8 up from the average illiterate... good to know...

Here's how it works:

The Big Read says that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Make the ones you loved obnoxiously larger than life
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who've read only 6 or less and make them read.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And now..... THE BIG READ TOP 100

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The 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 (I own this but have yet to read it)
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 Traveller'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 Hitchhiker'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 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' 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

Read : 14

Want to read: 13

(truth be told my list of to-read grows as I hear more... some of these are on my current one, and some of them are on the "in my lifetime" list... so...)

between daylight and darkness...

Caved. That's my only excuse. I caved. I didn't really want to read it, and I knew it wasn't going to be all that great, but I read the whole thing anyways. Well, this one. I don't know that I have the stomach for the next two.

Disclaimer: I am going to teach English and/or literature at some point in my life. A professor that I respect says that it made a lot of his students into readers-- so I digress. I borrowed--not purchased-- this novelty item and found myself reading it much later than twilight.

Admittedly, for a young writer, I have to say I give her credit for her zeal to tell an unfamiliar story though so familiar in a lot of ways too. I hate to say it, but from the Mormon girl perspective I couldn't help but see all of the ties of vampire thirsting after human as an uncanny parallel to the chastity lines...etc. I loved the way the story moved for the most part, in that it was engaging and left me wanting to read more. On the other hand, not a lot happens in this book... in fact, it takes a few hundred pages before you forget your reading. Until then, my eyes are sore from reading the same phrases, "he was a marble Greek pagan god..." and "i could not make out his expression..." All I have to say is, if you don't know his expression- then don't be a writer... or at least don't worry about trying to describe it over and over if you have run our of your black piggy bank of midget words.

In her defense, because I do want to write something that people like to read as well, I have to say she has done just that: provided a fun topic of conversation. I have heard a handful of people say the words: "I am not really a reader. In fact I don't usually read at all... but for some reason (probably peer pressure or your mom) I have picked it up and found myself flipping..." that is a good sign. Making readers out of not-readers is a good business too. I believe in that at least. I spent a lot of time at the high school recently, and seen lots of these books... so I guess that professor was right- at least they are reading. And if they get through these books, who's to say they wont stop to pick up another one? And then another? Reading Epidemic! (But don't take MY word for it... da na na!)

Not my favorite, not the best writing by any means, but fun. I personally am not allowed to read the other two because I fear it might cause me to have some sort of spazm in the brain.

My humble yet correct opinion: 3/5

A borrower.