A Fine Book Meme

I do a lot of reading, but not always what is on the New York Times Bestseller List. Even in High School we didn't read the usual classics, the teachers opting for more current cult tomes (it was the late 60's after all). Heidi at Heidi's Moments posted her list HERE and, curious about how well read I think I am, I thought I'd go through the list.

This is the list of top 100 books that the The National Endowment for the Arts came up with. It's estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed on this list. (Well, that is how this whole thing came about then... )Here's what you do if you want to play:
1) Copy and paste this list into your own blog post.
2) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
3) Italicize those you intend to read.
4) Bold and [bracket] the books you LOVE.

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] (Have not read the entire thing in order, but am pretty sure I have covered most of it in one way or another.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
[9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman], i.e. The Golden Compass
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 (I must confrss --- not ALL of it)
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 (just bought it)
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 --- currently reading it
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 (does seeing the movie count?)
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 (again, saw the movie)
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 (movies --- both versions)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I am surprised to see that I have read 30 of these! I've tried to catch up on the classics. My son encouraged me to do that. When he was in China for a month he ran out of reading material, so went to the book store --- foreign language section --- and all they had were the English language classics. So he got started on them that way. My treat is to spend hours at Barnes & Noble, Starbucks in hand, browsing and relaxing. More than the Starbucks goes home with me!

Let me know if you do this meme. I am always like to see how what others are reading!