Over the last couple of weekends The Times newspaper (which I buy on Saturdays only) has run articles on the “100 Greatest Films/Books of the Decade” (the decade in question being 2000-2009). I thought it would be interesting to see which of these films/books I have watched/read – perhaps this is a measure of how “current” or media-savvy I am. So, here goes my list from the 100 Greatest Books:
10: The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
17: Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling)
18: Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
22: The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman)
25: The Curioius Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon)
44: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)
48: A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)
54: Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Lynne Truss)
60: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (Jared Diamond)
75: The Damned United (David Peace)
91: My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes (Gary Imlach)
So that’s 11 of the top hundred – a better return than I managed for the top 100 films (see previous blog post).
There are a couple of others in the list that I’m definitely going to read at some point including:
06: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell)
57: Fleshmarket Close (Ian Rankin)
and a few titles that sound like my kind of book so there’s a little scope for my total to go up.
It’s rather alarming to note that my “top book” in this list is Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” but I should also point out that this was also listed as the No. 1 “worst book of the decade” in the same report. Fortunately, I have definitely not read, and never ever will read, the No. 3 “worst book” – “Being Jordan” by Katie Price.
Tim O'Hare 