In the spirit of sharing best practice I’m picking up on a popular blog story analysing the latest list of books, this time compiled by the US organisation National Endowment for the Arts which runs a reading programme called The Big Read. Its purpose is to “restore reading to the center of American culture.” They estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. I’ve copied my personal list in below along with instructions on how to pick up where I’ve left off.

I took up the mantle from Sally Whittle, who herself took if from a post by Wordsmith - and to get a wider perspective I did a quick straw poll around the office (or at least the six of us who were around at the time).

Overall Quest PR is a mixed bunch. Karyn won the title of best-read with 73/100, Joel and I shared second place with 42/100 whereas Sue, Nick and John brought up the rear with fewer than 20. We all make quite different reading choices (except for Karyn and I intriguingly) indeed there’s only one book on the list that we’ve all read: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Of the seven books we collectively haven’t read (including Les Miserables, A Town Like Alice and Watership Down) none of us had any inclination of ever reading them. So I suppose it goes to show that while we can’t make a collective decision on what we like we can quickly let you know what we don’t.

On a separate point, we all felt the list was flawed in a number of ways - not least in that Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe sits alongside The Chronicles of Narnia, as well as Hamlet being included apart from Shakespeare’s Complete Works - and so to add our twopenneth to the debate below are five books we feel are notable by their absence (in no particular order):

Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan

Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Brighton Rock - Grahame Green

Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre

Anything by Stephen King

So, over to you - what’s your take on the top 100, what’s on that shouldn’t and what’s not that should.

Here’s what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Red 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 (
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 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’s Adventures 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 (no way, not after abandoning Angels and Demons 3 chapters in. He can’t write)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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 MISSING
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 - A. S. 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