The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. *note* I can't figure out how to do this so I'm going to try changing the font or color...
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen Read once a year
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien never really liked- read because my brother told me I had too
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte Once a year
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee Named my kid Atticus
6 The Bible I love parts of it but on the whole? Nah.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte I read it over and just to get to the "Heathcliff is more myself than I am" speech.
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman It seems unfair they don't list these seperately like they do for C.S. Lewis
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens love
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott love - I don't care what Q says- I love Beth March
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller haven't read in ages but still think of Yossarian often
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare I'm lying- but since they list Hamlet seperately I think they know that
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks I'm surprised this is on here because I've never spoken to anyone else who's read it. Cool.
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot Love like crazy. This was my favorite book to read when Atti was a newborn and we could just sit and nurse and rock forever.
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell My ten year old self loved this. Me? Uh-uh.
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 Love to pieces- own it on the excellent BBC book on tape and listen to it in my car all the time - but, oddly, have never watched the movie.
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 One of the only Russian novels I actually plan on reading
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens Love.
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen Just reread this last year and I hate that girl more every time I read it.
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 I kept flipping to the front to check it was really written by a man.
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne "Oh, Eeyore, you are wet!" "Could somebody please explain to Piglet what happens when you've been in the water for a very long time?" The best!
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Love.
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins Only book that Wolf and I have really disagreed on.
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery Why doesn't Montgomery get the whole series included?
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood should reread- haven't read since I was a teenager
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 Never satisfied with the answer they gave.
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen Love.
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 Sets my head on fire.
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov Just can't read it anymore- loved and appreciated it as a teenager.
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt So Ridgecrest.
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold For some dumb reason I read this in a bookstore, sobbing, naturally.
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac Big impact on me in high school.
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie I think this is the only Rushdie I liked.
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens love.
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett I want to have a girl and read her this.
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce Someday.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray That Becky was too much for me.Yuck.
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker Like a swift kick to the gut while a heavenly choir sings.
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 love.
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom Seriously? Blech.
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 I am crazy about this book.
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ditto. Although I always wish I could have read it without the intro the first time.
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare Love and made my son memorize when he was 10. Not all of it, obviously. He uses it to impress girls now.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
