Meme! Which I stole from Yummy Turtle. These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, make it red if you couldn't stand it, and star those you want to read. Make it green if you've never heard of it.
The ones with no special mark I am mostly indifferent to, or perhaps that's implied.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell* (It IS recommended by 50 Books.)
Anna Karenina*
Crime and Punishment*
Catch-22*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick*
Ulysses (Yeah, I don't see myself ever getting through this in any meaningful way. I want story, J.J., not a damn literary mission. God.)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (I own a copy but we'll see if it gets read. It's not really calling my name...)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities*
The Brothers Karamazov*
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (It seems like nonfiction writing takes some serious hubris. I mean what about that subhead? Overambitious much? I prefer to let them sit for a few decades to see how well they age, before I expend any effort on them.)
War and Peace*
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife* (A present from my sister-in-law. Thanks M.!)
The Iliad (See: The Odyssey)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner* (At some point, I will pick up one of the frillion copies of this book for $.25 at a garage sale.)
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations (A victim of high-schoool indifference, I will probably revisit. I'm all about the Dickens these days.)
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged (She. Is. DeRANGED.)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (I read a couple Ayn Rand, and I now actively campaign against her ridiculousness. Come join me!)
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange*
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984 (I'm pretty sure I've read this, but I may have it mixed up with Brave New World or Farenheit 9whatever. I better revisit.)
Angels & Demons (Wait, is this by the Da Vinci Code guy? If so, I will not be reading it. He made a fool of me once with his shite.)
The Inferno* (Maybe I'll read it. You know what they say about the road to hell. Hey-O!)
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 (I just finished this today. Seriously. I wouldn't recommend it -- Franzen is a cynical bastard and not in a good way.)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (I tried this a few months ago and it didn't hook me, but I'll probably try again.)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Maybe I'll read this. Any recommendations? Should I bother?)
Dune
The Prince*
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present (This is totally the medicine I think I should take but don't. I've even given it as a gift, fer crying out loud!)
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything (I actually listened to this audio book on a road trip. Awesome!)
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (God. It was interminable)
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road (I agree with Capote on this one -- not writing, just typing)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything*
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down (I know this is about rabbits. I'm intrigued and also afraid.)
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood*
White Teeth*
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Do your own list and let's compare. Is there anything here that you're appalled (Appalled!) I haven't read? I'm easily swayed. Seriously.
12 comments:
OMG. I love booklists. You actually have heard of "Collapse" because Joe and I couldn't shut up about it on the canoe trip. And "The Blind Assassin?" That would be in my profile under "favorite books."
Now if only I knew how to italicize, bold, red and green things in this blog world.
And don't be afraid of the rabbits. I just read "Watership Down" this summer. I loved it.
Now what counts as "read?" Do books on tape, comic book classics, and/or movies count?
Well, I counted books on tape, but not anything else. You can add whatever categories you like.
Also, the italicize, bold, and color buttons are at the top of the entry window.
I'd do this sort of thing if I was smart enough to know how to work HTML tags!
Happy reading, my Sassmaster friend.
-cK
You don't need the HTML!! There are formatting buttons right on top of the window you type your entries into.
You never heard of the Silmarillion?
I hate Ayn Rand too! No wonder we're friends.
L. Galadriel Gehner sez: The Silmarillion is by my godfather, J. R. R. Tolkien. (But I think that you and I discussed once that Tolkien, worshipped by junior-high boys everywhere, just did not speak to us in the same way.)
Yeah, my dad, the literature teacher, was dismissive of Tolkien, so I was persuaded it was silly. I probably missed some magical moments, but I doubt it's be magic at this age.
I love Tolkien, but there's no way I'm touching the Silmarillion. I think that book requires obsession beyond love.
Over the course of your dad's career did he have kids read any from that list? 14 of the ones I checked had been assigned to me in some class or other. Not that I was necessarily grateful.
And I was thinking, if these books are all from a list of those most often NOT read, do you think there's a good reason?
The Blind Assassin (which is like the best book in the universe) and Oryx and Crake are by Margaret Atwood.
American Gods and Neverwhere are by Neil Gaiman. He wrote Stardust, which is in theatres now. I found it enjoyable in a large part due to Michelle Pfeiffer (spelling? hey it's not a poster!) Glad they made it before banning women from film.
I know my dad taught The Iliad and The Odyssey, and I'm pretty sure he assigned Moby-Dick. There must have been others from this list but I don't remember. We didn't go to his school, so my experience with his syllabus mostly came from using the back of extra copies of quizzes for scratch paper.
The list comes from LibraryThing, which is a site for people to catalog their personal book collections. If this list is the unread ones, it represents the books people buy but don't read. So the things they think they SHOULD read but don't.
I agree. Ann Rand is a turd.
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