I totally stole this from SheLikesPurple, which isn’t very nice of me, but I’ve been looking for a really long list of “recommended reading” books and this totally fulfills that need. Plus I like these kinds of things. So, here it goes:

Below is a list of books printed by The Big Read, an organization that—according to their Web site—hopes to “restore reading to the center of American culture.” They say, though, that the average American has only read six of the following hundred.

Key
1) Bold the books you have already read
2) Italicize the books you intend to read
3) Personally added: Notes in parentheses next to note-worthy titles.

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1) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
3) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (I’ve read half of it, and keep meaning to get to the rest. I promise!)
4) Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling 
5) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Read it in high school…I might have to reread it at some point – so many people found it so fascinating…I wasn’t a huge fan.) 
6) The Bible (I’ve read parts of it…but never the whole thing)
7) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
8) Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
9) His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
10) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (I can’t really remember if I read this or not, but I don’t think so.)
11) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
12) Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
13) Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
14) Complete Works of Shakespeare
15) Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (How can I NOT want to read this? It’s named after me! ;-))
16) The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
17) Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
18) Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
19) The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
20) Middlemarch by George Eliot
21) Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
22) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (We read this in high school and then watched the movie, and all I can remember is how horribly cheesy it all was.)
23) Bleak House by Charles Dickens (This title sounds like a book I would enjoy.)
24) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy  (I’ll leave this italicized, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get to actually reading it.)
25) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (LOVED THIS SERIES)
26) Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
27) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28) Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (I think I read this in high school…if not, I WANT to read it)
29) Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
30) The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
31) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
32) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
33) Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
34) Emma by Jane Austen
35) Persuasion by Jane Austen
36) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis
37) The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
38) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
39) Memories of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (I saw the movie…does that count?)
40) Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
41) Animal Farm by George Orwell
42) The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (His book Angels & Demons was WAY better…but neither of them had really fabulous writing…I just like the subject matter) 
43) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
45) The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
46) Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
47) Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
48) The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
49) Lord of the Flies by William Golding
50) Atonement by Ian McEwan 
51) Life of Pi by Yann Martel (I’ve heard it’s awesome, but I have no idea what it’s about.)
52) Dune by Frank Herbert (Ryan keeps wanting me to read this…I think it’s Ryan…someone does, I think…maybe it’s just me??)
53) Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
54) Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
55) A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
56) The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57) A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (I think I tried to read this once…and failed, miserably.
58) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
60) Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61) Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
62) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
63) The Secret History by Donna Tartt
64) The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
65) Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
66) On The Road by Jack Kerouac (I read this in my Popular Culture in the 1960s class in college. That class was AWESOME.)
67) Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
68) Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding 
69) Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
70) Moby Dick by Herman Melville 
71) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens 
72) Dracula by Bram Stoker
73) The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
74) Notes From A Small Island by Bill Bryson
75) Ulysses by James Joyce 
76) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77) Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
78) Germinal by Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
80) Possession by AS Byatt
81) A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
82) Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
83) The Color Purple by Alice Walker
84) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
85) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
86) A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
87) Charlotte’s Web by EB White
88) The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom
89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I don’t think I’ve read this, but I’m not sure…)
90) The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton
91) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
92) The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93) The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
94) Watership Down by Richard Adams (I hated this book. I thought it was dumb. You can hate me if you want, but that’s what I thought.)
95) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
96) A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
97) The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98) Hamlet by William Shakespeare
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
100) Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

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Total: 30 – I only counted the ones I had entirely read. Now to get started on the ones I haven’t (along with the books I have on reserve at the library already and the ones previously recommended to me by my fabulous aunts).

Your turn. Feel free to leave comments regarding books on the list (or not) if you don’t have a blog.

 

Oh, and speaking of books – I finished Love and Other Near Death Experiences and am in the middle of The Death Collectors. The first one was funny and a quick read…good British humor. The second is a murder-mystery type. I like it so far, although *note to self* don’t get the “large print” version (it was an accident). It makes you feel like you are reading Ramona Quimby Age 8 or something.