The Unread-Books Meme

[jducoeur]

Okay, this one is amusing enough to play.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the owns you own but have not read (yeah, I'll admit it).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment (actually a favorite of mine in high school)
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose (made it through maybe a third.  Saw the movie, but that hardly counts.)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick (hated, hated, hated it)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (a bit of a slog, but I loved Greek mythology)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities (not that I remember any of it)
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods (in the middle of it right now, and it's an audiobook, but I'll count it)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver (although it's on my to-get list)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World (I liked this one, although 1984 was more formative for me)
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum (took several tries to get through)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange (nasty as hell, but fascinating)
Anansi Boys (after I finish American Gods)
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984 (one of the two most influential books on me politically)
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (a favorite -- we have at least three editions, plus assorted novels based on it)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune (never got past page seven)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon (eventually)
Neverwhere (kinda-sorta -- I have read the graphic novel adaptation)
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon (read it at a sitting when it came out -- I was very into Arthurian myth)
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (mean to get this soon)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers (have I read this? I've seen so many adaptations in movie, TV and graphic form I'm not certain)

Comments

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

Moby Dick<> (hated, hated, hated it)

Query: When you read it and hated it, was it required reading in school or college, or of your own free will? I loathed it in school, expect I never finished it, and blotted it from my memory. Then rediscovered it in adult life, and quite love it now.

I think I shall have to bite the bullet and fill this out for myself sometime.

[jducoeur]

Required reading, and to be sure, that's a terrible way to learn anything. (Heaven knows I despised Shakespeare until I sat down and read the plays back-to-back voluntarily.)

I might retry it sometime, but it'll take some effort of will to overcome the bias against it...

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

How could you read 'Mists of Avalon' in one sitting? Wouldn't your butt go numb? Possibly even be permanently damaged.... I mean, I read the whole thing, but it was a slog. Definitely one of the books I prefer having read to actually reading.

On the other hand, I did read the entire Illuminatus! trilogy over one long weekend, so I can understand the level of absorption....

[jducoeur]

Actually, it was kind of "one lying-down". IIRC, I bought the book at noonish, and finished it at something like four in the morning before actually turning out the light. (I suspect my mother had no idea I was still up.)

Don't precisely know why the book drew me in so much -- I suspect I wouldn't find it as absorbing today. But at the time, it grabbed me hard, possibly the first fantasy novel to do so back in my hard-SF days...

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Had I not had school/work/other things to distract me, I rather suspect I would have done the same thing. But yes, it is a massive book.

Three Musketeers

[de-gonzac.livejournal.com]

I found the book opening quite memorable: a small, quiet town near the Spanish border. The townsfolk turn out to fight wolves or thieves, sometimes fight the French army, but never fight the Spanish or the Cardinal's men. Today's commotion is ... d'Artagnan's departure for Paris.