America's 100 Most-Loved Novels Were Just Announced. Did Your Favorite Make the List?

There's one simple and surefire way to get smarter: Read more books. Many of the most respected entrepreneurs--from Bill Gates to Elon Musk--are voracious readers.

Take a page out of one CEO's book, and you can find a way to read 100 books a year. But which book to pick up first? Deciding what to read is a hurdle within itself.

You could start with America's most beloved novels. PBS just announced a new TV series called The Great American Read. The series celebrates what PBS has deemed America's 100 favorite novels.

To select the top 100 novels, PBS polled thousands of people and asked them to name their favorite novel. They used public opinion polling service YouGov, which captured responses from a demographically and statistically representative group of 7,200 Americans.

Then, PBS pulled in 13 literary industry professionals to cull down the list according to a few criteria. To help increase variety, each author only got one book on the list. Entire series--like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings--only counted as one book to keep the list varied. Books could come from anywhere in the world, as long as they were written in English. Lastly, all books had to be fiction.

Here's the final list of America's 100 best-loved novels in alphabetical order:

1984, by George Orwell
A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
Alex Cross Mysteries (series), by James Patterson
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Another Country, by James Baldwin
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya
The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White
The Chronicles of Narnia (series), by C.S. Lewis
The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean M. Auel
The Coldest Winter Ever, by Sister Souljah
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
Doña Barbara, by Rómulo Gallegos
Dune, by Frank Herbert
Fifty Shades of Grey, by E.L. James
Flowers in the Attic, by V.C. Andrews
Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
Ghost, by Jason Reynolds
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
The Giver, by Lois Lowry
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan
Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton
Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
Looking for Alaska, by John Green
The Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
The Martian, by Andy Weir
Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden
Mind Invaders, by Dave Hunt
Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville
The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon
The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan
The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
The Shack, by William P. Young
Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse
The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut
The Stand, by Stephen King
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
Swan Song, by Robert R. McCammon
Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
This Present Darkness, by Frank E. Peretti
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
Watchers, by Dean Koontz
The Wheel of Time (series), by Robert Jordan
Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls
White Teeth, by Zadie Smith
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

The list spans a broad range of titles, some as far back as the 1600s and some published within the last couple of years. It's an interesting mix. There's a little bit of something from every genre. You'll find plenty of literary classics alongside contemporary bestsellers.

PBS is kicking off The Great American Read eight-part TV series on May 22, and will explore them all. "It investigates how and why writers create their fictional worlds, how we as readers are affected by these stories, and what these 100 different books have to say about our diverse nation and our shared human experience," the network explains.

Once the series kicks off, PBS will open voting for people to vote on their favorite of the 100 titles. America's favorite book will be announced when the TV series ends in October.
Dust off that library card (or get one in the first place), and get to reading. There's a whole summer ahead of you! And even if you don't get to them all, it's still worthwhile to surround yourself with more books than you'll ever have time to read. (Via Inc)