Here’s how it works:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE — mine are in purple.
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them 
The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.
I’ve read 27, which I guess isn’t shabby, but for someone who reads as much as I do it’s fairly sad. I want to read 17 more, and the others I either have no interest in reading or haven’t heard of/don’t know much about. Some on this list surprised me — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Really? And The Da Vinci Code? But whatever. It is what it is.
Edited to add: I went through a phase in 7th and 8th grade where I read classic after classic, because I’m apparently a literary snob. But most of them didn’t make it on the list. I wonder why?
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 : LOVE
6 The Bible – yeah, right.
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (I love the story, and I’ve even written essays on it, but I’ve never actually read it. Methinks I should, if only to make it up to the poor teacher I deceived.)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman : LOVE (This is probably my favorite series of all time. I luffs it.)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (Again, a book I’ve never read but whose story I love and about which I’ve written essays — although that teacher knew I hadn’t read it and gave me an A anyway.)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (I HATED this book with a BURNING passion. My mother and most of the females I’ve met who’ve read it love it. Go figure.)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare — No, but I have read Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, and probably more, so a significant number.
5 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (Don’t even get me started on this book. I hate it. With a passionate, fiery hate that is so strong all of Salinger’s work has been contaminated and as soon as I see “JD Salinger” I start to breathe fire a little bit. I hate it. So much.)
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 : LOVE (As everyone who knows me knows.)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (I’ve read part of it and I like it in the same way I love Kafka’s The Trial, so methinks I should finish it one day.)
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 : LOVE
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis : LOVE
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 : LOVE
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Oh, god, I hated this book too. Our lit circle recommended it to people who had insomnia because it would surely put them to sleep. We got in trouble for saying that, but it was how all 10 of us honestly felt.)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery : LOVE (Weirdly enough. This book is something I would usually hate, but I love Anne’s character.)
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 (We have to read this for English this year. So, soon.)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley : LOVE (Another one of my ABSOLUTE FAVORITEST BOOKS EVAR.)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon : LOVE
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I don’t ever plan to read this, considering my two previous experiences with his work. I hate it. A lot.)
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 (This one’s sitting in my drawer, waiting for me to read it …)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (This book creeped me out as a child. And I mean CREEPED ME OUT. But, even though it did, and even though it has all the hallmarks of a book I would hate, I actually don’t hate it. That said, I have no intention of ever rereading it. I have bad, bad memories of reading this book.)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson : LOVE (He’s hilarious.)
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 : LOVE (I think it’s surprising how few people have read this; it’s beautiful and so, so sad. And SO much better than the movie.)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (At first I loved these, but I read all of them and they start to get really, really formulaic after a while.)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (In the original French, no less. Yes, I win. And no, the book does not deserve to be considered a work of philosophical greatness, it deserves to be considered a really FREAKING WEIRD book written while probably under the influence of certain … organic compounds, shall we say?)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (Too preachy for me, and really, who the hell cares about the rabbits?)
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 (Surprisingly, I’ve only had to read excerpts.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl : LOVE, but, that said, I don’t think this is his best work. It’s just his best-known one.
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (I’m holding out until I can read it in French. Snobbery? Probably.)
