Gris's Journal

The Big Read Meme, and Joss Whedon's Evil Genius!

Yes, yes, it's been awhile, lovely to see you again too, no, I'm not dead.

Now that we've gotten that all out of the way... I've taken the next step into Web 2.0-ness, and created a Google Reader account and signed myself up for a plethora of RSS feeds (notably, a whole bunch of the links in my sidebar over there). Now, all the things that I've promised myself I would read regularly, I actually AM reading regularly, yay! (Come to think... I should share a few of the other sites I've added over on my sidebar. Right. One thing at a time.)

So, in honor of my marginally increased geekiness (did I mention I've gone all Firefox, all the time, now, too?), I offer you: a web event, and the uncloaking of the origins of a web meme.

The web event is fairly straightforward: Joss Whedon is back, and he's brought friends. Tune in TODAY (and until the stroke of midnight on Sun., July 20, 2008) to the third and final act of...

DR. HORRIBLE'S SING-ALONG BLOG!!!

But FEAR NOT!!! If you're reading this belatedly and missed the spectacular web event, Joss intends to make it available in other formats (according to his diabolical Master Plan. You DID read the Master Plan, didn't you?) In case that link goes away too, he states in his FAQ:

"[Q:] What happens when it goes away? Does it go to a happy farm for always like Fluffy did when mommy was crying and the neighbor kept washing his fender?

[A:] No, Dr horrible will live on. We intend to make it available for download soon after it’s published. This would be for a nominal fee, which we’re hoping people will embrace instead of getting all piratey. We have big dreams, people, and one of them is paying our crew.

And somewhat later, we will put the complete short epic out on DVD – with the finest and bravest extras in all the land. We’ll go into greater detail about that at Comiccon, but we’re changing the face of Show Friendliness a second time with that crazy DVD. "

Now, as for the meme... read on, Dear Reader, read on (and I DO mean that)...

In the spirit of any good web meme, I shamelessly stole this from Mary Warner of The Woo Woo Teacup Journal, who of course shamelessly stole it from someone else. If you work your way through the chain of outrageous piracy, pillage, and plunder (...hey, did you know that pillage (from the Old French) and plunder (from Middle High German) are essentially the same word, except that plunder traditionally refers specifically to the taking of household goods? No, really, go look! (And, for that matter, sack (with the meaning of "plunder") literally DID come from the sense of "putting booty in a sack"... so my former medieval history professor's image of the Vandals wandering Rome with giant Macy's bags wasn't so far off.) Yet another example of the English language's differentiation of meaning between Germanic terms and French loan-words. More on that another day, I think. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog entry, still in progress....), eventually most will claim that this meme was stolen from the federal government, specifically the NEA's Big Read. (Hence the name, Big Read Meme. Simple, ain't it?)

However, as is the case with so many web memes, this genealogy would be completely FICTIONAL! The Big Read is a worthy thing, but to date they've only produced a list of 21 books (note that I've marked these up according the the meme below, because, hey, why not? Looks like I've read more than half, myself.):

* The NEA Big Read Booklist *

Bless Me, Ultima - Rudolfo Anaya
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury (A novel for all readers... get the 40th anniversary ed., and read the afterword!)
My Ántonia - Willa Cather
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest J. Gaines
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett (I love Dash!)
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway, on the other hand...)
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston (The opening line intrigues me: "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.")
Washington Square - Henry James (Maybe... I've liked other James novels)
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (excellent, excellent book)
A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
The Call of the Wild - Jack London
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
The Shawl - Cynthia Ozick
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan (but I liked The Kitchen God's Wife better)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Old School - Tobias Wolff
The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy (never got into the Russians... but maybe someday)

So, the NEA's Big Read is *not* the source of the Big Read meme. "But then... what is?", I hear you cry. (Aren't you glad you asked a librarian?) Fear not! (I could really get used to that phrase), for I have delved deep into the Web's annals, and discovered the answer! Travel with me across the pond, Dear Reader, to the shores that gave birth to our Mother Tongue (and forgive me if English is your second language, your pronunciation is excellent, really).... to the UK's World Book Day. The meme's list (and yes, it's ranked) is of World Book Day's Top 100 Books that the UK couldn't live without, for 2007. This is (as the name implies) an annual compilation, and unfortunately WBD doesn't keep the old lists on its site. But I trust you'll accept this 3/1/2007 BBC article,"Pride and Prejudice is top read," as authoritative confirmation.

