
JustOneAnna posted the National Education Association’s Top 100 books, part of NEA’s "The Big Read" program. Responding to a suggestion from another blogger, she did the following:
- Look at the list and bold those we have read.
- Italicize those we intend to read.
- Underline the books we LOVE
So here’s my list:
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 (abriged)
Only 25…*Sigh*. I know the story of Hamlet, although I haven’t read it. On the other hand, I’ve read Macbeth, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, and others of Shakespeare, including many (most?) of the sonnets.
I’ve seen three of the Harry Potter movies…but I guess that doesn’t count, eh?

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Just as a small fly in the ointment – while this is an interesting list, it’s not one of the National Education Association’s lists – http://www.nea.org/readacross/resources/booklists.html . Nor is it the NEA – National Endowment of the Arts – list ( http://www.neabigread.org/index.php ).
It’s remarkably close – though still not quite the same – as the BBC’s “Big Read” list ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml ) from 2003.
The point at which you should have caught this as probably wrong, for certain, was when you reached item 36. That’s because it (Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe) is a subset of item 33 – the Chronicles of Narnia. At which point you’ve confirmed the uneasy feeling you got getting a series as number 4, and a “everything this author ever wrote” at 14. (Seriously – Titus Andronicus is supposed to be a Great Book?) Oh, and when you hit 98 you get a reconfirmation that this list is a wee bit wrong – Hamlet? You already did Hamlet at number 14.
I really should have added a brief note – my “score” would be 83. Yeah, I guess I’m bragging. (grin)
I’ve read 35. Strange list. A mix of good and bad classics, good and bad modern.
Don’t worry about not having read Hamlet. Plays are meant to be performed, not read. It’s like the difference between reading a screenplay and seeing the movie. Although, reading Shakespeare is better than no Shakespeare at all.
Oh, I agree 100%! Hamlet is often considered Shakespeare’s “best” play though…I’m just mildly amused that I’ve never seen/heard/read it.
Guess I should rent Mel Gibson’s Hamlet…
Don’t worry kestrel, the list is biased towards christian english lit anyways. I’ve read many books in my time, and not a lot of them are on that list. Look at it! Tolkien, Rowling, Shakespeare, the Bible! BLEH! Where is my Oedipus, my Beowulf, my Paradise Lost, my Little Prince (machiavelli)? Blasphemy, I say!
And the list doesn’t even include non-fiction! Where’s my Art of War, my 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? DOUBLE-BLEH!
Just because a person’s percentage is not high on that list doesn’t mean he or she is not well-read.
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Definitely should be a caveat that the list is fiction only. (Yes, I’m including The Bible there.)
No true science-fiction? Fahrenheit 451? Stranger in A Strange Land? Asimov? Clarke?
huh? I don’t think I said that there wasn’t science fiction there. I love Asimov, though!
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meh. I always suspect these lists is about “you must read the books what I read in high school, or I read ’cause it were on the bestseller list, or someone made a movie recently.” seems ta cover about 90% of the books listed.
The DaVinci Code??!? Great googly moogly. That musta been one of the worst conceived and written books ever. Be glads you haven’t read it, Kes.
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I saw the movie, Ratters.
Notice none of those unread books is italicized? There’s a reason most haven’t been read. Still and all…
Yeah, I question some of the titles on the list. Not because they aren’t good reads, but whether they rate “Top 100″ status..hmm..
But still, I can say I’ve read at least half of those, so gimme cookies or something!
I’m sitting at 45 of these read, but I strenuously object to a couple of them. Then again, I can’t find much provenance for this list, so that makes me feel a lot better. :>
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I also “borrowed” this from Anna’s blog, except I posted it on my private blog. I’ve read 30 of them… some of them are on my list.
Oh – and the Harry Potter books are much better (richer) than the movies. Can’t seem to get to like the movies while I loved the books. Strange, since I usually don’t have a problem with taking movies at their face value.
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This CANNOT be an American (NEA) based list. Out of the top 10, only Harper Lee is American. Mark Twain doesn’t even get one nod. That would be American literary blasphemy.
Enough said.
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I’ve read 37 of them myself. Some I really enjoyed (The Hitch Hiker’s Guide is essentially a bible to me) and some were so godawful I wouldn’t use them to line a bird cage (I’m looking at you, Lewis Carroll!) And I’ve noticed you’ve never read Dracula, Kes. Such a great story. And it’s an interesting read too, particularly when you base the original version against the current vampire iterations that pop up on a near-yearly basis.
And Ratsy? We’ll have to politely agree to disagree. I still say that was one of the best new books I’ve read in a very long time.
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This is the actual NEA program:
http://www.neabigread.org/index.php
Note that it’s just now got 21 books, with more released as it goes on.
The 100 list posted, while interesting in some of it’s choices, is completely fabricated. That said, everyone should read more. ^_^
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Hey Doodle
Thanks for doing the investigatory work! Clearly, I should have done more research before posting; had no idea this would turn out to be such a popular topic!
(And I’m still bummed that the list I got from Anna wasn’t the same as the one I saw on Bre’s blog–my fault entirely, for not paying attention. Lessons learned, believe me!)
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