Big Read: NEA Top 100 Books
Posted by tata on Thursday Aug 14, 2008 Under BooksThe Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six. According to another blogger, they encourage us to:
*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE
Share this list in your blog, too, if you like. 
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
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
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
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
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 - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Seventeen?! That’s it!?! Well damn. I have listed 8 that I intend to read and only 2 that I love. I am kinda upset at this list now. I read! I read a lot! Okay, well, I don’t read as much as I would like these days - it’s hard for me to focus when I’m constantly interrupted by a curious, grabby toddler, so I have put off reading anything deemed intelligent by these NEA folk.
For now, I’m content to listen here and there to stories on the iPod, courtesy of Librivox. Right now, it’s Anne of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I’m also enjoying some great how-to knitting books and a number of blogs via Google Reader. So take that, NEA jerks!
August 19th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
I’ve read at least 53–can’t remember if I’ve read some like Alice and Wonderland, and then there are others like The Complete Works of Shakespeare and the Bible that I’ve read significant parts of.
Then, there are a few on there–particularly the DaVinci Code–that you’re much better off not wasting time on….
August 17th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Oh, I have to do this! I have only read about 12 of the books listed, ugh!
August 16th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Wow, I’ve 45 of the books on the list! I guess that makes me well-read, huh? Of the books I have not read, 17 of them I could probably write a term paper on, since I know all about them (Especially Flaubert’s books, since he cross-mentions them). So, that’s not bad at all!
August 15th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I’ll have to do this!
Oh, and I love Librivox…I listen to books while I pump milk at work…
August 15th, 2008 at 10:42 am
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!
August 15th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Oh I am so making a list too. I’ll post it up tomorrow or Sunday. Probably Sunday.