I found this list off of my friend
Amber F. 's blog and decided to check out the list for myself. It was a lot of fun!
The
Big Read is a National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.
Here’s what you are supposed to do:
*Look at the list and bold those we have read. *Italicize those we intend to read.*Underline the books we LOVE .
Share this list in your blog, too, if you like.
Here's what I did: I had programming issues with my post so I just italicized books I loved rather than underlining them, however if you post on it too the underlining seems to show more love!
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee6 The Bible7 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 Alcott12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (Do I get points for reading the first few chapters one summer in high school before I abandoned the book?)
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (macabre, I know but I really liked this one)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (I probably just loved that I actually finished it!)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis34 Emma - Jane Austen35 Persuasion - Jane Austen36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown43 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 Montgomery47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (Does it count that I checked it out of the library? I had to return it before I got around to reading it last summer!)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens58 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 Steinbeck62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett74 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 Dickens82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker84 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 Albom89 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-Exupery93 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 (I don’t think it counts that I’ve seen almost every version of the Three Musketeers in movies, time to get reading I guess!)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I’ve read 38 out of 100, not too shabby unless they gave a horrible guess about the average person having read only six off their list. I didn't italicize any I haven't read yet because of laziness with my blogging problem, but I hope to read the remaining 62 books someday. If I don’t finish them all, I intend at least to make a good dent at the list, it’s always nice to read something besides my copy of Parents magazine (which I do love, but something without a story on better potty training techniques is a nice read sometimes too!). If you love books have fun with the list. Thanks to Amber for the fun idea!
