Editor's Note: I know this has been going around on Facebook, but the Facebook note function isn't working on my computer right now. Dern.
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! (Sry, yo, but I don't tag.)
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
(how the crap is this on the same list as Jane Eyre???)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (King James and Hebrew) (working on it)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwel
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
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
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
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
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 (listed separately from "Chronicles" because...?)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
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
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
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
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
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
(but I have read its predecessor, Carmilla by Le Fanu)
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
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
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
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
And I don't buy for a second the supposition that the BBC compiled this list as some representative sample of fine literature. Perhaps I'm biased, but here are a few that I have read or started that I think could easily kick Rowling and Dan Brown out of their spots:
The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Matilda - Roald Dahl
Silas Marner - George Eliot
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
And then there are my humorists that I love so dearly...
Pontoon - Garrison Keillor
Love Me - Garrison Keillor
I'll Mature When I'm Dead - Dave Barry
Family: The Ties that Bind and Gag - Erma Bombeck
Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night - Lewis Grizzard
Anything ever written ever by Ogden Nash.
Editor's Second Note: From here, I descend into a pit of Movie Trivia from which there is no escape, largely for my own enjoyment. Read at your own risk.
Incidentally, it was Nash who wrote "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker." People mistakenly attribute it to Willy Wonka from the 70s adaptation of the Dahl book because he says it after Veruca's father points out the presence of a "butter gin" tank - most of Gene Wilder's lines as Wonka were quotes from literary and musical works, a quirk written in by the screenwriters (read:
not in his original Dahl characterization) to make him seem "just a little off" as opposed to borderline antisocial. Johnny Depp's Wonka is actually much closer to the one Dahl wrote in the book.
Another interesting Wonka tidbit: in the 70s version, when Wonka plays the "musical lock" to open one of the doors, Mike Teevee's mother hears the brief motive and says, "Rachmaninoff." She is mistaken. The musical combination is actually the first few notes from the overture to
The Marriage of Figaro, composed by Mozart.
The 70s Wonka movie was filmed in Munich because the filmmakers didn't want American audiences to recognize any landmarks, making it easier for the individual viewer to identify with the town and perhaps draw parallels between Charlie's hometown and their own.
There is a difference of title between the two films. The 70s adaptation is
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, placing emphasis on the eccentric Wonka and using Charlie as more of a frame story. The 2000s version uses the actual book title,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and sticking more closely to the book's portrayal of Charlie as a purifying force in Wonka's isolated world.
I don't remember the book clearly enough to know how or if it described the worldwide scramble for the Golden Tickets, but it does strike me as interesting that although the tickets are ostensibly sent out far and wide, all five winners are white, Western-hemisphere children, three of whom are American, one English and one German. In addition, one of them magically lives in the same town in which the factory is located. True, Charlie would likely not have had the means to travel a long distance to get to the factory, but still. I suppose it's called "suspension of disbelief." Or to put it another way, "Get over it and keep reading/watching."
It's interesting to look at how the two films morphed each character for the big screen. The 70s version went with a more traditional movie-musical and had to make it warmer and fuzzier because of that choice, whereas the 2005 version had the task of translating the children's vices into contemporary culture.
Charlie Bucket - Because Charlie was (1) the main character and (2) presented as deeply impoverished with specific lifestyle quirks (like the massive grandparent slumber party in the living room), the only differences between the two Charlies are energy and mood. Peter Ostrum's Charlie is more morose and melancholy, while Freddie Highmore's Charlie is pragmatic and stable. Highmore's Charlie didn't need his mother to sing "Cheer Up, Charlie" to give him the strength to walk home at the end of the day.
Willy Wonka - As I mentioned above, Wilder's Wonka got molded like Play-Doh into a different man than the one Dahl wrote in the book. They used his frequent quoting and peculiar factory to make him "eccentric," but gave him the heart of an eternal child, pure in intentions and almost constantly delighted in demeanor. Depp's, on the other hand, gets his eccentricity from a torrent of emotional baggage. The 2005 writers added the father-as-dentist subplot to explain the baggage; the book never really does. A good example of where the two Wonkas widely deviate from one another is their reaction to Charlie's suggestion that his family come to live at the factory, made shortly after he learns that his grand prize is inheritance of the factory. Wilder's Wonka smiles warmly and immediately agrees, prophesying that Charlie will live happily ever after. Depp's Wonka laughs derisively and refuses, claiming that family members would be a deterrent to Charlie's success.
Violet Beauregard - The highly dedicated gum-chewer. The 70s Violet is a chatty, assertive young woman whose downfall is caused by an inability to submit to authority or to listen to advice. The 2005 Violet, on the other hand, is competitive and excels at several disciplines, one of which just happens to be gum-chewing. Her competitive nature (and her mother's enabling) lands her in Wonka's juicer. Funny how the exact same action - taking a piece of gum that hasn't been fully tested - can be so differently driven and executed by two actresses and screenwriter teams! Also, she undergoes a change in geography; 70s Violet is from Montana, while 2005 Violet is from the ATL, shawty!
Mike Teevee - The 70s Mike enjoys his TV and carries around his little cowboy pistols, but he isn't really given a heavy "vice" beyond over-curiosity about Wonka's kinesthetic television device. 2005's Mike has a bulldozer streak; he's violent, aggressive and angry (the filmmakers show him playing video games, apparently as a means of explanation.) That uncontrolled rage and aggression are what get him into trouble. Again, same character, same basic action - jumping onto and activating a dangerous device - made to look very different in the two films. The boys' reactions to Wonka's explanation of the device also demonstrate their differences very clearly: 70s Mike is excited at the prospect of being on TV himself, while 2005 Mike yells at Wonka for having stumbled upon teleportation and not even acknowledging it because he's so obsessed with chocolate.
Many of the other characters aren't developed heavily enough to be much different between the two films. Veruca Salt, Augustus Gloop and Grandpa Joe are all outlined like coloring book pictures and aren't given much room in the plot to deviate from their characterizations or background stories. Veruca = spoiled brat. Augustus = glutton. Grandpa = Charlie's favorite grandparent, cheerful and full of Wonka folklore. However, the portrayal of the childrens' parents and how it changed between the two films bears mentioning. In both films, Veruca's father and Augustus' mother are painted as enablers. But the two other non-Charlie parents get very different treatment - Mike Teevee's mother is an average, if talkative, woman in the first, but is replaced by a weak, ineffective father in the second, thus demonstrating how Mike's violent streak grew unchecked. Violet Beauregard's father is a loud, smiley car salesman in the first, but is replaced by a hyper-competitive mother living vicariously through her daughter's achievements in the second. In general, the 70s version was written as lighter family fare, trying as hard as it could to make the characters average and accessible to the audiences and to make the storyline as relatable as possible. The 2005 version, however, ventured gleefully into absurd and surreal corners and drew very clearly a landscape of parent-as-villain, wherein the failings and obsessions of parents shape the children in a harmful way.
This adult-vs-child theme runs through a lot of Dahl's writing. Consider his other very well-known children's books (both of which have corresponding film adaptations),
Matilda and
James and the Giant Peach. Two children in abusive and desperate situations find in themselves the power to strike back. I got to read an excerpt from Dahl's autobio where he talks about having grown up in a really tough boarding school. It makes it pretty clear why the theme of abused/neglected children comes up frequently.
Well, this post is getting so long that the AutoSave function is taking longer and longer to finish. Which is probably a sign that I should stop. If you've read all the way to the end, I am shocked.
