Book Thing

The Big Read, from the NEA, was designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They’ve come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don’t explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE (I’ve used an asterisk)
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A quick count shows that I've read about 75 of them.  What else this means, I don't know.  Found at BesoMami

Comments

[gracebythesea]

Sister Sledge! I was shocked to see that i am the first 'commenter' which is hilarious since of all of the RGBP-ers i am surely the most illiterate (Well besides regularly reading Mad Magazine).

The saddest news is that I have not read a single one on the list all the way through (thanks, ADD) but have read pieces of at least 7 of them and needed cliff notes for at least 3. (You can guess where the bible fits).

Thanks for the list and the challenge.

Cancelling cable the minute they open in the morning!

[Mary Beth]

Bythesea, with two degrees in English lit I may not have done a lot of things...but child, I have READ a lot of stuff. :)

I was waiting for a commenter to point out that I don't list the Bible as a favorite. Well, it's just not. :) And I guarantee you have read a lot more of it and know more of it than I do.

I'm more of a book party girl (whatta party!) :)

[Diane]

I haven't counted yet, but how can the list have 1) the complete works of Shakespeare and then later on, 2) Hamlet? Seems like cheating to me.

Interested in how they came up with the list! great idea!

[Diane]

huh. I was an English major and I only read about 54. I'm behind (haven't done much Harry Potter.) But ask me about Ernest Hemingway, who isn't even on the list.

[zorra]

I love Possession by A.S. Byatt, too. Reading the big scene in the cemetery, I screamed out loud! I wouldn't see the movie because I enjoyed the book so much!

I just finished The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. HIGHLY recommended!

[Jan]

I thought I'd read a lot, but you have the most read of anyone on this list I've seen thus far. WOW!!

[vab]

Yeah, who got to decide? And where are Anne Lamott, Robert A. Heinlein, & Rita Mae Brown?
Only 42 for me.
v

[miss smarty pants]

Love this. I haven't gone through to see how many I've done so far, but I like this list. Nowhere near 75 though. Another discrepancy - why have The Chronicles of Narnia and then list The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe separately?