Is it 'Lent' or 'Loaned'?

Well, I'm glad to see that Rosmuc, An Aill bhuí, which I raved about here the other day, narrowly beat the equally fantastic Cliffs of Moher III in the Brother's competition.

He'd posted a set of five paintings to ask which one people thought should be put up for auction on EBay to raise money for Rape Crisis Network Ireland and St Patrick's Hospital and Marymount Hospice, the two charities supported by this year's Irish Blog Awards. It's his way of saying thanks for his paintings having been included in the event.

If you can’t join in the bidding, he says, you can still help by linking, blogging, tweeting, etc. If you can bid, though, it's surely well worth it. I mean, take a look.

Your wall'd look good around that, wouldn't it?

Having mentioned the Brother, his American Hell cartoon yesterday was a tad less bleak but rather more seasonal than usual, and it reminded me of Ardal O'Hanlon's spiel about Lent from a few years back:

One thing I found bizarre about the Catholic religion is the season of Lent, y’know, forty days, ends on Easter Sunday, and it corresponds to the time that Jesus spent fasting in the desert. You’re encouraged to make a little sacrifice during Lent, to show solidarity with Our Lord, who was cold and hungry and sandy, and all alone. And most major religions would have a period of sacrifice where they’d give up food completely and they’d nearly die of starvation, but not Catholics, ‘cause we know how to look after ourselves.

What do we give up?

Sweets.

Yeah, just ask somebody next year, ‘Ah, hello Brendan, what are you giving up for Lent?’
‘Eh, Crunchies. No more Crunchies for me for a whole month.’

Bloody hypocrite! If he really wanted to make a sacrifice he should give up something he really needs. Like oxygen, for example.

To be fair, we probably ought to be a bit tougher on ourselves than we tend to, but the Church has always recognised that people can go to extremes on this one. Indeed, if we look at the history of early Christianity, it may strike us as ascetic to a degree that may border on fanaticism, but if we compare it with the myriad other cults and heresies that sprang up at the time, what's staggering is that the Church stood against their pessimistic tide by insisting on the inherent goodness of creation, and in doing so it insisted that our sacrifices should have limits: we might deprive ourselves of the good things of this world, but we ought never to hold that the world itself was not good. To quote Chesterton, as is my wont:

The early Church was ascetic, but she proved that she was not pessimistic, simply by condemning the pessimists. The creed declared that man was sinful, but it did not declare that life was evil, and it proved it by damning those who did. The condemnation of the early heretics is itself condemned as something crabbed and narrow; but it was in truth the very proof that the Church meant to be brotherly and broad. It proved that the primitive Catholics were specially eager to explain that they did not think man utterly vile; that they did not think life incurably miserable; that they did not think marriage a sin or procreation a tragedy. They were ascetic because asceticism was the only possible purge of the sins of the world; but in the very thunder of their anathemas they affirmed for ever that their asceticism was not to be anti-human or anti-natural; that they did wish to purge the world and not destroy it.

[...]

That the early Church was itself full of an ecstatic enthusiasm for renunciation and virginity makes this distinction much more striking and not less so. It makes all the more important the place where the dogma drew the line. A man might crawl about on all fours like a beast because he was an ascetic. He might stand night and day on the top of a pillar and be adored for being an ascetic, but he could not say that the world was a mistake or the marriage state a sin without being a heretic.

Which isn't to say that we mightn't do a smidge more than refrain from Crunchies. Am I fasting, and if so from what? None of your beeswax, as they say.

Creative Ashing

Yesterday being Ash Wednesday, or the Day of Ashes to give it its proper name, I made a point of going to mass in the morning. I'd been talking about it with a friend the previous day, who was trying to remember whether it had been me -- it hadn't -- who'd said to her that people like going to mass on Ash Wednesday because they get free stuff.

