A friend of mine blogged about this, & since I’m such a bookworm I thought I’d check it out.

The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest.

 

 “The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

 

(books in bold are the ones I’ve read)

 

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

 

2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

 

3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

 

4. The 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 – Phillip 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 . The Complete works of Shakespeare

 

15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

 

16. The Hobbit –J.R.R. Tolkien

 

17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

 

18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

 

19. The Time Traveler’s Wife

 

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

 

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

 

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 St. 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

 

49 out of 100. Ok, so I’m a book nerd. Does it make me nerdier that I’m thinking about taking this list to the book store next time I go?