A really long post--you might need an intermission to get through it all

I saw the following list posted on my cousin Jay's Facebook page. I've seen lists like this, compiled by various literary "experts" (who determines the qualifications to achieve "expert" status, anyway? I've been reading for 33 years now--doesn't that make me somewhat able to chose my own reading materials?) a few times--and I've always compared my reading habits with the supoosed "correct" or "educated" reading standards. Most of the time I fall short--but I have to admit that the BBC seriously underestimates me: I've read 33 of them. (And have included my ever-so-helpful thoughts on a few.)

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
[ ] 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (whoo-hoo--number one! Totally my pick, too)
[] 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I'm still working on it. Tolkein was a professor of Anglo-Saxon, and it shows.)
[ ] 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (Oh. Dear. Gads. It is such a melodrama.)
[ ] 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Cool, enjoyed it enormously--but is anything that can be made into a really cruddy movie worthy of an uber-snooty list?)
[] 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (yes, I liked it--but not enough to read it every year. Once a decade, maybe)
[] 6 The Bible (!!!!)
[ ] 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (Selfish people messing up other people's lives)
[] 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
[ ] 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
[] 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (We called our first son Pip. IT WAS NOT AFTER THIS BOOK!)
[ ] 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (Like it, have it, but it gets a little Victorian at times. Still, not a bad way to spend a rainy afternoon.)
[ ] 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Any book whewre the title character commits suicide is not worth the trouble--personal mantra)
[ ] 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
[ ] 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (80% there!)
[ ] 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
[] 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (Shouldn't this just be lumped in with the Lord of the Rings? Are they that distinctive?)
[ ] 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
[] 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
[ ] 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
[ ]20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
[ ] 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (Yeow! Overemotional twaffle. I wanted to slug Scarlett after the firt two pages. Do not read this for historical information!)
[ ] 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
[ ] 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
[ ] 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (People doing everything they can to remain miserable)
[] 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Chortle. Chorlte.)
[]27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[ ]28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[ ] 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (a tribute to the literary benefits of opium)
[] 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (Beautiful, but really difficult for a seven-year-old to understand. I know; we tried reading it together last year.)
[ ] 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
[ ] 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
[ ] 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (WHEEE!)
[ ] 34 Emma - Jane Austen (Fabulous! Much better than the movie, nice costumes notwithstanding)
[ ] 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen(Love it)
[] 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Good for a beginning, but not my favorite)
[ ] 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 (Harmless (which is more than can be said for many of these listed titles) and fun (ditto))
[ ] 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
[ ] 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 (If you get bored with this one, try Anne of Windy Poplars, instead)
[ ] 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[ ] 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
[] 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (EWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!! Why do they inflict this on us?)
[ ] 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
[ ] 51 Life of Pi
[] 52 Dune - Frank Herbert
[ ] 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ("All highly-sexed farm boys are called either Seth or Reuben." HEE HEE)
[ ] 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (Maybe my third-favorite Austen novel)
[ ] 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
[ ] 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
[ ] 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 (The only reason I know the first line of this book is from watching Love Boat in the late 70s.)
[] 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
[ ]72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
[] 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (Still have the copy my fourth-grade teacher gave me)
[ ] 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (very good--but you might need to watch your language after reading it. Toad in the Hole always sounds faintly naughty to me.)
[] 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
[] 76 The Inferno – Dante
[ ] 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
[ ] 78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
[ ] 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
[ ] 80 Possession - AS Byatt
[] 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (The only Dickens book where I don't start screaming about the thickness of the prose two paragraphs in.)
[ ] 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
[ ] 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
[ ] 84 The Remains of the Day
[ ] 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
[ ] 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
[] 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White ("WIIIIIIILBUR!"--although that was Mr. Ed. Still applicable, though.)
[ ] 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
[] 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Makes me cry cathartically)
[ ] 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
[ ] 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
[] 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
[ ] 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
[ ] 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (Much wordier than the movie)
[] 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Everyone and his pet pig dies)
[ ] 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (My boys have read it. Does that make them pretentious BBC snobs?)
[ ] 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (You'd think a romance, a revolution, and a redemption would make it interesting. You'd be wrong.)

