The Big Read

For my first post in a LONG time, I didn't even bother to come up with any original material. I totally stole it from my friend Chris who stole it from someone else's blog. But, since I vowed to read 100 books this year- it was a fitting post and an interesting exercise!



"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 + or bold those you have read.
*# or Italicize those you intend to read.
*Star the books we LOVE.

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** (I read this twice through. LOVE IT! Even convinced Shane to read them and he also liked them.)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (we have an autographed copy)
6. The Bible** (We have an autographed copy. Okay, so we don't- sounds good though!)
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 #(this book nearly did me in this spring- I never got past the first 1/4 of it.)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 Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger** (A MUST READ. This is in my Top 10 books for the year!)
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 ** (read this years ago because Rich Mullins said it was so good.it is a good read with a VERY odd story. The movie "Simon Burch" was loosely based on this book.)
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** (this was pretty good)
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez # (I tried to read this one recently as well. not my cup of tea)
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (I will love him and hug him and call him George.)
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 (And I wasn't even required to read this one! Liked it well enough.)
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** (Bryson is one of my favorite authors. He writes mostly non-fiction and they are usually travel diaries of sorts. THis one is particularly good.)
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 # (I had this one on my shelf for a while until it had to go back to the library. Maybe I will get to it!)
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 # (I've started this one many times)
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

So, that's my results- 33 of 100. Not bad and certainly far from "average". Tell me what your results were (in the comments).

Also, the quest to read 100 books this year? I'm already on numbers 91 and 92. About 10 of those are considered "Juvenile Fiction" as I have discovered a great series called "Dear America" but I think the fact I will probably hit closer to 120 books read by Jan 1, 2009 will more than make up for it.