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'Pride And Prejudice' voted Britain's best read
2007-03-01
Jane Austen's "Pride And Prejudice" topped a poll of Britons' 100 favourite books released Thursday, indicating that classic novels are still most people's idea of a good read ahead of modern offerings. Children's books adapted into big-budget films also do well -- "The Lord of the Rings" by JRR Tolkien is at number two and JK Rowling's "Harry Potter" series is at four. But with "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte at number three, her sister Emily's "Wuthering Heights" at seven and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell at eight, the list is dominated by staples of the school curriculum. There is also room for the Bible at number six in the list of works "our nation can't live without", compiled from an online poll of 2,000 readers for World Book Day Thursday. And the complete works of William Shakespeare also chart at number 14. Recent bestsellers fare less well -- Audrey Niffenegger's "The Time Traveler's Wife" makes 19th place, "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini is at 37 and Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" charts at number 42. British television has been dominated by a string of big-budget adaptations of classic literary works in recent years. In the rendering of "Pride and Prejudice", actor Colin Firth won the hearts of millions of British women with his portrait of Mr Darcy, including a notorious scene in which he emerged from a lake in a wet shirt. The 1813 novel has also been filmed for the cinema several times, the most recent being a 2005 version with Keira Knightley and Donald Sutherland, and a Bollywood make-over in "Bride And Prejudice", starring Aishwarya Rai. Its opening sentence, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife," is one of the most famous in English literature.
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