'Free stuff?' I said, 'Like dirt?'
'Well, yeah.'
'Hmmm. We used to spoof Ash Wednesday in school by using the dust from the tables in the school canteen. It was our science teacher, who was supervising there one day, that started that craze... Do you reckon Ash Wednesday's dirt is better than Palm Sunday's leaves?'
'No,' she said. 'Palm Sunday's far better, because then you can make the leaves into the shape of a cross and keep them.'
'I've done that many times,' I said.
'So have I.'

So yes, I went to mass yesterday morning, like I said, and listened to the readings that tell you basically not to go round moping when you're fasting, as it's not about getting brownie points from your neighbours -- though would fasting really impress your neighbours nowadays anyway? Especially given the far from arduous system of fasting that we tend to go by now.

If anything, it'd surely just cause people to look at you a bit askance.

Anyway, during the mass, when it got to the time for the ashes to be imposed, I couldn't help but stare at all the people ahead of me coming back down the aisle. I'd never seen so much ashes. Not for this priest the discreet grey smudge of the archdiocese of Dublin. Oh no. This fellow clearly went in for the whole shebang, great big black strokes, darkening your whole brow. This was an ashing that was designed to last.

So I went up, and received my ashes, and carried on with what needed doing this morning and eventually came home and looked in the mirror, to see that the priest hadn't so much put the sign of the cross on my brow, but the Batsign! I looked like some odd Bruce Wayne cultist.

And indeed, I looked that way till I washed the ashes off at bedtime.

Rosmuc, by Eolaí

Not that I want to be posting more than once a day, but I ought to add that the Brother is currently seeking advice on which of five of his paintings, recently displayed and apparently 'pawed all night' at the Irish Blog Awards, he ought to auction off for charity.



My choice would be this beauty, Rosmuc, An Aill bhuí, which you need to look at in its original glorious colours.

Gorgeous, eh?

The others are great too, of course, especially the one of the Cliffs of Moher. Go and have a look, and toss in your two cents' worth.

The Truth Hurts

So, having mentioned PHD Comics yesterday, it seems only fitting that I should point you to Jorge Cham's latest gem:

Usually Jorge's spot on, but I'm afraid he's exceptionally -- even painfully -- so with this one. Converting an academic CV into a civilian one isn't for the fainthearted.

For what it's worth, I've got four versions of my CV in play at the minute -- academic, conventional, skills-based, and short -- and the short, 1-page, American-style one actually looks the most impressive. Unfortunately nowadays it appears that 'impressive' may not be enough.

So it goes, though. It's not exactly a great time for career changes, after all. Not surprising, you might think, given that it's not a great time for careers, but given that all the boys with degrees in finance, economics, accounting and whatnot have royally screwed things up, this might'nt be such a bad time to try something a bit more daring

Sometimes playing things safe can be the most dangerous thing you can do. Soldiers under fire tend to bunch together, for example, which is about the most natural and foolish thing to do under the circumstances. It's natural because it plays to our herd instinct -- we're literally programmed to feel more at ease in the company of our fellows, but foolish because forming a clump turns the lot of them into one big target.

Collective defence is far better than individual defence, but it needs to be coordinated. The herd instinct just gets you into more trouble.

Advice for life, that.

The Power of Procrastination

Last term I went to a fine talk by Jorge Cham called 'The Power of Procrastination' in which he pointed us to the glories of such arch procrastinators as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. One he left out, though, was Leonardo da Vinci.

It seems that

'Leonardo rarely completed any of the great projects that he sketched in his notebooks. His groundbreaking research in human anatomy resulted in no publications — at least not in his lifetime. Not only did Leonardo fail to realize his potential as an engineer and a scientist, but he also spent his career hounded by creditors to whom he owed paintings and sculptures for which he had accepted payment but — for some reason — could not deliver, even when his deadline was extended by years. His surviving paintings amount to no more than 20, and five or six, including the "Mona Lisa," were still in his possession when he died. Apparently, he was still tinkering with them.

