So. It's all over Facebook again:
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.
Only the BBC doesn't "believe" any such thing. And the list itself doesn't have anything to do with the BBC, come to that.
The BBC does do lists of books, and the nearest one to the memetic "BBC booklist" can be found here, which is a list of "the nation's best-loved" novels. Being best-loved, you can imagine that "most people" may well have read rather a lot of them, rather than “only 6”. But it's not the list being touted as the BBC booklist anyway, so it really doesn’t matter.
The list of books actually comes from a poll for World Book Day in 2007, published in The Guardian newspaper, and can be found here. As the accompanying news story explains, this was made up of 2,000 readers’ lists of ten books they “could not live without”. Once again, no mention of “only 6” (or the BBC, although it also covered the story). And, once again, the nature of the poll makes it reasonable that “most people” may well have read quite a few of them.
Interestingly, the version of the list that appears across Facebook (and elsewhere on the social media landscape) appears to have been copy-typed at some point, introducing errors – for example: the list at The Guardian correctly uses a lower case “d” before the apostrophe in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and gives author Louis de Bernières the grave accent that is rightly his.
So how did it get everywhere, and why’s it doing so again? Like a lot of these things, it’s much easier to disprove what it claims to be than to prove what it actually is. It’s really unclear when the meme began. although it was clearly kicking around in early 2009. And I’ve no idea what gave it its new lease of life...
Of course, the real reason for its existence is to help people feel good that they’ve read more of these than “most people”. It probably wouldn’t have had the same legs if the inventor had written: The BBC believes most people will have read only 62 of the 100 books listed here.
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