AOL says these are the 10 Books to read Before you Die:

1. The Bible
2. Gone with the Wind
3. The Lord of the Rings (whole series counts as one)
4. Harry Potter (whole series counts as one)
5. The Stand
6. The Da Vinci Code
7. To Kill a Mockingbir[d] (they had a typo)
8. Angels and Demons
9. Atlas Shrugged
10. The Catcher in the Rye

So I'm not sure why Dan Brown gets two separate mentions while Rowling and Tolkien get only one. And doesn't reading Harry Potter cancel out The Bible and send you straight to H-E-double-hockey-sticks?

You have four books by authors who never really wrote anything else: Salinger, Lee, Mitchell, and God. But no Dickens, Twain, Angelou, Austen, Melville, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Orwell, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Wilde, Nin, Steinbeck, Hugo, or Bronte. But those two Dan Brown's: WTF?

I think AOL was going for volume. The first five titles weigh in at over 1,000 pages each, with the Potter series probably over 3,500 pages. I think their feeling is, anyone who's read over 10,000 pages of anything is pretty much done.