Nowadays, Leonardo might have been hired by a top research university, but it seems likely that he would have been denied tenure. He had lots of notes but relatively little to put in his portfolio.

Leonardo was the kind of person we have come to call a "genius." But he had trouble focusing for long periods on a single project. After he solved its conceptual problems, Leonardo lost interest until someone forced his hand. Even then, Leonardo often became a perfectionist about details that no one else could see, and the job just didn't get done.'

I had no idea of this, though it rather tallies with the notebooks that were on display at the Chester Beatty Library a year or so ago: page after page of densely detailed notes on hydrostatics with the occasional comment that he needed to be more organised, to manage his time better, to sort his life out.

The article's well worth reading, and makes a serious if counterintuitive case, though its definition of 'genius' is - at best - contentious.

Origins of the Crusades

I got a bit carried away the other day when sending a couple of links to a friend of mine. She's been studying Arabic, and I thought she'd be interested in some books that have recently come out exploring the contribution of the Muslim world to science in the medieval period. I felt, though, that while the books I'd alerted her to certainly looked interesting, they nonetheless went too far.

Islamic thought and learning transformed medieval Christendom beyond recognition, Lyons writes. A key import was natural philosophy, the precursor to modern science, and the idea that came with it: the notion of a university as an intellectual, cultural and social institution. Roger Bacon, the 13th-century English scientist and philosopher, travelled through Muslim Spain dressed as an Arab and was among the first to teach natural philosophy in Paris. Without these imports, Lyons says, the Renaissance would not have been possible and European “progress” as we know it would have been inconceivable. The Arabs gave Europeans their ideological and intellectual identity - indeed, Lyons suggests, “the West” itself is a Muslim invention.

But the West's gratitude to Islam was expressed in its wilful forgetting of the Arab legacy. This process began with the successors of Adelard and Scot and had four core themes: Islam distorts the word of God; it is spread solely by the sword; it perverts human sexuality; and its prophet, Muhammad, was a charlatan, an anti-Christ. It was thus necessary to write the Arab learning out of history and to claim direct descent from Greece. As Petrarch, one of the most prominent 14th-century anti-Arab intellectuals, declared: “I shall scarcely be persuaded that anything good can come from Arabia.”

So summarises the Times reviewer, but the Wall Street Journal one is far more alert to the shortcomings of The House of Wisdom:

Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant, though marred at times by tendentiousness. Medieval Muslims, as he says, did find Europeans uncouth as well as brutal. (Though Mr. Lyons doesn't mention it, medieval Muslims were shocked to realize that "the Franks" were ignorant even of such refinements as underarm deodorants.) Mr. Lyons is right to remind us of the spectacular savagery of the Crusaders who waded knee-deep in blood through the Holy Sepulchre and of the embarrassing inability of Europeans to tell time once the sun had set.

But he hammers the point too insistently, as if to elevate Islam by diminishing European civilization to crude farce, and at the very time when it, too, was beginning to launch its own projects of philosophical speculation and scientific inquiry.

Me being me, though, I found it difficult to just send the links and leave it at that. I felt a need to add what struck me as an important caveat, as it strikes me that the books appear to fall into the trap of portraying the medieval Muslims as sophisticated and peace-loving, and the Europeans as mere barbarians, with their barbarism culminating in the savagery of the Crusades. This approach is really just an example of propaganda - much of it anti-Catholic, in fact - which has settled into the popular mind since the Eighteenth Century.

It tends to depend on three things: an ignorance of modern scholarship of medieval Europe which has reached a point where the term 'Dark Ages' is almost taboo, now that we recognise the steady spread of learning and the sequence of renaissances following the fall of Rome; a willful blindness towards the halfway house that was the Byzantine Empire, which certainly doesn't fit the 'crude European' stereotype; and a docile accession to the myth that the Crusades were an act of unprovoked Christian aggression.

