Tuesday, May 06, 2008

I spotted this at Stef's place. This is one of those things for which I wonder if perhaps I'm a direct descendant of Ethelread the Unread.*

What we have here is 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, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

(*And yes, I know, old Ethelred was actually poorly-counseled and not actually poorly-read. Though he was probably very likely illiterate).

So here are the ones I've read/not read. With a few throwaway comments here and there because I can't resist them.

And more in the spirit of What you have on your self that makes you look smart, I'm going to asterisk the ones that I own copies of but have not (yet?) read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina*
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose*
Don Quixote*
Moby Dick*
Ulysses
Madame Bovary*
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre

The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov*
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (have it at home, might read it)
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
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
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 novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (And no, after reading what of it I did, I feel no need to read the whole thing)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula (may actually have read this for school)
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (Yes, all three: Great Books, baby!)
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 (Started it last summer, hit a rough patch, started to find it depressing and gave up)
Les Misérables*
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
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
Neverwhere
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
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas* (I think I have this one on the shelf - nonfiction book about clouds, no? I have several weather-related tomes as I'm kind of a weather geek).
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
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (many, many times)
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island*
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Okay, that's a little embarrassing with the asterisks. I do own a lot of books that I bought while saying to myself "I should read this!" and I wind up never getting around to them.

2 comments:

dragon knitter said...

interesting which books we've both read. I actually own moby dick, but found the language pendantic, and hard to read. my 13yo has read it, though! (2 years ago, in fact!)

one of those "should read the classics" typet hings, i guess.

chittavrtti said...

Cloud Atlas is a book by David Mitchell. It follows the lives of various people as they interesect wiht one aonther. I really enjoyed it but I don't think that all people like multi-, multi-, perspective books :)***CV