Just 'cause I can. (stolen from ironychan)
The list is the 106 books most often noted as unread by Library Thing users. Bold is for books you've read. Italics for books you've started but haven't finished. Strikethrough is for books you found unreadable.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (GAH. I know the plot drags a bit sometimes but it's so good! Oh for some patience among readers...)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude (It's kinda like the above on crack.)
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (Bow before my geekitude, n00bs!)
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
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 (fully recommended, btw.)
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods (not nearly as good as Anansi Boys, IMHO.)
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 (Dear Gregory Maguire: inserting random sex and violence into childrens' books does not make you edgy. Love, me.)
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
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula (I've promised myself I'll get back to it, though.)
A Clockwork Orange (one of those "oh, I should read this but I just know I'll come out of it hating myself and wanting to die" books, like 1984.)
Anansi Boys (yay!)
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel (I loved it at first, then the effect mentioned in A Clockwork Orange kicked in and I was too guilty about not living in the impovrished Congo to finish.)
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
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 (I really want to finish it, but it's one of those books for me that always ends up taking a lesser priority to others.)
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 (I read it for school--this being during late February when I tend to get really, really depressed, I didn't come off with the best impression.)
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon (I read this when I was about 14 and decided it was THE BEST FANTASY SINCE TOLKIEN AND THE BEST ARTHURIAN RETELLING PERIOD AND ALL YOU HATERS WHO SAY THAT MORGAN LE FAY WAS AN EVIL WITCH CAN BITE MY SHINY METAL ASS, but after a few years of the same I came to the conclusion that Marion Zimmer Bradley needed to back slowly away from the soapbox. Plus I could never read any of the sequels, or the Darkover books even during the same obsession.)
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
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (Wait. The Sil I get, but why is The Hobbit on this list and not LoTR? It's way more readable than either... guess it just doesn't have a major motion picture with hot guys to recommend it.)
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
***
A great deal of these, especially the acknowledged classics, were read to me by my mother during school hours. So in the sense of actually having moved my eyes across the page to absorb the text I suppose I haven't "read" them per se, but I'd certainly like to think I absorbed most of the information.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (GAH. I know the plot drags a bit sometimes but it's so good! Oh for some patience among readers...)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude (It's kinda like the above on crack.)
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (Bow before my geekitude, n00bs!)
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
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 (fully recommended, btw.)
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods (not nearly as good as Anansi Boys, IMHO.)
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 (Dear Gregory Maguire: inserting random sex and violence into childrens' books does not make you edgy. Love, me.)
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
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula (I've promised myself I'll get back to it, though.)
A Clockwork Orange (one of those "oh, I should read this but I just know I'll come out of it hating myself and wanting to die" books, like 1984.)
Anansi Boys (yay!)
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel (I loved it at first, then the effect mentioned in A Clockwork Orange kicked in and I was too guilty about not living in the impovrished Congo to finish.)
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
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 (I really want to finish it, but it's one of those books for me that always ends up taking a lesser priority to others.)
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 (I read it for school--this being during late February when I tend to get really, really depressed, I didn't come off with the best impression.)
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon (I read this when I was about 14 and decided it was THE BEST FANTASY SINCE TOLKIEN AND THE BEST ARTHURIAN RETELLING PERIOD AND ALL YOU HATERS WHO SAY THAT MORGAN LE FAY WAS AN EVIL WITCH CAN BITE MY SHINY METAL ASS, but after a few years of the same I came to the conclusion that Marion Zimmer Bradley needed to back slowly away from the soapbox. Plus I could never read any of the sequels, or the Darkover books even during the same obsession.)
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
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (Wait. The Sil I get, but why is The Hobbit on this list and not LoTR? It's way more readable than either... guess it just doesn't have a major motion picture with hot guys to recommend it.)
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
***
A great deal of these, especially the acknowledged classics, were read to me by my mother during school hours. So in the sense of actually having moved my eyes across the page to absorb the text I suppose I haven't "read" them per se, but I'd certainly like to think I absorbed most of the information.