
to see a bit of airtime devoted to the wonderful Owen Meany. Ideally they would have gone the whole hog and featured the top thirty, which would have brought in another of my favourite books ever: The Grapes of Wrath (along with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Story of Tracy Beaker, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Pillars of the Earth, and last but not least: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.)
It's no wonder the world is constantly messed up by politicians when so many women prefer to while the hours away reading Gone With The Wind or Little Women, and then moan that The Grapes of Wrath is horrible and Catch-22 has no story.
I'm sorry, but the Big Read seems to be turning me into a sexist pig. I know there are plenty of women who do appreciate so-called 'boys books', but even so the gender divide has begun to look like a chasm to me. Come on girls, Little Women? In this day and age? Wake up!
But for me the biggest disappointment was A Christmas Carol missing the cut (only reaching No. 47). I will maintain to my dying day that A Christmas Carol IS Britain's best-loved book, but the initial voting took place last spring when Christmas was a long way from people's minds. If it had been in the running now I think it would have a chance of winning. But, as I anticipated, there was nothing capable of beating the inscrutable popularity of The Lord of the Rings. Bah, humbug! Still, looking on the bright side,
in ten years time its popularity will be in decline because everyone will have seen the films and nobody will bother to read the books anymore.
The Advocates
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Each week three books were advocated by a celebrity, and I use the word 'celebrity' wrongly. Who the heck was the guy representing His Dark Materials who kept talking about Lara rather than Lyra? Fay Ripley championed Harry Potter - she turned out to be the one from Cold Feet, not the one from Steps, I think. Phill Jupitus was clearly the biggest, and most enthusiastic Winnie the Pooh fan the Beeb could hope to find, but what did Louis de Bernieres (or the rest of us) do to deserve Clare Short on a scooter? And Sanjeev Bhaskar did the impossible - he talked about one of the funniest books ever (The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy) for half-an-hour without raising a titter. I beg your pardon, I did laugh once: when he had a dig at Birdsong ("if you like doom and gloom...") which William Hague had done a very good job advocating. Although I wouldn't read Birdsong again if you paid me, it's too harrowing, I'd rather invite a Vogon round to read me some of his poetry while I stick red-hot pins in my eyes.My favourite book in The Top 21 was Joseph Heller's satirical anti-war novel Catch-22 which John Sergeant enthused about. When someone asked Heller if he regretted never subsequently having written anything as good as Catch-22, his reply was: "Who has?" He wasn't being modest in my opinion, just factually accurate. Catch-22 is the Guernica of
fiction, a staggering twentieth-century cubist masterpiece depicting the chaotic lunacy of war from several angles at once, and packed full of unforgettably mad characters.
Jo Brand put her boot in in favour of Nineteen Eighty-Four. An extraordinarily powerful, but over-pessimistic novel, in my opinion. Hasn't subsequent history shown that totalitarian regimes are always overthrown in the end? Abraham Lincoln was right about the people. Mind you, so was Barnum. And, by the way, why isn't Jo Brand presenting Have I Got News For You?
Impressionists Alistair McGowan and Ronnie Ancona showed why their marriage was probably doomed from the start when he advocated Wuthering Heights and she chose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Maybe prospective newlyweds should compare favourite books as a sort of compatiblity test! I have a soft spot for Narnia, It may be Christian propaganda, but the idea of going through the back of a wardrobe into another world was genius, as was the idea of a place where it was always winter but never Christmas. Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, appalled me. Maybe it is a brilliant written gothic novel, but isn't it also full of horrible people being spiteful to each other? A battered wife's idea of romance perhaps, but not mine.
Goodie birder Bill Oddie will wanted us to wote Wind in the Willows the winner. I'm afraid the twit didn't'woo me though, as I've never really seen the appeal of a book about a rich selfish buffoon and his dopey pals in animal form. I'd rather read Watership Down any day; while green-fingered scribbler Alan Titchmarsh clearly loved Rebecca as much for the descriptions of the gardens as the story itself. (I must get round to reading it)
Thanks to one of those 'oh why the feck did it do that?' moments with the video recorder, I missed David Dimbleby putting the case for Great Expectations (I must get round to reading it. I expect it will be great.) I also missed most of Fay Ripley (whoever she is) advocating
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, because the BBC put the show out much earlier that week. Curses! It may not be the most wizard book ever, but it's certainly one of the most exciting children's books I've ever read - a real rollercoaster ride.
Sandi Toksvig, who I've always liked and respected, but now just like, had her work cut out when she advocated Little Women. She didn't quite manage to stop me muttering furiously to myself and throwing things at the telly. Telling me it was based on Pilgrim's Progress and sending off for Louisa May Alcott's horoscope didn't help. It still seems like old-fashioned preachy Yankee schmaltz to me. It may have been progressive in its day, but I suspect that most women (and it is only women) who read it nowadays do so for very different reasons. Nice, happy, frilly, sentimental reasons. Did the suffragettes chain themselves to railings and throw themselves under horses for nothing?
