Watch as The Great American Read finds our favorite book

America’s favorite pastime of reading a book has now become a PBS special. The Great American Read first aired on May 22 and is intended to end on October 23 after 8 episodes about America's top 100 favorite books. The series hopes to end with a counted vote for America’s favorite book.

The series involves individuals’ opinions on books and their different genres, as long as the books are fiction and written in english. Anyone can vote on the PBS website for one of the hundred classic and popular literature books. Not only does this list include young adult literature, but children’s books as the 100 includes as many people in their show as possible. Some of those special guests being John Green and James Patterson, popular authors with featured books.

Some of these books include the Harry Potter Series, Ready Player One, Charlotte’s Web, Great Gatsby, and The Outsiders. The episodes are also very diverse from topics about heros and villians to love and fantasy worlds.

Here at Aurora, Jeness Kington has used this program in her Honors English 9 class:

“A corner of my classroom is dedicated to TGAR materials...students had to select a book from TGAR list…they will do a video presentation expressing their thoughts on the novel and its worthiness to be on the list...students have to select an episode to view and write a response.”

Through enforcing this curriculum, Connor Zamary took up the complete challenge. He’s read almost half of the books from the list as well as his favorite “The DaVinci Code.”

Zamary says, “There are a lot of good books that aren’t on the list. Because it is such a short list compared to the almost 130 million books that are in the world.”

Despite this, he encourages others to watch the show or read the books to have a better connection to literature. Kington also believes this show is an amazing way to spread some of America’s favorite works of english writing which everyone would benefit from reading.

Read more about the show at https://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/home/ and tune in on October 23 to see America’s favorite book!