Contrary to what pretty much everyone believes, they were nothing of the sort. They were, put simply, a belated response to more than four centuries of Muslim aggression against the Christian lands.

In the century following Mohammed's death the Muslims had overran the Christian lands of Palestine and Syria, Cyprus and Rhodes, all of North Africa and most of Spain, their relentless expansion only being halted by the French under Charles Martel at Poitiers in 732. Even when I'd studied the Crusades as an undergraduate I used to think that things settled down after that. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Avignon soon fell, and Lyons was sacked a few years later. Saracen raids on Southern Europe from 800 on were a match for Viking ones in the North and Magyars in the East - that was a rough century to be European! Crete fell in 826, a 10,000-strong Saracen army took Rome in 846, sacking St Peter's, St Paul's, and the Lateran Basilica, and in 859 Sicily was lost to the Saracens, not to be regained for two hundred years. A permanent base was set up at a fortress between Rome and Naples enabling forty years of raids throughout the area, and a similar raiding centre was established towards the end of the ninth century near Toulon, enabling raids through Province and Liguria, and threatening the Alpine passes. Genoa fell in 935, and Sardinia was briefly taken in 1015, just a few years after the Church of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem had been destroyed, with the tomb of Our Lord being desecrated.

By 1050, when things were looking far more hopeful for Christendom, with the Magyars and Vikings having been converted, with the Normans campaigning in Sicily, and the Spanish Reconquista well underway, things started getting much more ominous off in the east.

The Seljuk Turks had been converted to Islam and had given Islam an intense new dynamism. Christian Armenia and Georgia fell to them in 1064 and in 1068 the Byzantine Empire was invaded, being decisively defeated at Manzikert in 1071, paving the way for the collapse of Empire in the east and the Turkish settlement of what is now Turkey; within a decade most of Anatolia was in Turkish hands. It was this resurgence of Muslim aggression, raising the spectre of a repeat of the century after Mohammed's death, that basically caused the Crusades. The tipping point may have come with the Seljuk capture of Jerusalem in 1076.

The Pope's first appeal for western knights to help their Byzantine brethren went unheeded, but in 1095, by which point the Muslims were threatening Constantinople itself, having taken Nicea, site of the Church's first ecumenical council, the Byzantine Emperor beseeched the west for help, stressing the dangers the Seljuks posed to Christendom as a whole. This time the Pope's call at Clermont had a far greater effect, and the First Crusade was launched with the key aims of helping the Byzantines, securing the pilgrimage routes to the Holy Land, and retaking Jerusalem itself.

In short, then, the Crusades weren't an example of unprovoked barbaric Christian aggression against Islam - they were, in effect, a counterattack, the first centrally coordinated retaliation after more than four centuries of Muslim aggression against the Christian world and a response to what was perceived as the greatest Islamic threat in more than three hundred years.

There's no denying that they tapped too into a desire to end the constant petty wars that were the small change of medieval European life by sending the troublemakers abroad, and also fed off the aggression and triumphalism that went with the Spanish spirit of Reconquista, or indeed that they they weren't another example of the Norman expansionism that had led to their conquests in southern Italy, Sicily, and England, but in the main this analysis is pretty solid. These elements gave fuel to the fire, but that fire was lit in the first place for reasons that were wholly defensive and utterly defensible.

Of course, it all went wrong, I concluded. The Latins expected help from the Byzantines in recapturing their lands and reclaiming the Holy Land, but Byzantine shenanigans and doubledealing eventually led the Latins to go on effectively alone without help. Cue infighting, petty fiefdoms, bloodbaths in Jerusalem, Crusader kingdoms in the Levant, and several more increasingly ineffective Crusades, none of which - it has to be said - did Christianity much credit.

Yes, I got a bit carried away in that e-mail, I'm afraid. We all have our hobbyhorses, though.

