100 Books, 100 More Books, All the Words Ever

[onceupon]

There's a list of 100 book titles going around on Facebook. Apparently the BBC put this list together; the supposition is that the average person has only read 6 of the books on the list

Comments

[elusis]

More later, but... I've been trying to find an authoritative source to debunk that "the BBC thinks you've read 6 of these books" thing and am only getting ahold of edges. The BBC did do a poll to create a list of audience members' 100 favorite books, which overlaps some with this one, but has distinct differences like listing several of the Harry Potter books separately. (And the list going around FB has some baffling inconsistencies like making "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" two separate entries when the former encompasses the latter... and also is not "a book.")

This blogger said it's from the Guardian, and was created by asking people for "10 books you couldn't live without" thereby assuming people have read 10 books.

I don't know why this is so annoying to me, except that memesheepery has been a low-level irritant for a long time, and Facebook seems to be the ideal petri dish for it as half the people there don't even know the difference between a Google result and the Facebook login page. I guess the quasi-outrage of the pass-alongs got on my tits, as well as the total lack of evidence for the BBC claim.

Ah, another investigation.

[onceupon]

I think lists like that exist as a way for nerds to feel superior. I really do. Mostly, I think it's interesting to see what other people have read. It does make me feel like a word shark. *laugh* I actually haven't seen any outrage from people on this one - just a couple of people tagging me with their own, uncommented-upon lists.