Okay, I'll bite
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
The List:
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I read this roughly once every two years.)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (I loved it when I first read it. Since then I've found it less engaging, but I remember it fondly all the same.)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I was really bored in jr. high.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (This is a terrific book. I hated it to pieces and refuse to read it again.)
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
---13(a) All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Yes, all. Including the sonnets and the longer poems. Pretty much everything but Love's Labour Won and Cardenio. I do love some of them, but some of them suck (Pericles, Prince of Tyre, anyone?) so I can't underline.)
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
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (I just bought this, actually.)
29 Alice's Adventures 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 (Again, I loved some and didn't others)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (Even though I know it's full of sad.)
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 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 And for "loved" read: AUGH!)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (I wanted to enjoy this a lot more than I did.)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (The movie... enh. I hope the book is more of what I liked about the movie, and less of what I didn't.)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (I own it, but have never read it--it's massive. Have you seen this book? It's the size of Les Miserables, easy.)
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 (Though I'll always have a crush on the Artful Dodger, I liked David Copperfield better.)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
---72(a) Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (Why is this not on here?! Why?)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (I laughed until I couldn't breathe.)
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 - 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
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
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I've read the abridged version, I've seen the musical, I'm ~300 pages from the end of the unabridged version, the students are manning the barricades, I know that in the next couple hundred pages (that's "soon" for Hugo) Enjolras, Eponine, and Gavroche are all going to die and I CAN'T LOOK. I've been hung up here for months.)
41 then. 43 if you count the two I added because I couldn't believe they weren't on there already, though it looks like they're only counting the ones Big Read has actually printed. Not too shabby, I think, especially since there's actually not much overlap between this list and "things I read for school"--and most of that overlap dates from highschool. For the lit degree, I read a ton of stuff, (probably literally--there were a lot of books, and some of them were pretty heavy) none of which apart from Shakespeare and Dracula is on this list. Frex, it's not that I've never read any Austen, but Northanger Abbey isn't on there. And yet 4 of her other books are. There are some weighting problems with this list, I think, though I imagine there would be similar problems with any such list that anyone tried to put together. At least this one has some representation from the genre ghettos.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
The List:
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I read this roughly once every two years.)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (I loved it when I first read it. Since then I've found it less engaging, but I remember it fondly all the same.)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I was really bored in jr. high.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (This is a terrific book. I hated it to pieces and refuse to read it again.)
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
---13(a) All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Yes, all. Including the sonnets and the longer poems. Pretty much everything but Love's Labour Won and Cardenio. I do love some of them, but some of them suck (Pericles, Prince of Tyre, anyone?) so I can't underline.)
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
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (I just bought this, actually.)
29 Alice's Adventures 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 (Again, I loved some and didn't others)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (Even though I know it's full of sad.)
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 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 And for "loved" read: AUGH!)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (I wanted to enjoy this a lot more than I did.)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (The movie... enh. I hope the book is more of what I liked about the movie, and less of what I didn't.)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (I own it, but have never read it--it's massive. Have you seen this book? It's the size of Les Miserables, easy.)
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 (Though I'll always have a crush on the Artful Dodger, I liked David Copperfield better.)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
---72(a) Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (Why is this not on here?! Why?)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (I laughed until I couldn't breathe.)
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 - 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
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
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I've read the abridged version, I've seen the musical, I'm ~300 pages from the end of the unabridged version, the students are manning the barricades, I know that in the next couple hundred pages (that's "soon" for Hugo) Enjolras, Eponine, and Gavroche are all going to die and I CAN'T LOOK. I've been hung up here for months.)
41 then. 43 if you count the two I added because I couldn't believe they weren't on there already, though it looks like they're only counting the ones Big Read has actually printed. Not too shabby, I think, especially since there's actually not much overlap between this list and "things I read for school"--and most of that overlap dates from highschool. For the lit degree, I read a ton of stuff, (probably literally--there were a lot of books, and some of them were pretty heavy) none of which apart from Shakespeare and Dracula is on this list. Frex, it's not that I've never read any Austen, but Northanger Abbey isn't on there. And yet 4 of her other books are. There are some weighting problems with this list, I think, though I imagine there would be similar problems with any such list that anyone tried to put together. At least this one has some representation from the genre ghettos.