On Reading Behind the Panels

I was chatting to Nigella the other day, and conversation got round to the the brilliant webcomic that is XKCD. We darted online, and I skipped to it, and we began to browse through it, and then, all of a sudden, I discovered that there are bonus punchlines, easter eggs, hidden footnotes that only appear when you do a mouseover on the strip itself.

Take the strip I've posted here, for example. Good, eh? Certainly Nigella is enthralled by it, and is sorely tempted to try it. And why wouldn't she? After all, if you go to the original strip on the site itself, and do a mouseover, you'll see a little box that adds that 'You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.'

My jaw dropped on discovering this, and we rushed through them, laughing at the punchline and then splitting our sides at the bonus ones. How had I not known this?

I e-mailed NMRBoy about when I left. 'XKCD,' I said, 'did you know that when you do mouseovers on the final panels there are odd messages there? I know, that sounds crazy. True, though.'

'They do that in all the best comics,' he replied, 'including mine. but also Dinosaur Comics too. Check it out!'

And I did.

The Intrepid Prawo Jazdy

I have very little patience with people who tell Irish jokes. Or Polish jokes, I suppose. I dunno, I reckon it's just that I grew out of Kerry jokes when I was, oh, ten or so. Maybe eleven. At a push. It may be why the Abderite jokes in To Philogelos rarely do it for me. Try substituting 'stupid person' in for the ethnic identity in the joke. If it's still funny, the joke works. If it doesn't work, but you'd laugh at it with the ethnic element intact, then you're a racist and a cretin. Sorry, but true.

Dara O'Briain has a fine routine in his Live at the Theatre Royal show were he talks about how Irish jokes aren't really done in Britain nowadays, except among a couple of moronic exceptions:

... but then, I'm Irish, and of all the people who've benefited from a good dose of political correctness on this island, it's been the Irish. 'Member the good old days with the jokes about how stupid we were? And then a memo went around some time in the eighties, where you all went 'Oh Jesus, we're not doing jokes about the Irish anymore,' and you went 'Oh, okay, fine,' and you just stopped, and thank you very much. A bit overdue, but thanks very much nonetheless.

'Cause we didn't really enjoy that kind of stuff, and it's good that we don't get that kind of reputation. Just so you know, there are still plenty of stupid people dotted around Ireland, but you're not allowed talk about them.

There was a fire engine called out last year, because there was a cat stuck up a tree in Limerick. The lads drove out, took the cat down, gave it back to the old woman. She said 'lads, will yeh have a glass of whiskey?' This is a completely true story. The lads said 'We will of course have a glass of whiskey. The other crew are on at the moment, it's fine.' So they had the glass of whiskey, they had another glass of whiskey, the whole town came out, had a bit of craic with the fire engine, life was good. Eventually they said 'Listen, we'd better go back now'. They waved goodbye to the village, they waved goodbye to the old woman, they got back into the fire engine, drove off, ran over the fuckin' cat.

Completely true story, and you're not allowed tell it.

And of course, the news this last week has given us a tale to rival it. Yes, it's the story of Prawo Jazdy, which the Irish Times reported as follows:

HE WAS one of Ireland’s most reckless drivers, a serial offender who crossed the country wantonly piling up dozens of speeding fines and parking tickets while somehow managing to elude the law.

So effective was his modus operandi of giving a different address each time he was caught that by June 2007 there were more than 50 separate entries under his name, Prawo Jazdy, in the Garda Pulse system. And still not a single conviction.

In the end, the vital clue to his identity lay not with Interpol or the fingerprint database but in the pages of a Polish-English dictionary. Prawo jazdy means driving licence.

In a letter dated June 17th, 2007, an officer from the Garda traffic division wrote that it had come to his attention that members inspecting Polish driving licences were noting Prawo Jazdy as the licence holder’s name.

“Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence,” he wrote.

“Having noticed this I decided to check on Pulse and see how many members have made this mistake. It is quiet [sic] embarrassing to see that the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities.