Now for the part where I tell you what I think of all this.

First of all, I cannot understand for the life of me, why just because a book is bleak, dreary, and utterly incomprehensible when one is not under the influence of drug, legal or otherwise, it is automatically hailed as a literary landmark. Seriously, would it have killed some of these authors to look in the mirror, tell themselves they weren't really all that intellectually monumental, and then set to writing a genuinely knee-slapping short story? Admit it: with half of these ponderous tomes if you've read them at all, you plowed through doggedly to cross them off some list, and when you shudderingly turned the last pages, you exhaled huge sighs of relief and thanked your blessed stars you never had to read them again. They are beynd dismal. They are the ultimate and unjustified punishment for passing Kindergarten. No one reads most of these books for enjoyment--except people who have the emotional fortitude to withstand the inevitable depression that ensues. (I have a few of these people as friends. My admiration for them has no bounds. I adore them for their intellectual prowess. They accept me as light comic relief.)

I've tried on numerous occassion to wade through any book by Charles Dickens. I actually endured all the way through Great Expectations. It was a struggle. A Tale of Two Cities gathers dust in my bookcase now--I have attempted the slog of reading it four times, never advancing past page 24. My cousin, Kate (Hi, Kate! You don;t mind if I cite you, do you? Because you are the most knowledgable-on-the-subject person who I actually know, and are great deal more reliable than Wikkipedia.) tells me that Mr. Dickens was paid by the word for his work. It shows. His are some of the most bloated pages I have ever seen.

On the other end of the reading-list spectrum are bizarre trifles by Mitch Albom, Helen Fielding, and Dan Brown. Yes, they are best sellers. But serious masterworks of the craft of writing? No. Are they on the list as examples of popular taste at this point in history? Because as portraits of a decadent society they work. As telling revelations of the human spirit or condition they lack massively.

And don't get me started on books that every English Lit. teacher raves over, but which I have to take a bleach and lye shower after reading to rid myself of the crawing of the flesh feeling they induce.

So here's what I'm going to do for you: I'm going to give you my own approved reading list, with explanatory notes. Every title on it guaranteed to uplift the spirit, enlighten the mind, or evoke glee (some of these titles may do all three--they're my oersonal favorties). Go ahead and copy it, and then start reading. When you finish a book, place a check mark next to the title. There's no rush, and if you only read one or two, I won't judge you like I know the snooty folks at the BBC are at this very moment.

• The Bible (well, of course--the basis for all Judeo-Christian thought and philosophy, and the foundation for most of post-classical, pre-modern literature. Seriously, this is required.)
• The Book of Mormon (naturally--a companion to the Bible, and the ultimate "feel-good" read)
• The Chronicles of Narnia (I know the BBC listed only the Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe as a stand-alone choice. Sillies. My personal favorites are The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle. Decide for yourself.)
• The Anne of Green Gables series (Kate says, and I agree, that the latter books are better if you're over the age of 14. Don't forget to read Rilla of Ingleside. It always gets left off, for some reason.)
• Winnie-the-Pooh and the companion books. (Because if you don't, you'll never get the joke about Henry Pootle.)
• I'm a Stranger Here Myself (the BBC recommends Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island. I liked it, but I like this one better. Mainly becuase the BBC's recomended book is about Braitain--go figure--and this one is about what happens when an American returns home after twenty-something years abroad. It's funny and thought-provoking.)
• White Goats and Black Bees (I found it in a sale years ago, and re-read it whenever I get overwhelmed with my life. It makes me smile. Surely that's enough to pique your interest!)
• Hamlet (yes, I'm going with the BBC on this one. But I also like Macbeth, A Midsummer's Night Dream, As You Like It, and almost everything else except the dull Tudor histories--which he had to write to be economically and politically safe. He caved to the powers in charge, but he made the resulting plays so boring that they get shoved to the side--how's that for the last laugh?)
• 1776 (Not the movie--although I do enjoy it--the book by David McCullough. Seriously, you should read this one.)

You know what? There are a ot of good book out there, way too many to list here. I have a few of them on my shelves. If you need something to read, come on over; I'd be glad to let you peruse for a while.