PBS Great American Read Top 100 Books Vote

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Doc Creed

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Nov 18, 2015
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Fifty Shades of Grey is on and not Fahrenheit 451...nor any Ray Bradbury titles? Totally NOT impressed! But you can vote here if you like. The TV special on the event had a nice segment on The Stand.

Vote | The Great American Read | PBS
I watched it and enjoyed it and I, too, was somewhat incredulous at the choices. I need to watch again to see how the 100 choices were compiled. Surely, a big part of it had to do with book sales. Interesting.
 

CoriSCapnSkip

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Jan 16, 2015
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Unfortunately voting is disabled outside of the United States.

http://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/vote/#

My Own Personal Roundup of Titles Which Made the PBS Favorites List:

Have Read
(Without Checking My List, In Pretty Much This Order)

Counting Series as Single Titles = 27

Charlotte's Web -- E.B. White

Where the Red Fern Grows -- Wilson Rawls

The Count of Monte Cristo -- Alexandre Dumas

The Little Prince -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee

1984 -- George Orwell

Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Brontë

The Chronicles of Narnia -- C.S. Lewis

The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Outsiders -- S. E. Hinton

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll

Gone with the Wind -- Margaret Mitchell

Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison

Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley

Beloved -- Toni Morrison

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer -- Mark Twain

Anne of Green Gables -- L.M. Montgomery

Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austen

Little Women -- Louisa May Alcott

The Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger

The Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck

Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift

The Giver -- Lois Lowry

The Call of the Wild -- Jack London

Moby D!ck -- Herman Melville

Wuthering Heights -- Emily Brontë

Harry Potter (Series) -- J.K. Rowling

Tried But Did Not Complete
Counting Series as Single Titles = 2

Dune -- Frank Herbert

The Lord of the Rings (Series) -- J. R. R. Tolkien *

On Current TBR List to the Point of Having a Copy
(In General Order of Likelihood to Read)
Counting Series as Single Titles = 7

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn -- Betty Smith

Rebecca -- Daphne du Maurier

Hatchet (Series) -- Gary Paulsen

A Separate Peace -- John Knowles

The Picture of Dorian Gray -- Oscar Wilde *

Foundation (Series) -- Isaac Asimov

The Pilgrim's Progress -- John Bunyan

On or Near TBR List But Not Enough to Have a Copy
Counting Series as Single Titles = 5

A Prayer for Owen Meany -- John Irving

Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens *

The Stand -- Stephen King *

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time -- Mark Haddon

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams

On Past TBR List But Unlikely to Read
(In school, depressing and upsetting books are greatly emphasized and some made my list. The older I get, the more I don’t need help becoming depressed, upset, or confused, so some difficult books were removed. I might consider them, but I doubt it.)
Counting Series as Single Titles = 2

Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller

The Color Purple -- Alice Walker

Heard of the Author But Not the Book, No Opinion
Counting Series as Single Titles = 3

Alex Cross Mysteries (Series) -- James Patterson

The Sirens of Titan -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Tales of the City -- Armistead Maurine

Never Heard of the Author or the Book Till Seeing This List, No Opinion
Counting Series as Single Titles = 21
(So "classic" books I've read just barely outnumber "classic" books I've never heard even of the author let alone the book!

The Alchemist -- Paulo Coelho

Americanah -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Bless Me, Ultima -- Rudolfo Anaya

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- Junot Díaz

The Coldest Winter Ever -- Sister Souljah

Doña Bárbára -- Rómulo Gallegos

Ghost -- Jason Reynolds

Gilead -- Marilynne Robinson

Gone Girl -- Gillian Flynn

The Intuitionist -- Colson Whitehead

Looking for Alaska -- John Green

Mind Invaders -- Dave Hunt

The Notebook -- Nicholas Sparks

Ready Player One -- Ernest Cline

The Shack -- William Paul Young

Swan Song -- Robert McCammon

Their Eyes Were Watching God -- Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe

This Present Darkness -- Frank E. Peretti

The Wheel of Time (Series) -- Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson

White Teeth -- Zadie Smith

Not on TBR List. Would Consider Under Right Circumstances, But Unlikely
Counting Series as Single Titles = 24

A Confederacy of Dunces -- John Kennedy Toole

And Then There Were None -- Agatha Christie

Another Country -- James Baldwin *

The Book Thief -- Markus Zusak

Clan of the Cave Bear -- Jean M. Auel

Don Quixote -- Miguel de Cervantes

Game of Thrones (Series) -- George R.R. Martin

The Godfather -- Mario Puzo

The Handmaid's Tale -- Margaret Atwood

Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad

The Help -- Kathryn Stockett

The Hunt for Red October -- Tom Clancy

The Joy Luck Club -- Amy Tan

Jurassic Park -- Michael Crichton

Lonesome Dove -- Larry McMurtry

The Martian -- Andy Weir

Memoirs of a Geisha -- Arthur Golden

One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel García Márquez

Outlander (Series) -- Diana Gabaldon

The Pillars of the Earth -- Ken Follett

Siddhartha -- Hermann Hesse

The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway *

War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy

Watchers -- Dean Koontz *

SERIOUSLY ABSOLUTELY NOT EVEN!
(Would consider reading only if well paid or doing a study on why awful books and horrible authors are so popular.)
Counting Series as Single Titles = 9

Atlas Shrugged -- Ayn Rand

Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Da Vinci Code -- Dan Brown

Fifty Shades of Grey -- E. L. James

Flowers in the Attic -- V. C. Andrews

The Hunger Games (Series) -- Suzanne Collins

Left Behind (Series) -- Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

The Lovely Bones -- Alice Sebold

The Twilight Saga (Series) -- Stephenie Meyer

* Have Read the Author, But Not This Particular Book.
 

ServantThirteen

Well-Known Member
Nov 7, 2016
103
383
49
Fifty Shades of Grey is on and not Fahrenheit 451...nor any Ray Bradbury titles? Totally NOT impressed! But you can vote here if you like. The TV special on the event had a nice segment on The Stand.

Vote | The Great American Read | PBS
There are some great titles. Many classics and moderns of which I haven't read. But then .....yeah....50 Shades...really. Almost completely discredits the list.
 

Coolallosaurus

Well-Known Member
May 20, 2018
252
1,666
I was thrilled to see A Confederacy of Dunces and The Stand on the list although I am still not sure what "best-loved novels" means. The list looks like a mix of contemporary fiction sprinkled with required reading from AP high school lit/undergrad English (Call of the Wild, The Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quixote, A Separate Peace, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). I guess it's in lit classes that many people find their "best loved" classic, so that makes sense.

I am not sure if it's regional or across the US, but my local library has been a Great American Read Program to go along with the series. It's pretty neat because the library has been adding audio- and e-book versions of the 100 novels to its collection.
 
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