Mood:  incredulous

This is the message I wanted to send to The Big Read national survey response but as I wasn't a participant, I can't. 

I didn't participate in the Big Read but a good friend of mine sent me a list of 100 books that supposedly most Americans hadn't read that she got off some Big Read website. She said that most Americans had read six books off the list of the “top 100”. I've read more than two dozen on that list and am planning on reading quite a few more. I feel obligated to comment that quite a few of the books on the list are incredibly boring and overrated. Additionally, there were books absent from the list which astounds me utterly. How was this top 100 created? Was it complied by sales? If that’s the case, then of course all the books on classical literature reading lists are going to be listed. Just because Dickens is on practically every reading list doesn’t mean he should be included in the top 100 six times! Where was Faulkner? Where was Hemmingway? Where was Truman Capote or Mark Twain? No Agatha Christie? No Stephen King? No R.A. Salvatore? No Robert Jordan? No Anne Rice? I was utterly amazed that Charles Dickens, the most boring and overrated hack ever published, got SIX mentions and Hemmingway received not one! Jane Austin gets, what, four? What's up with that? Don't get me wrong. I appreciate seeing women represented well in the top 10 - "Way to Go!" JK Rowling and Harper Lee, but Austin and Bronte? Ick! I had also hoped to see books that had true social relevance like Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, or Ellison’s Invisible Man, perhaps even the published speeches of Malcolm X. What is a list without The Prince by Machiavelli, or The Art of War by Sun Tzu? What about Exodus by Leon Uris? Or Portnoy’s Complaint by Phillip Roth? It was a “puff list” of many books that someone at sometime thought were literary and worth the time reading. How many on that list won the Nobel Prize in Literature? Yes, I see that some of the Pulitzer winners were included, so that mollified my ire somewhat. Still, the list is woefully lacking. My husband and I have a personal library of over 2,000 books and enjoy reading thoroughly, as do our children. I feel we are pretty average Americans, thus, I find the assumption that most Americans have only read 6 books on the supposed “top 100” list ludicrous, as some of those books are so utterly forgettable and unpalatable that it is highly likely the average American blotted the trash from their mind upon finishing the ubiquitous high school exams that tested their knowledge on pointless tripe such as what the color references in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness supposedly meant.