(no subject)
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.
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 (read it but thought it sucked)
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities (Favorite book ever. Was known in high school as Mme. DeFarge for needlework habit + homicidal tendencies)
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (Bolded half of the title as I am only about halfway through. I find nonfiction incredibly difficult to read, so I am working through it one chapter at a time, over the course of several weeks.)
War and Peace (damned if I remember much of it though)
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations (worst book ever. Got to the end and thought "who cares?")
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
Foucault's Pendulum (in fairness, this book belongs to Jack and he has read it. I started a couple of times but never really got into it.)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo (Another favorite. If you are too lazy/busy to read the book, get a copy of Bravo's miniseries with Gerard Depardieu in the original French. It's fantastic, even if they did fuck up the ending.)
Dracula (ages ago, remember almost none of it)
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984 (Another of Jack's. I think I tried to read it a couple of times because Jack and Nick liked it so much, but never really go past the first couple of chapters.)
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility (Read it for school. I actually don't own it anymore. Decided I do not like Jane Austen.)
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 (Also saw the musical in London in '94)
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (have now coerced both Jack and Rob to read this)
Dune (long time favorite)
The Prince (I really have no intention of ever reading this, but I feel like as a medievalist I should)
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 (Will never read this book. Tried once, was bored)
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (another Jared Diamond book I pick up when I am feeling ambitious. I'll get through it eventually, but right now have stalled out about halfway through)
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 (surprisingly easy to read)
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 (read it, thought it sucked)
The Three Musketeers (Actually, I have a real soft spot for Dumas)
In other news, party was great, hangovers were bearable and hippies are not dead. More later.