Re-post of the re-do of a Facebook mutation of a 2003 "BBC's Big List of Books They Think People Haven't Read"

I first saw it on Facebook, courtesy of Jennifer Hoffman. But, I now am wiser and that know this is merely a reconstituted meme (thanks to The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent. ).

I like to think of it as the next "25 Things" or "The three English words that end in -gry" riddle . Here's how it was presented to me:

The BBC's Big List of Books They Think People Haven't Read

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
Copy this, then open "write a note". Copy it in.
Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

Tally your total read at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen  (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible
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
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (X)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
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 
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh 
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen 
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 
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
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (X)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (started it 2 nites ago)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 
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
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (X)
80 Possession - AS Byatt (X)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
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 
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
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 
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (X)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 

Methinks my tally is 25.5.

Beeman leaves for U of MN

On any college/university campus there are always those profs whose classes you never take but you end up knowing them by reputation and/or domain. So into that Brunonian pool I can't put political commentator Darrell West whose poli sci course I tooked (if not finished) or Barrett Hazeltine in whose "gut" Engin 9 I fumbled and managed to pull a C. (Note: "guts" aren't easy if you have zero interest in the topic! And, perhaps if I'd paid more attention I'd be another B-entrepeneur instead of unemployed.).

Other profs that come to mind include Ken Miller, a biologist now more commonly known for being a religious (Catholic) scientist than for having attended many of the same Brown women's basketball games that we did. Same with public policy prof Ross Cheit who along with his wife Kathleen Odean, a librarian, were at the same games. (BTW, she's also the author of Great Books for Girls (1997) and Great Books for Boys (1998).)

There's also Thomas F. Banchoff, a mathematician much noted for his dimensional lectures involving a little old book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions which may arrive at a cinema near you! Or public speaking aficionado Barbara Tannenbaum whose kids I once babysat and now are old enough to be in high school and college. (Heck, they may have graduated from both by now!) While a professor in Brown’s Department of Theater,Speech, and Dance, Tannebaum was much involved in women's politics at the campus level as well as locally including being a consultant to a range of political hopefuls.

Since I realize now that politics has become a theme here, this headline seems sad news for Brown, if not Minnesota:

Frustrated with Middle East studies program, longtime prof. leaves Brown.

Bill Beeman is another who I seem to recall being a professor whose political voice was a standout in a less disinterested way than the intentionally apolitical academic. For a deeper drink from the Beeman faucet, here's some archived op-eds and his blog:

• on why Colin Powell should resign
• Understanding Osama bin Laden, 2001
• Wisdom from Phil: Bush is in trouble, 2002
• Culture and International Affairs