23 but a lot of them I read an aweful long time ago.
I’ve read 33 of them. Will be curious how the vote turns out, but as I’m not an American I shall refrain from voting.
How can they call this a great American read with all of the non-American authors?
I also don’t understand how you vote. Every time I click Vote it wants to send my vote to Facebook. If I have read lots of those, I don’t want every single vote going to Facebook.
A very odd list of books indeed, of wildly varying literary merit, I’d say. Didn’t see any Bradbury, Heinlein, Clarke, Haldeman or Scalzi on the list of sf contenders, which is too bad.
I’ve read 29 of the 100:
1984
A Prayer for Owen Meany
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
The Catcher in the Rye
Charlotte’s Web
The DaVinci Code
Dune
Foundation
A Game of Thrones
The Godfather
Gone Girl
The Great Gatsby
Harry Potter
The Hunt for Red October
Heart of Darkness
Invisible Man
Jurassic Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Pride & Prejudice
Rebecca
The Help
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Joy Luck Club
The Lord of the Rings
The Lovely Bones
The Martian
The Shack
The Stand
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tough to narrow it down, but I think my Top Five would be:
Gone Girl
The Great Gatsby
The Hunt for Red October
Memoirs of a Geisha
The Lord of the Rings
Very different books, but each a great read in its own way. And if I had to pick just one, it’d be LOTR.
I think I’ve finished 36 of them–there are some titles that I may have read as an adolescent, but I don’t remember for sure. Very few of the books I’ve read from that list really stuck with me, but The Count of Monte Cristo remains one of my all-time favorite reads.
I’ve read 91 of the books, but maybe it should be 90.5 because I have never made it all the way through an Ayn Rand book.
I’ve disliked 10 or so of the ones I’ve read, mostly because they were shitty books – the “Great American Literature” book I most despise is “Huckleberry Finn”; I don’t like anything by Mark Twain.
My favorite is “Confederacy.” It’s a shame Toole didn’t live to see the success of his manuscript and write more.
That what I was expecting, too. Where the hell is Nabakov on this list? My favorite American novel, Lolita isn’t even on it.
Looks like I’ve read about 15 of them, and abandoned a few: (Lord of the Rings, I got through the first third, and had enough; 100 Years of Solitude is beautiful, but a couple times I started, got through about a quarter of the book, put it away for a couple of weeks, and then just completely lost track of the characters, so I’d have to start again.)
My favorites of the bunch are A Confederacy of Dunces (I only discovered this book about fifteen years ago; how I had never heard of it until I started leafing through a copy of it on my friend’s shelf, I don’t know. One of the funniest books I’ve ever read), Catch-22 (brilliantly funny, too, of course), Catcher in the Rye (I haven’t read it in about 25 years, but I suspect I’ll still enjoy it. I know it’s one of those polarizing books.), The Little Prince (another one I came into later in life, in my early 20s, and adore so much that I started collecting the various translations of it), and The Picture of Dorian Gray.
21 completely read and about 10 or so others I’ve read part way and lost interest.
I can’t really feel for any list that includes Twilight and it’s knock off fanfic 50 Shades of Gray…
I counted 60 that I’ve read.
Favorites that I’ve read multiple times include:
Alice in Wonderland
Harry Potter
Chronicles of Narnia
Lord of the Rings
Foundation
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Call of the Wild
Wow, 33 on the list for me, way higher than I expected. I counted a few of the series though, as long as I got a book or two into them, even if I didn’t finish (e.g. Wheel of Time, which I mercifully quit at book 4).
My short list…
1984
Dune
The Stand
Watchers
Hunt for Red October
Hitchhikers Guide
For those outside the US who can’t see the list on the front page, you can probably see the pdf list - I can from the UK.
Weird list. No Pratchett? My favourite of the ones I’ve read is probably Hitchhiker’s Guide.