The Big Read, the big insult

Come on, it's not such a hard one to answer. Hogwarts or Hobbits? Which do you prefer? That is the question. It might as well be settled now by the toss of a coin.

As soon as The Big Read was announced, back in February in the wake of Great Britons, it seemed obvious that JRR Tolkien and JK Rowling were the only possible winners.

The short-list announcement on Saturday dramatically confirmed that fact. It was disclosed that the rules had been arbitrarily changed to ensure that each author could only be represented by one novel - quite simply, to stop Rowling getting four titles on to the short list and Tolkien two, so making The Big Read even more of a howling embarrassment to any real lover of literature than it is as we now know it.

The Big Read Top 21 on BBC2 on Saturday night was an hour-and-a-alf of unrelieved torture. The overall compère for the duration is the bumptious lawyer Clive Anderson - a presenter who is somehow ubiquitous without ever actually being liked by anybody. In the studio on Saturday, he was joined by the novelist, and columnist for this paper, Tim Lott; the pushy fertility-consultant-turned-TV-face Robert Winston; the comedians Linda Smith and Armando Iannucci; the reigning scriptwriter Andrew Davies; and Daisy Goodwin, the TV producer who edits popular poetry anthologies.

So this was not a gathering of snooty elitists, by any means. Yet, as the full horror of the short list emerged, a remarkable amount of dissent grew in the studio. Andrew Davies said of Sebastian Faulks: "He writes like he'd never ever shagged in his life, just read about it in books." Linda Smith found the racism implicit in Gone With the Wind uncomfortable, The Lord of the Rings plain rubbish, and the Christian indoctrination in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe disgusting. For his part, Tim Lott reckoned The Wind in the Willows painfully smug and middle class, "a Penge novel".

Daisy Goodwin argued that many of the books - not just the six children's titles - are not suitable for adults. You should read Jane Eyre before you are 13, she said. Little Women? "Again, you don't want to read that book once over the age of 14." Nineteen Eighty-Four? "You should read this book by the time you are 15." To Kill a Mockingbird? "I bet all the people who voted for it read it like I did, before 15." Davies again put the boot into Wuthering Heights, calling it "wilfully clumsy, a deeply, deeply silly book, and really it shouldn't be read by anybody over 13".

The Big Read Top 21 contains several titles that unequivocally deserve to be there, if there must be a Big Read Top 21. Nobody would quarrel with Pride and Prejudice or Great Expectations or War and Peace (although the latter is no match for the discarded Anna Karenina). But many of the 21 are sad choices. Sebastian Faulks and Louis de Bernières are there, but Gustave Flaubert and George Eliot are not.

A supporter of The Big Read might yet maintain that we have here at last a genuine sounding of popular taste. These are the books the reading public genuinely loves, rather than those that the elitists would prefer for them. But it's not true. This list is a travesty for several reasons.

Some are excusable enough. It's obvious that people are really voting here for films and TV adaptations rather than books. Why else are Rebecca and Gone With the Wind contenders? Why other than memories of Colin Firth did Pride and Prejudice take precedence over Emma or Persuasion? More people now "know" novels through adaptations rather than actual reading, so this tendency in the voting should not come as any surprise to us, especially as the constituency of The Big Read is television-oriented by definition.

More deeply disheartening is the adolescent tone of the list as a whole. It's not just that there are so many children's classics there. As Anderson's unruly panel complained, most of the "adult" novels are also books best read in our teenage years, not later. What we have here is just a list of the books people can remember reading way back when and have scarcely supplemented since.