TJ's Baseball Skills turned into Literary Heresy

I was talking to my friend T.J. today and he told me to check out the video of his baseball highlights that was posted to his facebook wall. As I laughed hysterically at the background music of Wind Beneath My Wings by Bette Midler, I noticed that he had taken a book challenge quiz called "BBC Book list challenge" and decided to take it. After I saw 2 JRR Tolkien titles, Life of Pi, and The Da Vinci Code on the list, I decided to boycott it.

I'm not saying that they aren't good books, but in a list of 100 books in the same vein as Ulysses and 100 Years of Solitude?! Please. Especially because there are much better books that may not be as popular but are much more deserving, such as anything by Tom Robbins, Cormac McCarthy, Virginia Woolfe, or Marcel Proust, to name a few. I would have said Mario Puzo except for the revelation forthcoming in the next paragraph.

So I looked into this list and found it has nothing to do with the BBC at all. In fact, the BBC took a poll based on nominations and came up with a list of 100 books based on the criteria of "Nation's best-loved novel" It is personally sad to me that Tolkien actually turned up to be number 1 on this list, but I understand most people don't generally like substance, just a good story. I can accept that. It was refreshing to know that the BBC never intended this list (it's not even the same list by the way, just 2/3 of the same books) to be the top 100 classic books of all time. (Mario Puzo's The Godfather is on the BBC list even though it is not on the Facebook version, hence why I did not include him in the aforementioned list)

I'd be irked at this facebook meme, but they did have one redeeming quality...they had the wherewithal to remove JK Rowling and all the Harry Potter books from the list before they posted it. I guess that's good enough for forgiveness in my book.