According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list. The instructions: Look at the list and:
- Bold those you have read.
- Italicize those you intend to read.
- Underline the books you LOVE.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Great American Novel #1)
6. The Bible (I actually did read the whole damn thing in college.)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - 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 (Most depressing book EVER.)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (Okay, I have not read Cymbeline or Troilus and Cressida, but pretty much everything else.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (taught it; and let me tell ya how much my 12th graders loved it when I read the "f*** you" part at the end)
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (Great American Novel #2)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens (gaaaaak)
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I gave you two weeks of my life with Anna Frakking Karenina, and that's all you get)
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 (tried; failed)
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (train couldn't come fast enough)
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis (counting this since I read #36 below)
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (would you like some allegory with your tea, missus?)
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 - A.A. Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (tried; failed)
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (read once; on The LIST to read again)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan (got through 50 pages and wanted to throw it across the room)
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 (on The LIST)
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 (read once; on The LIST to read again)
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 (get a job, loser)
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (I take that back: THIS is the most depressing book ever.)
68. Bridget Jones' 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 - A.S. 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 (HATE)
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - E.B. White (Great American Novel #3)
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 (silflay hraka, my 10th grade English teacher)
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 (not part of #14?)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I got 53, with 9 intentions. Not bad.
4 comments:
you're a moron....you obviously do not understand kerouac.
Yeah, probably not. I'm not the right audience for beatniks or 19th-century heroines. I do take exception to "moron," however.
Wow. That's the best tally I've seen so far.
I'm afraid this is a combination of two different programs that has been going around the internet in a viral fashion. The book list is from the U.K. and compiled by the BBC. The real NEA's Big Read is a series of grants provided to communities across the U.S. The communities select from a few dozen (not 100) books for a "one book, one community" program and provide free resources for book and classroom discussions. Go to neabigread.org to see what the Big Read is really about.
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