So - the results of the World Book Day survey have been published, and according to their poll, the 10 books without which our glorious nation is unable to exist are:
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë =8 Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell =8 His Dark Materials Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations Charles Dickens
Staggering, no? Well, once you've scraped your jaw off the floor, I can reveal that while no one quite managed to nail all 10 of the titles when we asked you to guess yesterday, fmk came impressively close, with eight - so we'll send the books to him (are you a him, fmk? I have a feeling you are) anyway. fmk, email me at sarah.crown@theguardian.com with your address and we'll get them out to you ...
Back to the results. What to say? I really do hate to be uncharitable about something as worthy - and worthwhile - as WBD, but I have to ask: is there any point - any at all - in asking people to vote in another "favourite books" poll, when the answers are the same Every Time? Are our tastes really so homogenised that not matter what the question or when we're asked it, we wheel out the same tired list of top titles? Or has the insidious drip-drip-drip of these polls so addled our brains that we now believe on some level that Jane Eyre/LotR/Potter et al are the "right" answers?
Because whenever I've had the favourite books conversation in real life, the variety of titles mentioned has been astonishing. Half the time I haven't read or even heard of the books that other people can't - in the words of the survey - live without.
And one last thought on that wording: as far as I'm concerned, the only book you "can't live without" is the one you're reading right now. In my case, that's Light Years by the phenomenal James Salter, just republished as a Penguin Classic. It's so wonderful that it may well find a place on my top 10 books list - after Pride and Prejudice, naturally.
