I found this over at Chasing Myself:
Apparently, the Big Read (a program of the National Endowment for the Arts (sic)) guesses that the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books on this list.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your blog.
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 Traveller'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 (Never in a Million Years!!)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais)
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
So I suppose I am above the average. And I've read the Bible more than once so that should count for something. I couldn't figure out how to underline or change colors.
13 comments:
What a wonderful idea! I'm kind of ashamed I haven't read more on this list, but its nice to have the list to work from. I'll have to add this list onto my blog this afternoon. ;)
I think you have to add something to your html code to underline, but I think you would have to do it for every line you wanted to underlind. I would do it in a word document and then copy and paste it back into my post. At least thats how I'm going to try and do it later.....
Thanks for visiting my blog...I enjoy your comments. :)
That is quite the list. I'll copy and mark my reads...post it soon.
William Young is speaking at my church today. He wrote The Shack. We booked him several months ago before his book hit the NY best seller list. We are a small church in a rural town. There are so many negative things being said about the book but I think that people are reading as a theology study instead of it's intended purpose. To me it is a book that helps people ge unstuck from terrible hurts and open up to talking and reaching a healing place.
It will be interesting to hear what he has to say this morning.
Thanks for stopping by my blog. I wish I had time to read but with working full time and raising Ned by myself, there is no time for anything!!
Wow...I'm surprised I've read quite a chunk of those books...though it was years ago, and college and there were papers involved...very long papers, so yeah...I should probably go back and read them all again.
I just watched a movie called, "The Jane Austen Book Club." Girly flick. It made me want to read all her books once again. Though, I have to say, those girls could stand to read a couple books off of your list there, cuz they maybe knew a little too much about Jane. Little bit.
I really am loving your blog. I loooove the banner. Too sweet. It's very calming over here. :)
Love the list! I'll be adding it my blog!
Wow, I am above average at something...cool..
Actually, I have read the Davinci Code and it was a great book...it is totally fictional account of a group that may or maynot exist. I wasn't offended at all as a Christian.If you like murder mysteries...that was a good one!
Flower...I just finished reading The Shack and I really liked it. I don't know about the theology either, but I thought that it gave us a beautiful picture of God's heart.
I can't wait to stop by ya'alls blogs and see what you guys have read!
I'm afraid this is an incorrect posting that has been going around virally about the Big Read. Go to neabigread.org to see what it is really about. The NEA provides grants to communities for "one book, one community" programs. The communities choose among a few dozen (not 100) books and provide free guides and resources for community and classroom discussions.
Actually I did a search and this list evidently comes originally from the BBC. They asked for people to nominate their 100 favorite books and came up with this list. See here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml. Thank for letting me know that it wasn't through the NEA.
I was pumped that I had read 17 of these books. Yippee. CANT believe you've not read The Kite Runner. Completely enthralling and extremely well written (even when extremly uncomfortable)
Well, I obviously have been reading things OTHER than the classics. The Chronicles of Narnia is one of my favorite series and my daughter is trying to get me to read Harry Potter.
Great idea!
Jen
After reading this list, I must put down the romance novels and read something with substance!
I have only read about 6 books on this list, and I am a librarian...shhh...don't tell anyone:-)
Thanks for the comment love today.
I am above the 6 average, but if you count the movie, I am WAY above average. Something tells me, though, that counting the movie kind of defeats the purpose.
KEEP BELIEVING
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