Lorraine Kelly put the case for Jane Eyre. Lorraine Kelly? Was Jade from
Big Brother not available? Gawd 'elp us. I'm afraid I didn't get far with Jane Eyre. After a few pages
of poor little Jane being repeatedly mistreated, I ran out of sympathy...for the author.
Trendy history know-all Simon Scharma explained why War and Peace is the only book you ever need to read because all of human life (and death) is there. No wizards though. Well, I don't think so, obviously I haven't actually read it all - or much of it. Perhaps I should get back to it. I wonder how many other people, all over the country, started reading War and Peace when the Top 21 was announced? And I wonder how many still are? Well at least we've tried, and that's the point - The Big Read has got people reading a bit more, which can only be a good thing.
After all, reading is the cure for ignorance.
Unless you're reading Little Women, and you think that bliss needs no cure.
The Result
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As seemed inevitable from day one, Lord of the Rings won (with 174,000 votes) followed by Pride & Prejudice (135,000). The total number of votes cast was given as 750,000 - which seems disappointing, especially when you consider the number of people who were casting multiple votes. Online voting allowed up to five votes per
computer per week so the total number of voters was undoubtedly a lot lower. The only real battle was that for third place, which was won by Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy with 63,000 votes, following a late spurt in the final week which took it past the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (57,000) and Happy Rotter and the Goblet of Fire (55,000).
A bit of an anti-climax, I thought; with the wider public (as opposed to bookworms) seeming apathetic. Indeed the final clashed with Sam being knocked out of Pop Idol which was unfortunate. (N.B. That sentence was deliberately ambiguous.)
My own progress was, erm, hopeless. When the Top 21 was announced, I had already read thirteen of them. Since then I haven't actually managed to finish any of the other eight (or even bother to start Gone With the Wind). I did manage to re-read 2½ of the ones I like though. In the end it comes down to personal taste, and it clearly does take different strokes for different folks. As for Lord of the Rings, I'm currently trying to plough through it, to see if I can figure out why so many people talk about it with the vaguely missionaristic fervour of brainwashed, happy-clappy, cult-members. Isn't it just a pompous overblown children's book full of gobbledegook? Having reached the bit about Treebeard, I don't see how that can be denied. But can I say that and live? And did I just
make up the word missionaristic? Can I do that? Well yes, Tolkien made up lots of words so why the pheugh shouldn't I? Just as long as it doesn't become a bad hobbit!
All in all, it was a great idea, but one which could have been so much better. Asking people to vote for their One favourite book means you end up with the book which has the most devotees rather than the one that is most widely admired; and multiple voting should have been avoided. If people had been asked to register once and vote for their Top Three (or Five, or Ten) from the last hundred (or two) the result would have been much less predictable, and more interesting.
Bah! Humbug
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As I said earlier (doesn't cut and paste come in handy) I will maintain to my dying day that A Christmas Carol IS Britain's best-loved book. Nothing has been read, re-read, filmed and re-filmed more, and there are certainly more than 174,000 people
in the UK who
love it. Merry Christmas and God bless Us, Every One!
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·······The Big Read Top 200
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····1 The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien)
····2 Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
····3 His Dark Materials trilogy (Philip Pullman)
····4 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
····5 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (JK Rowling)
····6 To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
····7 Winnie the Pooh (AA Milne)
····8 Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
····9 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (CS Lewis)
··10 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
··11 Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)
··12 Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)
··13 Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
··14 Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
··15 The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
··16 The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
··17 Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
··18 Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
··19 Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Louis de Bernières)
··20 War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
··21 Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
··22 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (JK Rowling)
··23 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (JK Rowling)
··24 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (JK Rowling)
··25 The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)
··26 Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
··27 Middlemarch (George Eliot)
··28 A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
··29 The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
··30 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
··31 The Story of Tracy Beaker (Jacqueline Wilson)
··32 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
··33 The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
··34 David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
··35 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl)
··36 Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
··37 A Town Like Alice (Nevil Shute)
··38 Persuasion (Jane Austen)
··39 Dune (Frank Herbert)
··40 Emma (Jane Austen)
··41 Anne of Green Gables (LM Montgomery)
··42 Watership Down (Richard Adams)
··43 The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald)
··44 The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
··45 Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
··46 Animal Farm (George Orwell)
··47 A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
··48 Far From the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy)
··49 Goodnight Mister Tom (Michelle Magorian)
··50 The Shell Seekers (Rosamund Pilcher)
··51 The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
··52 Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
··53 The Stand (Stephen King)
··54 Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
··55 A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth)
··56 The BFG (Roald Dahl)
··57 Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome)
··58 Black Beauty (Anna Sewell)
··59 Artemis Fowl (Eoin Colfer)
··60 Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
··61 Noughts and Crosses (Malorie Blackman)
··62 Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
··63 A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
··64 The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCollough)
··65 Mort (Terry Pratchett)
··66 The Magic Faraway Tree (Enid Blyton)
··67 The Magus (John Fowles)
··68 Good Omens (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman)
··69 Guards!
