I've done this before, but not for a year or so...
**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:
* Look at the list and bold those we HAVE read
* Italicize those we INTEND to read
* Underline the books we LOVE
* Reprint this list in our own blogs
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I tried, I tried)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (I don’t know why I haven’t read it yet)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee( Had to read it for English. DETEST.)
6 The Bible (Bits and pieces)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (Read at 11, need to re-read because I didn’t really get it)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (I’ve never really gotten on with Mr Dickens)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (I adore Tess)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (I read the first half and hated it)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (well, I haven’t read everything!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (It was okay.)
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Everyone says I should)
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (One of the most perfect novels I’ve read)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (Too short. Not enough explanation)
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 (Why is this on here separately?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres(I’m about halfway through)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (So so good)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (I love 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 (I cannot underline this enough!)
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 (I absolutely adore this book)
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 (Hated it. Read it in a lunch break.)
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 (I want to re-read this now)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (I really ought to read this!)
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 (I got very bored with it and gave up.)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (This is what put me off Dickens)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (Read the first few pages and thought: no)
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (I liked ‘The Remains of the Day’)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (I wanted this to be so much better!)
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 (I. Would. Marry. Sherlock. Holmes.)
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 - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo