I can’t tell if this is current or old or very old. The BBC started compiling their information in 2003 which appears to be when the Big Read programs aired. Regardless, at some point in the last six years they published the results. And  I see it’s currently memeing (is that a word?) its way around Facebook, etc. Regardless, as a big, fat, stinking book nerd, I love, love, love, to look at these lists.  It is, of course, English language centric. It is, as all book lists are, very, very weird.  Whatever. The Facebook thingy claims something most people only being able to find six books on the list they’ve actually read, then asks you to rank yourself. I couldn’t find that at the BBC, but it sounds good to me. And since I read it on Facebook, it must be true. Anywho… Here’s the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/. Here’s the list of 100:

1.  The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2.  Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3.  His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4.  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5.  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6.  To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7.  Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8.  Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9.  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10.  Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
11.  Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12.  Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
13.  Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14.  Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15.  The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16.  The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17.  Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18.  Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19.  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20.  War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21.  Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22.  Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23.  Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24.  Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25.  The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26.  Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27.  Middlemarch, George Eliot
28.  A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29.  The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30.  Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31.  The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32.  One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
33.  The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34.  David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35.  Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36.  Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37.  A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38.  Persuasion, Jane Austen
39.  Dune, Frank Herbert
40.  Emma, Jane Austen
41.  Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42.  Watership Down, Richard Adams
43.  The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44.  The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45.  Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46.  Animal Farm, George Orwell
47.  A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48.  Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49.  Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50.  The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

51.  The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52.  Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53.  The Stand, Stephen King
54.  Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55.  A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56.  The BFG, Roald Dahl
57.  Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58.  Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59.  Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60.  Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61.  Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62.  Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63.  A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64.  The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65.  Mort, Terry Pratchett
66.  The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67.  The Magus, John Fowles
68.  Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69.  Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70.  Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71.  Perfume, Patrick Saskind
72.  The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73.  Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74.  Matilda, Roald Dahl
75.  Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76.  The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77.  The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78.  Ulysses, James Joyce
79.  Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80.  Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81.  The Twits, Roald Dahl
82.  I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83.  Holes, Louis Sachar
84.  Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85.  The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86.  Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87.  Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88.  Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89.  Magician, Raymond E Feist
90.  On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91.  The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92.  The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93.  The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94.  The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95.  Katherine, Anya Seton
96.  Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97.  Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
98.  Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99.  The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100.  Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

Post PANK 3 hitting the shelves, post AWP, and pre grant deadlines, your friendly neighborhood PANKsters (all five of us) are running around like proverbial chickens, sans heads, knocking things over, blood everywhere, and generally making an unnecessary mess. Which is to say, expect all things PANKish to take even longer than usual.

We are especially contrite for having sat on all these wonderful submissions for so long. Thanks for your patience, submitters.

And it’s taken awhile to get all the contributors copies and subscriptions out. Thanks, too, to you, for your patience, and your contributions, and your money, all you PANK possessors out there.

And there’s all the wonderful online content for February that we have yet to plug, but will, with all our hearts and minds and hands, we promise to all you wonderful, beautiful, sexy, smart February contributors.  Gessy Alvarez,  Michelle Askin,  Lisa Bellamy,  Robert Davis,  Thad DeVassie,  Deborah Flanagan,  Tania Hershman,  Brad Johnson,  Clark Knowles, and  Stephen Mills. There you are!  Thank you, PANK page taker-uppers.

But… But… But… Though we fuddle and fuss, good things are in store for PANK this year. Change. The outgrowing of pants. The getting too big for our britches. Our wrists getting cold. Our shoes hurting.

Stay tuned.

1. Pank needs to keep an eye on cost.

2. Pank needs coin.

3. Pank needs to refresh.

4. Pank needs to settle.

5. Pank needs a spanky.

6. Pank needs a piggy.

7. Pank needs a million dollars.

8. Pank needs to put a smiley with some tears on it.

9.  Pank needs to iron out some details.

10. Pank needs to learn how to manage.

Yikes. By noon today it was time to barf. Or kill. Does the P stand for pretentious? What’s with all the writerly posturing minus the actual writing? Why the fixation on genre minus concern for actually producing anything worth reading (who cares if it’s called memoir if it stinks)? Why all the 5.5×8.5 journals with the same cover, the same format, the same content, the same…zzzzzzzzzz…

I’m sorry, I must have dozed off there. Enough with the negativity.

Three cheers for Hobart, bateau, Quick Fiction, Fence, DIAGRAM, et all, and for all the really exciting newness out there.  