It's worth reading the whole tale, as it's quite amusing. Sadly, though, some BBC buffoon who didn't get the memo felt a need to glitz up the story a bit:

Details of how police in the Irish Republic finally caught up with the country's most reckless driver have emerged, the Irish Times reports.

He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines.

However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address.

But then his cover was blown.

There are some subtle distortions here that change the tone off the story to turn it into an Oirish joke. For the BBC it's a case of the Guards being eejits who were actively conducting a futile manhunt across the land, and being bamboozled by a wily Polish scam, whereas in fact the issue was fiftly unrelated errors and no attempt to join the dots. You can blame laziness for this, or sloppiness, but not institutional idiocy. It's a subtle point, I know, but an important one.

Sorry, this makes me sound a tad touchy, doesn't it? I'm not really, it's just, well, this is a completely true story, and you're not allowed to tell it. Well, you can, but tell it like it is. It's funny enough with racist implications.

And where's this 'Irish Republic' being spoken of anyway? Cork? It's very simple: under the Constitution the name of the country is 'Ireland,' and under the Republic of Ireland Act the description of the state is the 'Republic of Ireland'.

I'm fairly sure the BBC have a style guide that explains this. Calling it the 'Irish Republic 'is like calling the UK 'the British and Irish Monarchy'.

Satan fell by the Force of Gravity

I couldn't help but sigh the other day when I read on the BBC that a recent Vatican report has found that men and women apparently tend to sin in different ways. It was with a wry grin that I remembered an Anglican friend of mine -- now a clergyman, as it happens -- remarking back in March that when it comes to religion the mainstream media is utterly clueless.

If you remember last year's nonsense about Rome having drawn up a replacement list of seven modern deadly sins, something which never happened, you'll be suitably troubled by it being repeated a year later:

Traditionally, the seven deadly sins were considered: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth.

The Apostolic Penitentiary, one of the Vatican's most secretive departments, which fixes the punishments and indulgences handed down to sinners, last year updated its list of deadly sins to include more modern ones.

The revised list included seven modern sins it said were becoming prevalent during an era of "unstoppable globalisation".

These included: genetic modification, experiments on the person, environmental pollution, taking or selling illegal drugs, social injustice, causing poverty and financial greed.

Frankly, you should be suspicious of any article featuring lines such as 'one of the Vatican's most secretive departments, which fixes the punishments and indulgences handed down to sinners'. Has more than a whiff of Jesuits under the Bed about it, doesn't it?

This looks like a complete non-story, and certainly nothing even close to the lurid fantasy conjured up by the Times, which merrily repeats last year's gibberish, as do pretty much all the other reports I've seen on this; they all appear to be feeding off each other, with none of them bothering to check the source of the tale. For the Times this story is mainly an excuse to roll out some medieval stereotypes:

Sex discrimination is destined to continue in the scorching fires of Hell, according to a study approved by the Vatican which suggests that men are most likely to commit lustful sins whereas women are beholden to pride.

The men, it seems, are the ones whose souls end up being pelted with fire and brimstone, while the women's souls are more likely to be broken on a wheel.

What's actually happened here? Well, it seems -- and I'm working from incomplete reportage, so bear with me -- there's a new book out about St Thomas Aquinas' teaching on the seven capital vices, which is a rather better name for pride, anger, gluttony, lust and the rest than 'the seven deadly sins'. Father Wojciech Giertych, theologian to the papal household, has commented on this book in the Vatican's newspaper, and noted that personal experience seemed to confirm Aquinas' beliefs that men and women tend to sin differently, with men giving way most frequently to lust and gluttony, while women tended more towards pride and envy.

I'm not sure how the reported survey conducted by the 95-year-old Jesuit Roberto Busa factors into all this. Supposedly it is the result of a survey of confessional data conducted by Father Busa that has allowed the Vatican to rank the sins in this way. It doesn't sound likely, though, does it? A survey of confessional data? Confessional data? I'm not sure, but given the nature of the Confessional Seal, can there be such information? Are we to assume that Father Busa wrote to a load of priests, asking them to generalise on their experience of hearing confessions over the years? That doesn't sound very systematic, does it, especially for a scholar reportedly known for his computerised study of the works of St Thomas Aquinas...

