I accidentally strayed onto Facebook a couple of days ago, mainly because I was clearing down some of the applications that seem to create repeats of my messages. I think I deleted around forty so-called applications that had somehow installed in my Facebook.
How careless of me.
Anyway, I also stumbled onto this little quiz from the BBC about books. Apparently the average person has read six of these. I must spend too much time on airplanes and trains or something.
If you want to have a go, copy this source into your own browser/editor. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (2)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Total: 7
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
Total: 3
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens x
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
Total: 6
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres x
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
Total: 4
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins x
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy x
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan x
Total: 6
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth x
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez x
Total: 8
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov x
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt x
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac x
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy x
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie x
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Total: 7
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson x
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (started it)
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome x
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray x
Total: 5
80 Possession - AS Byatt x
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro x
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
Total: 2
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks x
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Total: 3
Grand total: 51
Of course, I've read them over quite a long period of time, but I do occasionally dip into some of them again.
Ever technologically enabled, one approach is through the little book reader on my iPhone. Its called Stanza and has 45 titles stored in it at the moment. Most of them are 'public domain' in the sense that they are classics long out of copyright - which is like many on the BBC's list.
But the heavy artillery is the little eReader I used when I was travelling around in the USA earlier this year. I think it currently has another 160 books on it, including some modern ones that I've actually paid for. Whereas the iPhone is all glossy full colour the eReader is steadfastly black and white and uses the electronic ink technique of refreshing a page and then switching off, which means the batteries last for ages because when its simply displaying a page, it doesn't consume any power.
Now I can almost hear the sighing of others at the thought of electronic books; "doesn't have the sensation of paper/end of the world etc." but my own experience is somewhat different. If I want read a book for the first time, then the real item is still a good place to start. I've just read Pynchon's "Inherent Vice" and despite its hardback bulk, it was a good way to enjoy it.
But what's fun with the electronic readers is the ability to dip into a book. Like those piles of books by the bedside, its quite easy to select a few and just browse/refresh. To skim read something again because its available. Don't ask me why, but Machiavelli's Prince and Carroll's Alice in Wonderland were a couple of my recent choices. Not to mention another 5-6 pages of Ulysses on the iPhone.
Of course, I'm mainly beta testing the future doing this, to see what will happen when the high serial number devices start appearing.
I think it provides a different way to access books, like Wifi radio provides a different experience (almost any radio station in the world) and VOD, iPlayer and iTunes change television viewing and music listening with time-shift and infinite libraries.
Naturally, I intend to keep buying real books as well as encouraging others to do so (especially a certain one that is moving inexorably towards proper publication), so I'll see these other mechanisms as additions. It will be interesting to see how it all develops compared with television and music.
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