There now, enough debunking. On With the Meme! (Wow, that sounds like a web sequel to Gone With the Wind, doesn't it?) I'm not going to quibble too much about what's included on the list; I'm certain that *everyone* has a "Top 100" of their own, and I doubt that it would exactly match anyone else's (although, hey! Literary blind date idea!). Yes, it annoys me that this list focuses almost exclusively on the novel (it probably *was* meant to be exclusive, but I think the UK would have been hard put to give Shakespeare the axe); there are so many fantastic plays (Inherit The Wind) and poetical works (The Odyssey, Inferno, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Pablo Neruda...) that should've made it. This list gives us a common place from which to start. I've read about 47 of the below titles, and made a go at 5 more on the list (which was frequently as much as I could stand of the title, and I do *not* give up on books easily). (As a note, I've bumped the font size a little for the lists, because bolding just wasn't showing up decently-- my apologies if it annoys.)

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* The Big Read World Book Day Meme *

How do you stack up? Below is a list of the top 100, with instructions for how to post the meme on your blog.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Put a line through the books you HATE.
5) Post your list in your blog. (Feel free to add personal notes.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (I'll note the movie came out in 2007, if you're wondering how this won the top slot... not that it's not a great novel)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (started it many times, but he DOES drone on. The originals were SO much better-written; he should have stuck to academic writing. Liked the movies, though. :D)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (loved all except the middle book)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (In retrospect, I'm shocked I *haven't* read this yet)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (Animal Farm was quite enough, thanks.)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Thanks, read more than enough Dickens. I DESPISE his writing; he was paid by the word, and wrote like it. If ever a novelist was in greater need of a stern editor....)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (This has been on my to-read list for quite some time; must do something about that)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Haven't read all, but most)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (see above, re: pallid remake of the Sagas)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Dunno why, but I've never felt motivated to read this, either.)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (It's just too, too overblown for me, and Scarlett is such a self-centered drama queen that frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn what happens to her or her beloved Tara. Doesn't help that my sisters watched the movie EVERY. TIME. it came on TV)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (Dickens AGAIN? Yeesh.)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (maybe someday. I've tried to start it, but... it IS a doorstop of a novel.)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (The whole "trilogy", actually.)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (This is another I tried to start, but just couldn't get into.)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (NO. NO DICKENS. NO NO NO.)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (Read my poor copies to tatters.)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (This seems redundant, given #33)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (Have it on my to-read shelf now, actually...)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (Also on my to-read shelf)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (in Latin, too! If it were possible to multiple-underline things, this would be underlined to the bottom of the page.)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (I could NOT choke my way through the entirety of this ill-written, poorly-edited piece of cliched, stinking, tiresomely predictable drek. And furthermore, H2G2 (#25) should have been in this slot.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (Not as good as The Moonstone, though!)
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (long and long ago)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (excellent, but so VERY grim)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (ARGH. WHY is this on school required reading lists? Why?)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (I do have a certain resistance to reading things just because "everyone else" is reading them, which is not a great quality for a public librarian... still, it's how I am)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (A boy, a raft, a tiger... I love the cover art.)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (The successive books got old, but the first is still a masterpiece)
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 (If I could underline multiple times, I would. The audiobook is also excellent)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (STOP with the Dickens already, SHEESH!)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (Liked this the best of Steinbeck's novels, but that's not saying much. I respect the man as one of America's literary greats, but I just don't care for his style)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas Not my favorite of his, but Dumas is delicious)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (read pieces, but never the whole thing)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I liked Bartleby the Scrivener much better, actually)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (NOOOOOOOO. Brits and their darned local heroes....)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (If you've only seen the movie version, you're missing out on quite the psychological gothic novel.)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (A Walk In the Woods was screamingly funny, if you'd prefer to read an Americentric title)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (I've read close to half of Finnegan's Wake, does that count?)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (The descrip makes me think of Edward Eager's Half-Magic, which was one of my FAVORITE books as a child)
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (This surprised me... I didn't expect to like it)
80 Possession - AS Byatt (Marvellous book for anyone who likes the culture of books. The movie didn't do it justice.)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (Proof that Dickens didn't HAVE to be tiresome, which makes the rest of his corpus-- and I use that in the sense of "habeus corpus," believe me-- all the more cringeworthy to me)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (One of the rare cases where I actually liked the movie better, as it did such a good job of distilling the wistful melancholy of the book)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry (it amuses me how many of these titles are on Oprah's list... is her influence that far-reaching?)
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (Some pig!)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (read some... I was more of a Miss Marple enthusiast, myself. But Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell books are fantastic-- Holmes' wit and intelligence, but more humanized, without the extreme superciliousness and misogyny)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (I've sometimes wondered what a list of formative childhood classics would look like from other parts of the world.. I think I'm beginning to get an idea....)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Er... #14, anyone? Still, my favorite Shakespeare play)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Posted by gris at July 19, 2008 07:56 PM