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Having gone on about this kind of thing recently - and basically thinking it pointless but not quite - a link to the BBC Big Read 100.
I hope the fact that it's 1/3 children's books means that lots of children voted and hence read books, not that there are millions of sentimental adults about the place. We can overlook the fact it's full of airport books, or crap books made into fine films, because there are 7 translations here (I think) with Russia winning first place with 2 Tolstoys and a Dostoyevsky. And that, absurdly, makes me pleased.
May 21 2003, 03:56:41 UTC 9 years ago
so many ways to dissent
I thought you might like to read my friend altariel's rant on the same subject from a completely different perspective.-----
After the TV show with this list was shown on BBC2, The Big Read Debate was shown on BBC4. This is a version of the rant I posted to a mailing list after watching it. It was a round table debate chaired by Andrew Marr, with guests including John Carey, Germaine Greer, Michael Rosen, and one or two others. This is a rant. I haven't bothered to turn it into a polished piece of prose because I'm lazy.
Rant
The debate had me ranting with two minutes. Not just the sight of Germaine Greer being stupidly, stupidly wrong about Tolkien (this time she finally admitted that she'd never even read LoTR), there was also the bit where television was compared unfavourably to books (grrr... and this from a set of people making part of their livings as television pundits).
But the bit that really got my goat was when John Carey claimed that Birdsong and Captain Corelli's Mandolin weren't romances, and then the panel went on to have a go at Georgette Heyer (who also wrote a book about a love story unfolding against a backdrop of war and gave a very well-regarded account of a famous battle (Waterloo). To give Greer her due, she did defend Heyer here. I hate blatantly wrong double standards perpetrated by media-styled intellectuals. Grr, again.
I was amused when one of the panellists remarked that he was shocked that there was virtually nothing to represent the modern literary novel - and got to howl my usual rant about the modern literary novel ("That's because it's shite!"). But the funniest moment was right at the start when Andrew Marr (the presenter) asked the assembled worthies whether any of them had read The Stand. None of them had. Which strikes me that they should have tried to get a more eclectically-read set of panellists!