something I wrote a while back, but never bothered to post. A response to the internet meme ""the BBC expects that the average reader has only read 6. Mark how many you've read."Creating a cannon of literature always brings familiar criticisms. The most trite of the bunch is the indignant, "There's _____, but no______‽" While there are meaningful commentaries to be had regarding the selection process (for example, within the scheme of the list, are the non-English writers included fair representatives of their cultures or mere tokens to deflect from the Anglo-American predominance?), the majority of these comments tend to be thinly veiled boasts of one's own literacy.
A follow-up criticism to lists of this sort is the irrelevant, "why Bother?" Yes, these lists are arbitrary and flawed, but that's beside the point. People love lists, and from a publisher's point of view, they're goldmines-- especially when the entries are questionable, as they allure new readers, even if they only initially come to express their horror that we value
Memoirs of a Geisha more than
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
But what I found most disconcerting about this list was the note at the top, "the
BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100." Not only is six is an incredibly dismal number, but six is an excessively meager digit given that the majority of the books listed are either school readings or or children's books or have been best sellers within the last decade. Perhaps I'm taking my education for granted, but I really would think that if one weren't completely deprived of a childhood and has read at least one school book or a best seller a year, the count would easily surpass 6 by the time one graduates from college, if not high school.
So I was curious as to how the
BBC got the number six. I looked and I looked, and I couldn't find it. In fact, I couldn't find any evidence that the
BBC ever wrote this list. While there was a similar list by the
BBC, there were some key differences in selection and ordering. As it turns out, the list that had been going around as the
BBC List was actually a poll of readers' favorites compiled by the Guardian for World Book Day in 2007. And, of course, there is no mention of the number six. In fact, the Guardian had asked that readers submit ten books they "could not live without," meaning that everyone who participated in making this compilation has read more than six.
Sure, there is a possibility that someone accidentally confused the Guardian for the
BBC and somehow thought that the number six was involved. But call me a cynic, but this the creator of this meme seems to be exploiting our desires to appear well-read. As I said before, reading six books from the list is not at all a daunting task. What better way for an internet meme to elicit dispersal than to allow someone to preen how he or she has exceed the
BBC's expectations of an average reader? And I think this is where the switch from the Guardian to the
BBC came about; believing that the
BBC was perceived to have more name recognition than the Guardian, the maker of the meme might have consciously lied about the origin of the list in an effort to make it appear even more authoritative.
But perhaps saddest of all is the fact how seriously some have taken this meme. There are many blog posts and articles (some of them by seasoned columnists) that bemoan the number six and go into long diatribes against today's "illiterate" society. The lesson to take away? Always fact check, especially when it's a matter of simply googling "100 Books
BBC."
++Unrelated notes and confessions++
-I'm surprised that Harper Lee made it so far up on a poll of what I assumed to be mostly British readers. While
To Kill a Mockingbird is the most accessible and possibly most known from the Southern Gothic genre, I could have not expected that rural Alabama would have struck such a chord with non-American readers, which I readily admit is probably a misconception on my part. After all, who could hate Atticus Finch?
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