Guards! (Terry Pratchett)
··70 The Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
··71 Perfume (Patrick Süskind)
··72 The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Robert Tressell)
··73 Nightwatch (Terry Pratchett)
··74 Matilda (Roald Dahl)
··75 Bridget Jones' Diary (Helen Fielding)
··76 The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
··77 Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
··78 Ulysses (James Joyce)
··79 Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
··80 Double Act (Jacqueline Wilson)
··81 The Twits (Roald Dahl)
··82 I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
··83 Holes (Louis Sacher)
··84 Gormenghast (Mervyn Peake)
··85 The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
··86 Vicky Angel (Jacqueline Wilson)
··87 Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
··88 Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons)
··89 Magician (Raymond E Feist)
··90 On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
··91 The Godfather (Mario Puzo)
··92 The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M Auel)
··93 The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett)
··94 The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
··95 Katherine (Anya Seton)
··96 Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
··97 Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
··98 Girls in Love (Jacqueline Wilson)
··99 The Princess Diaries (Meg Cabot)
100 Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)
101 Three Men In A Boat (Jerome K Jerome)
102 Small Gods (Terry Pratchett)
103 The Beach (Alex Garland)
104 Dracula (Bram Stoker)
105 Point Blanc (Anthony Horowitz)
106 The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens)
107 Storm Breaker (Anthony Horowitz)
108 The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks)
109 The Day of the Jackal (Frederick Forsyth)
110 The Illustrated Mum (Jacqueline Wilson)
111 Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)
112 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (Sue Townsend)
113 The Cruel Sea (Nicholas Montserrat)
114 Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
115 The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy)
116 The Dare Game (Jacqueline Wilson)
117 Bad Girls (Jacqueline Wilson)
118 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
119 Shogun (James Clavell)
120 The Day of the Triffids (John Wyndham)
121 Lola Rose (Jacqueline Wilson)
122 Vanity Fair (William M Thackeray)
123 The Forsythe Saga (John Galsworthy)
124 House of Leaves (Mark Z Danielewski)
125 The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
126 Reaper Man (Terry Pratchett)
127 Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging (Louise Rennison)
128 The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
129 Possession (AS Byatt)
130 The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
131 The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
132 Danny the Champion of the World (Roald Dahl)
133 East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
134 George's Marvellous Medicine (Roald Dahl)
135 Wyrd Sisters (Terry Pratchett)
136 The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
137 Hogfather (Terry Pratchett)
138 The Thirty-Nine Steps (John Buchan)
139 Girls in Tears (Jacqueline Wilson)
140 Sleepovers (Jacqueline Wilson)
141 All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
142 Behind the Scenes at the Museum (Kate Atkinson)
143 High Fidelity (Nick Hornby)
144 It (Stephen King)
145 James and the Giant Peach (Roald Dahl)
146 The Green Mile (Stephen King)
147 Papillon (Henri Charriere)
148 Men at Arms (Terry Pratchett)
149 Master and Commander (Patrick O'Brian)
150 Skeleton Key (A nthony Horowitz)
151 Soul Music (Terry Pratchett)
152 Thief of Time (Terry Pratchett)
153 The Fifth Elephant (Terry Pratchett)
154 Atonement (Ian McEwan)
155 Secrets (Jacqueline Wilson)
156 The Silver Sword (Ian Serraillier)
157 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey)
158 Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
159 Kim (Rudyard Kipling)
160 Cross Stitch (Diana Gabaldon)
161 Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
162 River God (Wilbur Smith)
163 Sunset Song (Lewis Grassic Gibbon)
164 The Shipping News (E Annie Proulx)
165 The World According To Garp (John Irving)
166 Lorna Doone (RD Blackmore)
167 Girls Out Late (Jacqueline Wilson)
168 The Far Pavilions (MM Kaye)
169 The Witches (Roald Dahl)
170 Charlotte's Web (EB White)
171 Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
172 They Used To Play On Grass (Terry Venables & Gordon Williams)
173 The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
174 The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
175 Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder)
176 Dustbin Baby (Jacqueline Wilson)
177 Fantastic Mr Fox (Roald Dahl)
178 Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
179 Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (Richard Bach)
180 The Little Prince (Antoine De Saint-Exupery)
181 The Suitcase Kid (Jacqueline Wilson)
182 Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)
183 The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
184 Silas Marner (George Eliot)
185 American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)
186 The Diary of a Nobody (George & Weedon Grossmith)
187 Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh)
188 Goosebumps (RL Stine)
189 Heidi (Johanna Spyri)
190 Sons and Lovers (DH Lawrence)
191 The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
192 Man and Boy (Tony Parsons)
193 The Truth (Terry Pratchett)
194 The War of the Worlds (HG Wells)
195 The Horse Whisperer (Nicholas Evans)
196 A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
197 Witches Abroad (Terry Pratchett)
198 The Once and Future King (TH White)
199 The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Eric Carle)
200 Flowers in the Attic (Virginia Andrews)
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Incidentally, you can get a very nice Big Read calendar from:
http://www.open2.net/bigread/
it's good quality and absolutely FREE. No wonder the licence fee is going up.
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Bah! Humbug. 