Three cheers for all the discerning in-the-knows who walked off with PANK 3 and/or turned out to the PANK Reading last night at Quimby’s.

Three cheers for all of our wonderful, talented, beautiful contributors who keep us reading and keep us excited in spite of our fury over all the slurry.  

Hip hip…

Hip hip…

Hip hip…

OK then, time to get home and back to work.

Hipster zoo at the book fair, NOT awesome. Tongue tacos on Ashland, awesome. Selling lots of copies, totally awesome. The reading at Quimby’s rocking our socks, wicked awesome. Not awesome, 1. Various awesomeness, 3. Awesomeness wins. Thanks Dan, Jennifer, Sheila, Rachel, and James! Thanks Quimby’s!

 

Date & time:  Friday,  February 13, 2009, 7pm
Location: Quimby’s Bookstore, 1854 W. North Ave, in Wicker Park, Chicago.
Cost: Free.

Jennifer Pieroni, James Grinwis, Sheila Squillante, Daniel Nester, and Rachel Yoder read their work from the pages of PANK.

BIOS:

Jennifer Pieroni is editor in chief of the literary journal Quick Fiction. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the literary journals Hobart, elimae, Word Riot, Wigleaf, Another Chicago Magazine, bateau, Frigg, and No Colony. An essay of hers will appear in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Rachel Yoder is a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Arizona. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The  Sun Magazine, Cimarron Review and elsewhere.

James Grinwis edits bateau, a new journal and chapbook press. He lives in Florence, MA.

Sheila Squilllante is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in Phoebe, Prairie Schooner, Clackamas Literary Review, Southeast Review, Quarterly West, Glamour, Brevity, TYPO, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Literary Mama and elsewhere. Her essay, “Student/Body,” is part of the new collection, Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and the Academy. She is the associate director of the MFA program at Penn State, and a senior lecturer in the English department.

Daniel Nester is a journalist, essayist, poet and editor. His first two books, God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II (2004) are both collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His third book, The History of My World  Tonight (BlazeVOX, 2006), is a collection of poems. His next book, How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull Press), a collection of humorous nonfiction, will be published in 2009. He is an assistant professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

Friday night, 7pm, at Quimby’s in Wicker Park. More details acomin’. Stay tuned.

Happy New Year! PANK 3, the print anthology, is in production, due out in a couple of weeks. New work from  Rosanne Griffeths,  Michelle Tandoc-Picherau,  R.A. Allen,  Brooklyn Copeland,  Matthew Thorburn,  Erik Wennemark,  Stephanie King,  David Brennan,  Margaret Bashaar,  Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz,  Daphne Gottlieb,  Bernard Bomba,  Les Kay,  Michael Wilmore,  Kevin OberlinIan Grody,  Roderick McClain,  Priscilla Atkins,  Brenna Maloney,  Katherine Chariott,  Kristine Ong Muslim,  Rachel Yoder,  Thomas Cook,  Valerie Z. Lewis,  Kris Bigalk,  Chris Gavaler,  Brent Fisk,  Patrick Carrington,  Jacob Thomas,  Daniel Nester,  Sean Carswell,  Ckay MatthewsTed Morrisey,  Maggie Glover,  Steven Wingate,  John Farmer,  Dan Gutstein,  Morgan Smith,  Ingrid Satelmajer,  Heather RoundsJoel Patton,  Bruce Cohen,  David LaBounty,  Kenneth Gurney,  Janis Butler Holm,  Blake Butler,  Ron Burch,  Marc J. Sheehan,  Jillian Weise,  Courtney Elizabeth Mauk,  Cheryl Boyce-Taylor,  Rachel Arndt,  Jennifer Andrews,  Caleb Barber, Sara Bailey Nagorski,  Naoko Awa,  Scott Garson,  Kathy Fish,  Tamara Shores,  Luke Geddes,  Sheila Squillante, and  Chantel Tattoli. The awesomeness defies all description. Visit us in February at the AWP Bookfair in Chicago!

All submissions that come in after today will be considered for PANK 4, both online and print.

That’s kind of exciting. We should probably print more. We probably will. But right now we’re enjoying the idea of both existing and having moved the merchandise. A testament to our writers, we thinks. Regardless, we’re still sticking to a print run of 500 for PANK 3, and the orders, if not flooding, are definitely coming in briskly. Get some  here  before they, too, run out.