The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these.So, we are encouraged to:
So, we are encouraged to:
1) Look at the list and bold those we have read. (I had to underline them in order to get them to stand out)
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs and share!
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 (almost… minus a few)
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
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 (yes, I actually read the entire thing... aren't you proud of me?)
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 (no, but I've read Frankenstein... does that count?)
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 (no, but I've read two Toni Morrison books... who I think was my generations 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 (I even read it in French... so there NEA!)
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 have only read (or can only remember reading) 23 of the 100 (though I feel a little like I’m cheating with that, since Hamlet is a part of the complete works of William Shakespeare… and the truth is I don’t think I’ve ever read Cymbeline, a few of the histories or some of his sonnets). It certainly gives me a whole list of books to go look for at the library. I didn't italicize those I want to read because until I've read the descriptions of them, how will I know (though just by the titles Love In The Time Of Cholera and The Five People You Meet In Heaven are intriguing)? Plus, shouldn't a part of me (the academic part at least) want to read all of them?
And I want to know where are Fahrenheit 451 (which is one of the NEA Big Read sponsored books!**) and Hunchback of Notre Dame (one of the few books I was required to read in high school that I really enjoyed… there is just something truly rambling and wonderful about Hugo). And for that matter, where is Red Badge of Courage or The Scarlet Letter (both of which I would have to only half-bold because I read parts of them… enough to pass the tests in MA Block, sorry Mrs. Singleton).
(this list courtesy of both my mother’s blog, AliceD’sThoughts, and Merrilee’s blog, Merrilee’s Musings, on the side)
(**Thank you to the first comment for pointing out the disparities between the list and the "One Book/One Community" program... I, in fact, know about the latter due to the fact that our theatre department was granted a NEA Big Read grant last year and we did an entire year of programming focused on Fahrenheit 451, including producing the play as our last show of the spring season... we also gave out over three hundred free copies of the book to individuals here in the San Luis Valley and had forums on censorship, a banned movie series, etc. In no way were my remarks above intended to belittle the NEA. I think some of their grants and sponsorships are very noble endeavors).
5 comments:
Great blog! Of course, you've probably already discovered by now that this list is from the U.K. and compiled by the BBC. In the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read, the NEA gives grants to communities for "one book, one community" programs. The communities then choose from a few dozen (not these 100) books selected by the NEA. Just thought NEA and the Big Read communities should get their just due!
Yay, you're home!
Other missing books:
Anything ancient! Hello, where is Homer??? Aesop? Virgil?
Ok, I think we can all agree that this list is missing just a few good books but does contain some excellent ones.
Ok, now we just have to get your father and sister to go over this list and by the time we all see what we have and have not read we much just prove what a family of geeks really looks like!
Well, I knew we were all readers, but I can only believe that most people have only read 6. Like I mentioned in Alice's blog, if you actually read the books you were supposed to for high school english you would have met the quota.
I am personally a little concerned that the only books seemingly involving wizards on the list is Harry Potter. I just had to get my shot in there for the fantasy genre.
Jenna- Glad you made it home, have fun getting ready for the school year.
What? NO Kerouac? Did I miss "On the Road" or "Dharma Bums"? Bummer man - two of my fav. books...
Reid
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