Or is that the clue? Is it simply that Father Busa wrote a book on Aquinas' teaching on the seven capital vices, drawing on all manner of linguistic evidence, that being his speciality, and perhaps drawing on some sort of survey, and that Father Giertych commented on it in L'Osservatore Romano, saying that Aquinas' beliefs and Busa's findings tallied with his own experience?

I'm not saying that's what's happened, but it does sound rather more likely than the reports, doesn't it?

Honestly, if sports journalism was this lazy and sloppy -- let alone politics or business reporting -- then heads would roll. It's one of the reasons why I think John Allen is wrong to think that Rome needs to work on its PR -- no matter what it says or does, it's going to be misrepresented by the media.

Six from a Hundred?

It's Sister the Younger's birthday today, so breithlá shona di and all that.

In other news, I've been intrigued lately by all the Facebook memes that people are actually running with -- they've always been there, but over the past few weeks people seem far more likely to actually try them theirselves. Probably the one that has most intrigued me has been one with a list of books supposedly drawn up by the BBC, of which most people have read only six. Jen was the first person I saw who'd done it, having drawn it from Amanda, and since then I've seen a few more, most of which put me to shame, as though I reckon I've read 51 of the books, I'm seeing people passing sixty and seventy out there.

As a man said to me recently, I need to read more. Still, the ones I've read are in bold. The eleven in italics are ones that sit on my shelf, waiting for me to get my life sorted out and get stuck into them.

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
9 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 Albom
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

But here's the thing. I was highly suspicious of the note when I first saw it, thinking the six-book figure was improbably low, that Bill Bryson's description of his travels round Britain sat very oddly among the novels, and that there was some curious duplication here, with Hamlet appearing as well as Shakespeare's Complete Works, and with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe sitting just a few places away from The Chronicles of Narnia in their entirety.

To be fair, I hadn't been alone in my scepticism. Jen had herself observed that

' ... the BBC is retarded if they think most people will have read only 6 books on this list. Come on. A lot of these you read in school.

I'm ashamed I've only read 34, but it's a VERY random list. Why Dan Brown's atrocity of a novel is on this list, I have NO idea. I looked at his sources, at an example of the quality of his writing and gagged.'

Where had this list come from? I seemed to have no logic behind it at all. And then just an hour or so ago, Px posted a list that was almost identical but seemed marginally more coherent. Romeo and Juliet had replaced Shakespeare's Complete Works, and Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter had taken the place of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, thus wiping out the duplication issue. But even allowing for these corrections, the list clearly struck her as peculiar:

Apparently (and I got this off someone else's page, so it MUST be true) this list was produced by the BBC and, worryingly, they reckon the average person has read about 6 on the list. Incidentally, I can think of several books that should be on there - the Guardian's recent list, which featured "The L-Shaped Room", "The Trial", "Mrs Dalloway" and "Ballet Shoes" was far more instructive :-)

So I frowned again, and had a quick rummage online, and it seems, according to this fellow who did all the legwork, that the list was drawn up as a result of an online poll for 2007's World Book Day, with The Guardian running the story and publishing the list on 1 March 2007.

2,000 people were apparently asked which ten books they couldn't live without. I guess this explains the oddness of a travel book, a play, a library of religious writings, and the complete plays and poems of Shakespeare in a list otherwise made up of 96 works of fiction, and perhaps the number of children's books on the list too. Certain childhood books always remain precious to us; of the small number of books that I take with me whenever I've moved, pride of place is given to the battered King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table I grew up with.

The claim that most people have read only six of these, is, however, something that appears to have been plucked from thin air. That's the only kind of air suitable for plucking things from, you know.