Results of PBS American's Most-Beloved Books

[lovecraft68]

I thought "Huckleberry Finn" would be on this list. But then, nobody made a movie of it in the past twenty or thirty years, so people don't know about it.

Haven't you heard? Huck Finn is racist! People couldn't vote for it or they'd be called racist. Freedom of expression PC style.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I only saw one horror novel (Swan song near the end) Unless Ghost is, not looking it up.

It is a skewed list to not have one Stephen King novel on there and you can't tell me the Exorcist doesn't rate.

I think "Stand" at #24 is meant to be King's "The Stand", though it probably wouldn't be my first choice to represent his work.

For horror, the list also includes Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Grey. Arguably also Rebecca, depending on where you draw the lines.

Potter over Lord of the Rings is a big surprise if for no other reason than how old LOTR is compared to the relatively new(in terms of this list) Potter series.

I'd guess that's exactly why it's rated higher - more recent in people's memories.

 

[txgent101]

"The Chronicles of Narnia" is a seven-book series, and "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" is the first and best-known book in that series. It seems odd to list both of them - did the source have any info about why that was done?

All 7 of the Narnia books are among my all time favorites. Read and re-read many times. Actually LWW is not my favorite: 'Silver Chair' and 'Magicians Nephew' are the ones I like best. Truth told, the one I like best is the last one I happened to read...

 

[NotWise]

"The Chronicles of Narnia" is a seven-book series, and "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" is the first and best-known book in that series. It seems odd to list both of them - did the source have any info about why that was done?

There's very little information in the source. I think there is actually a PBS series about the list, but I haven't seen it.

"Dune" is also on the list as a single book, yet it is a series. I count six "Dune" books on the shelf. Maybe it really was just the first book that got votes.

 

[KeithD]

There's very little information in the source. I think there is actually a PBS series about the list, but I haven't seen it.

"Dune" is also on the list as a single book, yet it is a series. I count six "Dune" books on the shelf. Maybe it really was just the first book that got votes.

PBS ran commercials (to the extent they do commercials) for some weeks on collecting on this and promoting the reading of select books.

 

[Bramblethorn]

There's very little information in the source. I think there is actually a PBS series about the list, but I haven't seen it.

There are two lists in this thread - the PBS one that started the discussion, and a British list that Polranny posted. The Narnia duplication that I was asking about is in the British one.

 

[Polranny]

The important thing is to keep encouraging everyone to read. One royalty payment can make a lot of difference to the author starving in a garret

 

[Athalia]

It's also worth noting how many of these books show up on lists of "assigned reading" in schools, thereby exposing children to works they would not otherwise have known about.

 

[MajorRewrite]

Lonesome Dove is an interesting one to me. It’s a modern book that was hugely popular and also made into a mini-series. But it also is consistently put on serious lists of the best American novels (this PBS list isn’t intended to be serious, it’s just promoting reading, which is fine).

It’s probably the only modern novel written by an American that was both super popular and considered by serious critics to be among the best of all time.

 

[jehoram]

Haven't you heard? Huck Finn is racist! People couldn't vote for it or they'd be called racist. Freedom of expression PC style.

I'm sure you're talking with tongue in cheek, referring to the commotion that some people put up about Twain using the N-word without having ever read the damn book.

Those who have read the book know that it is as anti-racist as a nineteenth- or twentieth-century book can be. It's about a boy who eventually repudiates the racism that he was born into, the racism crystallized into laws that he flouts.

The people who object to the book want to white-wash American history. They're no better, IMHO, than the authors of that history textbook that tells kids that the Southeastern native Americans "agreed to move" to the Indian Territory to allow white people to live in their old homeland.

 

[Oblimo]

Brit list

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

Meh.

8= His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

Woohoo!

 

[ElectricBlue]

Meh.

Woohoo!

Should be the other way around. His Dark Materials is far superior, I reckon.

 

[The_Trouvere]

Brit list

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

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8= Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

8= 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

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

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

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 Alborn

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

I am surprised that the Bible is on the British list, but not on the American list. The British are said to be less religious than Americans. The Bible is my favorite too. I am an American.

In second place I list White Nights, by Dostoevsky. The protagonist is just like me.

 

[Handley_Page]

It would be interesting to read a British reader equivalent.

How true

 

[Handley_Page]

error

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I'm skeptical of the methodology for this list. The Web site says 7200 people participated, which is a pretty small number considering the size of the population of the country AND the number of books on the list. I imagine the books at the end of the list were selected by relatively few people, casting into doubt the usefulness and accuracy of the list.

There's quite a few that have been brought out to the screen; makes me wonder if all the people that voted have really read them, or if part of their popularity is because people have seen them to register on this list?.

I have to agree. A list of 'best beloved' books which includes Twilight, 50 Shades and Captain Corelli's Mandolin (remember - books) is suspect. And there are truly ponderous works there - Ulysses, Moby Dick and The Pilgrim's Progress. Incredibly writing, true literature, but those got enough votes to count from people who had actually read them?

I liked the Brit list better.