I like to read blogs when I'm waiting for people to show up for appointments. This morning I ran across this one. I liked the idea of a list of books and this one had a surprising number that I have read. The National Endowment for the Arts has a program called the Big Read. Here is the list. The average number of books that an individual has read is 6.

Look at the list and bold those we have read.

*Italicize those we intend to read.

1. The Lord of the Rings- JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Predudice - Jand Austen
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 Shakespeare1


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 Lewis3


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

I've read over half of the selections. Some I read on my own and some as a result of being an English Major in college. I don't have any italicized because I don't usually have intentions to read something. If I see it and it appeals to me, I read it. I may read the Golden Compass and the others in the trilogy because my daughter keeps telling me how much I'd like it. (I liked the movie a lot).

How'd you do?

PS I finished the body of the Wildflowers Shawl on Sunday with the yarn that Teresa sent me. There is a little more blue in the new skein but since it is across the top and will be on the edges, it's all good. Now I have to figure out how to attach the edging as I knit it. I'd rather not knit the edging separately and then graft it on which is an option. Learning to knit the edging onto the shawl as I go is part of the process for me. It's what I have learned from this project. I am still a new enough knitter that I learn something from each project I attempt. I'll try to take some photos. It's really pretty.

Happy Monday!