I copied this from Iris. This is from something called 'The Big Read' from the NEA. They came up with a list of their top 100 books, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these books. I will highlight the ones I've read. Cut and paste into your blog and let us know which you've read. And then maybe hop over to Amazon or take a trip to Barnes and Noble for some summer reading material.
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 Faulks1
8 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
Forty four for me. Not bad! Still, some of these I've always wanted to read and haven't. Some I tried to read and couldn't get into. Some I've never heard of. Some I read, and they were good, but not even close to being what I'd considerworthy of inclusion in the the top 100. About five absolutely do NOT belong on a list of the 100 best books. (Dan Brown? Who are they kidding? That's a bad joke.) And some are not included that absolutely should be. (What? No Mark Twain?) Absolutely not to be missed book from this list? Watership Down.
9 comments:
You'd think that since I was an English major this kind of thing would turn me on, but quite the contrary. For some reason, I quit reading fiction about 20 years ago, after having so many years with my head in a book. Sometimes I feel so out of it.
In contrast, my oldest was quite a reader and considered being an English major, but by the time she was out of high school, she had read most of the classics already and had moved on to read most of the modern supposedly great authors and figured she'd be bored in too many English classes in college.
This from someone who was a constant reader in elementary and high school and tried to keep on reading with age, when kids and work would allow it and yet, I've only read nine of the books listed there! Ok, I've been trying to read two of those really fat ones -one for almost 5 years, the other for the past 2 years and can't seem to keep plowing through them. I think I must have surely read some of the Bronte works in high school but be darned if I can remember that. And yes, where are the Mark Twain books anyway? Or James Mitchener, Leon Uris, Toni Morrison too, to name a few others and Pearl Buck?
I was at fifty five for sure, a couple others sounded familiar, but I could just as easily have seen a movie version or read the title and synopsis at the store.
For me, The Great Gatsby was the must read, but I know quite a few people who detested that book.
Fun...I'll try this on my blog.
Fifty five! I am impressed!
I was an English major. A fair number were assigned reading, others I read to see what the fuss was about, and Lolita I read hoping it was illustrated. ;) Made for interesting discussions when I was the only one in class (including the professor) who liked The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness.
Yay! I'm glad you played! I agree with you about the Dan Brown and lack of Mark Twain. What gives? But I guess the point is to get people discussing and reading books!
I played! This was an interesting exercise. I've hit almost half.
Yeah, I wondered about the lack of Twain, and Poe, and .... many others. And Dan Brown? Good grief.
fun stuff!
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