BBC book list

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? My total at the time of writing is 19 (highlighted in bold and tallied in brackets). This only includes books that I have read myself; not books that were read to me as a child or which I've read in part but not finished; or consumed in some other medium such as film, TV, radio, or audiobook; nor books which I own and at some time had the desire to read but haven't quite got round to yet.

1. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
2. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
3. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1)
4. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter series (I've read only the first book)
5. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
6. The Bible
7. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
8. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (2)
9. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials
10. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
11. Louisa M. Alcott, Little Women
12. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (3)
13. Joseph Heller, Catch 22
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
16. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (4)
17. Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong
18. J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye (5)
19. Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
20. George Eliot, Middlemarch
21. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
22. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (6)
23. Charles Dickens, Bleak House
24. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
25. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
26. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (7)
27. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
28. John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath
29. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (8)
30. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
31. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
32. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
33. C. S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia
34. Jane Austen, Emma
35. Jane Austen, Persuasion
36. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
37. Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
38. Louis De Bernieres, Captain Corelli's Mandolin
39. Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
40. A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh (9)
41. George Orwell, Animal Farm (10)
42. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
43. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
44. John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meaney
45. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (11)
46. L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
47. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
48. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
49. William Golding, Lord of the Flies
50. Ian McEwan, Atonement
51. Yann Martel, Life of Pi
52. Frank Herbert, Dune
53. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
54. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
55. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
56. Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind
57. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
58. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (12)
59. Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (13)
60. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
61. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
62. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
63. Donna Tartt, The Secret History
64. Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
65. Alexandre Dumas, Count of Monte Cristo
66. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
67. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
68. Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary
69. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
70. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
71. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
72. Bram Stoker, Dracula (14)
73. Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
74. Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island
75. James Joyce, Ulysses (15)
76. Dante, The Inferno (16)
77. Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons
78. Emile Zola, Germinal
79. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
80. A. S. Byatt, Possession
81. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
82. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
83. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
84. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
85. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (17)
86. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
87. E. B. White, Charlotte's Web
88. Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
89. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
90. Enid Blyton, The Faraway Tree Collection
91. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (18)
92. Antoine De Saint-Eupery, The Little Prince
93. Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory
94. Richard Adams, Watership Down
95. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
96. Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice
97. Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
98. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (19)
99. Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

I originally noted this list on 15 March 2009. I came across it again when purging old files on my laptop.

If you liked this post, you may also like the list of books I have read since June 2006 and  books I wanted to read after Finals. If films are more your kind of thing, here's a list of films I've seen and (sometimes) reviewed.

University education

I've been purging old files on my laptop to free up space and came across this little gem of a speech I transcribed from the BBC Radio 4 programme, Any Questions, from 15/16 October 2004.

19 minutes into the programme

The question: Does the panel think that universities should be expected to "socially engineer"?

Jonathan Dimbleby: This flows, I imagine in your question, from Chris Patten as Chancellor of Oxford University saying, amongst other things, the following: talking about the pressure from what's called Oftoff [Office for Fair Access (Offa)] – what Oftoff is asking, it's not asking them to be needs blind (they are); what it's asking is that they should lower their standards in order to engage in "social engineering". Why do they want universities to lower their standards? Because standards in secondary schools are not high enough.

[Jeanette Winterson, whose blood is boiling, followed by Bob Marshall-Andrews]

Tim Yoe (Shadow Secretary of State for Environment and Transport): […] I agree with a lot of what Jeanette [Winterson] said: she's absolutely right that the crucial thing is that we should raise standards in schools. […] I do believe that raising our game as a country in education is absolutely crucial to our survival as a successful economy and a successful country in the next generation. We are in danger of being overtaken very quickly unless we make sure that British school-leavers and British universities have the kind of skills that will give them the sort of knowledge based jobs on which this country will depend in the next generation.

Jonathan Dimbleby: Sir Ken Robinson.

Sir Ken Robinson (Senior adviser to the John Paul Getty Trust, and former Professor of Education, Warwick University): Well – [applause] You clapping the very sound of my name? Or is that…? [laughs] I know, I know, I know.

Jonathan Dimbleby: Someone from the audience – for those at home can't necessarily hear what your acute ears picked up – someone said, "I love you."

Sir Ken Robinson: Thank you. [laughs]

Jonathan Dimbleby: Or "we", actually, I think the person said. Royal we or not, I don't know.

Sir Ken Robinson: Thank you mother. [laughs] We're all having boiling blood here, so let me tell you what makes my blood boil: it's when people talk about how we have to raise standards as if this is an important political breakthrough. Of course we have to raise standards in schools. We all know that. I mean, what would be the point of lowering them? You know? [muted laughs] We would say, "We have to raise standards of literacy." Well, yes. Why lower them? [muted laughs] And when would they get to be too high anyway? You know, people wandering around, speaking blank verse, mugging each other. I don't think so. [laughs followed by applause] Of course we should raise standards. The question really that faces this country is which standards are we talking about? And my concern – this lay behind the report that I produced for the government and that led, among other things to creative partnerships [like at The Community College, Whitstable in Kent, from where the programme is being recorded] – is that most policy-makers in this country believe that the way we face the future in education is by doing better what we did in the past. We just have to do more of it. And raise standards. And truthfully, the old model as Bob [Marshall-Andrews (QC & Labour MP)] is suggesting is absolutely bankrupt. When Chris Patten talks about "social engineering", this sounds like a smart remark and something that's vaguely to do with socialist states; but actually the whole of education has always been the process of social engineering. What I mean by that: education has always been written in the image of the society that we want to create. That's why we put so much of our Gross National Product into it. The issue at the moment, though, is: our present system of education was modelled, created for and devised entirely in the interests of and the image of industrialism. It was developed in the nineteenth century to meet the needs of industrialism, and there are several features of this which are important to recognize in trying to move forward into the future. The first is: that the industrial economy had a very broad base of manual workers – about 80%; and about 20% professional. The system was designed to produce that workforce. This is why we had secondary modern schools and why we had a small number of grammar schools, and it's why we had the 11+. I was always fascinated by this idea of the 11+ because many people failed 11+ because they had to. 80% of people had to fail the 11+. But in most cases that I experienced, people feel something different. They felt it was like a blood test: that the 11+ told them whether they were clever or not. If they have a blood test, there's no point in demanding a recount. You know, you say, "I'm sorry, all my friends are group A's; I'm group B. How will I face them? Count again." [muted laughs] They were tested not on their overall intelligence, but whether they could do the grammar school curriculum, and then a small proportion of them went to university. So in the 60s and 70s about one in twenty went to university and a degree was worth a lot of money. Now, the whole economic context has altered. Getting a degree doesn't guarantee you a job whether it's in aroma therapy or astro-physics – it doesn't really matter, because so many people have them. In the next 30 years [stifled applause] – thank you – in the next 30 years more people will be gaining formal qualifications throughout the world in education and training than since the beginning of history. This is a seismic shift in education and we need to completely re-design it – both intellectually and conceptually. And I think this school here in Whitstable, with all of its work across the arts and sciences and balance in technology, is pointing the way forward. And I wish people wouldn't look back as a way of planning for the future. We need to reconsider education and recognize it is a process of social engineering and figure out what kind of society we're trying to engineer here. [lengthy applause]