Finally, a USEFUL book meme!

In the US, there's a silly "20 poetry books" meme going round like a late-winter flu; everyone's catching it - 20 books that made you fall in love with poetry... 20 books by women that made you fall in love with poetry by women... 20 books that made you want to hate poetry. Yikes. At least in the UK there's a more useful meme, namely one relating to books people lie about having read! The top ten:

1. 1984 - George Orwell (42%)

2. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (31%)

3. Ulysses - James Joyce (25%)

4. The Bible (24%)

5. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (16%)

6. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking (15%)

7. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (14%)

8. In Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust (9%)

9. Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama (6%)

10. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (6%)

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The good and evil, the beautiful and ugly, have been assumed under the rubric of the interesting. Non sequitur rendered lyric by a retrospective act of will. Tongue worries tooth. Repetition worries referent. Non sequitur rendered will by a retrospective act of lyric.

-- Ben Lerner