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Did you watch it?!? On Tuesday, October 23 PBS aired the final episode of The Great American Read and revealed America’s favorite book. And the winner is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee! Lee’s book took and kept the lead right from the beginning. There were a few close calls: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier was bumped out of the 24th spot by The Stand by Stephen King and Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry edged past Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett to claim the 22nd spot. The ranking of each title is listed below:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2. Outlander (Series) by Diana Gabaldon
3. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
6. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
7. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
8. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
9. Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
11. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
12. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
13. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
14. Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
15. Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
16. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
17. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
18. 1984 by George Orwell
19. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
20. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
21. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
22. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
23. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
24. The Stand by Stephen King
25. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
26. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
27. Color Purple by Alice Walker
28. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
29. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
30. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
31. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
32. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
33. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
34. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
35. Dune by Frank Herbert
36. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
37. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
38. The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel
39. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
40. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
41. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
42. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
43. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
44. The Giver by Lois Lowry
45. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
46. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
47. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
48. Game of Thrones (series) by George R.R. Martin
49. Foundation (series) by Isaac Asimov
50. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
51. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
52. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
53. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
54. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
55. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
56. The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
57. The Shack by William P. Young
58. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
59. The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy
60. Beloved by Toni Morrison
61. The Martian by Andy Weir
62. The Wheel of Time (series) by Robert Jordan
63. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
64. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
65. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
66. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
69. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
70. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
71. Hatchet (series) by Gary Paulsen
72. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
73. The Twilight Saga (series) by Stephanie Meyer
74. Tales of the City (series) by Armistead Maupin
75. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
76. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
77. Left Behind (series) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
78. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
79. The Watchers by Dean Koontz
80. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
81. Alex Cross Mysteries (series) by James Patterson
82. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
83. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
84. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
85. Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews
86. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
87. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
88. This Present Darkness by Frank E. Peretti
89. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
90. Another Country by James Baldwin
91. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
92. Looking for Alaska by John Green
93. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
94. Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon
95. Mind Invaders by Dave Hunt
96. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
97. Ghost by Jason Reynolds
98. The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah
99. The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
100. Doña Bárbára by Romulo Gallegos

Though I still haven’t read all the books on the list, I have made progress and I do intend on getting through it. So far, my favorite book on the list that I had not read until I saw the list is The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. What about you? Are you reading through the list? Any pleasant surprises?

Castle Rock. Emma gets practically giddy when it is mentioned, and then when you get her together with  Dale and Lynne (outside of work time, of course) the chatter is non-stop. The three of them are either talking all things Castle Rock or one or the other is shushing the others because they are an episode or two behind. If you’re not familiar with Castle Rock, as I wasn’t, it is a new horror show on Hulu based on a fictitious town in Maine that appears in a variety of Stephen King books. A number of other Stephen King’s works have been adapted for television that are set fictitious Maine towns. They include: The Dead Zone, Haven, The Mist, Storm of the Century, and Under the Dome.

This got us thinking about other TV shows that are set in Maine. Do you remember Murder, She Wrote with Angela Lansbury? Set in Cabot Cove, Maine, the plot involved an author, Jessica Fletcher (played by Lansbury), who happens to be around whenever someone is murdered. It aired for twelve seasons on CBS and Lansbury received four Golden Globe Awards for her role in the series.

More recently, the show Once Upon A Time which aired on ABC from 2011-2018, is set in Storybrooke, Maine. The premise of this show is that fairy tale and folk tale characters are confined to present-day Storybrooke due to a curse cast on them by the Evil Queen Regina. They are exiled and their memories lost until a young boy, with the help of his mother (who may or may not be the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming), set things in motion to free them all.

There’s also Olive Kitteridge which is a four-hour mini-series based on the book by the same name by Elizabeth Strout. Set in Crosby, Maine, this follows the life of Olive, a retired schoolteacher who is married to the man who runs the local pharmacy. They have one child, a troubled son Christopher, who is a podiatrist.

And we can’t forget Dark Shadows that aired on weekdays from 1966-1971. It was a gothic soap opera that was set in Collinsport, Maine and followed the lives of the wealthy Collins family.

I haven’t seen all these shows, but it’s interesting to look at how Maine is portrayed. Is the portrayal of Maine accurate? Has the way “Hollywood” portrays Maine evolved? It’s interesting to see how Maine is projected on audiences that might not know anything about us.

At Topsham Public Library, when we start getting requests for Tess of the D’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy, we know school is soon beginning. Students who enroll in AP English classes have summer reading assignments, and, as in true student form, they tend to wait until the last minute to get it done. (Who can blame them?!)

Other trends in summer reading assignments seem to be 1984 and Animal Farm both by George Orwell, Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut, and, of course, Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Those are all signs that students are back at it.

Watching these students cramming in those summer assignments causes me to reminisce over my high school reading assignments. I think my favorite book that I read in all my years of high school is another of Vonnegut’s work – Player Piano. It was assigned by Mrs. Maguire my senior year. That book has stayed with me all this time and I think about it often. In the book, Paul Proteus must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run by machines.

I also remember studying Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Mrs. Baker’s class. Actually, I don’t remember the text as much as I remember her playing Iron Maiden’s version in class.

I asked my fellow staff members what their favorite assigned high school reading was. (Some had to really think hard because high school was a lloooonnngggggg time ago for some of us.)

Dale’s favorite was assigned by Mr. Palmer, and it was The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien which is about the Vietnam War. A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote is Dave’s favorite book that he was assigned to read in high school.  This book is about a memory of a Christmas shared between a seven-year-old boy and sixty year old woman. Linda read Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. This story tells of journeys by a ship’s surgeon Lemuel Gulliver, who encounters strange lands and strange beings.

Emma did not connect with much of the assigned reading until about age 16 when, through assigned reading, she discovered the poetry of Samuel Coleridge (and in particular, Kubla Khan), Shakespeare’s plays (especially Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream) and the novel Emma by Jane Austen which is a humorous look at match-making in nineteenth century England.

Mr. Kingdon assigned The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier in his English class. That’s how Cyndi came to read it. She remembers that book clearly because it was the first book she read where the bad guy wins at the end.  She loved it for the unexpected rush of surprise as she read the last few pages.  She went on to read I Am the Cheese, also by Cormier, immediately after she finished The Chocolate War.

In Sixth grade Julie’s teacher, Billie Howe, let the class pick what they wanted to read. Some of them picked The Lord of the Rings series (which her brother had just read).  She thought the series was awesome. That was also the first time Julie read To Kill a Mockingbird. Sophomore year, Mrs. Young and/or Mrs. Anderson, had us read The Scarlet Letter. She loved it!  Junior year, Ms. O’Neil assigned a lot of interesting books but her favorite was The Great Gatsby. (It was the best paper she ever wrote.)

What did you read in high school? Did you love it or hate it? Does a particular assigned book hover in the back of your mind? Sometimes it’s hard to enjoy a book you have to read, but there are times when those books stick with you for the rest of your life.