As seen most recently at Maude's and other places around the web.
The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.
Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
I'm not sure how to deal with the one's I read on my own and then read for school. I think I'll add an asterisk for those. I do think that is a distinction that needs to be made since I didn't expect those books to be school reading when I first read them. I should get on with this. I'm sure it will be sufficiently embarrassing.
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 (I was 11 and I know I didn't really "get it")
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre *
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair (Actually, on my list for this summer)
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
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 *
Angels & Demons
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
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune (In English and in German!)
The Prince (my guide to high school)
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
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion is this
There is 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
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
10 hours ago
5 comments:
Oh, K8! Save yourself the trouble of reading Vanity Fair--seriously the most GOD-AWFUL excuse for a book I have ever put before my eyes --600+ pages of absolute crap of the most odious and offending variety-- the time it took me to read the d@mn thing I can never have back-- SAVE YOURSELF!
Well, it's among the 150+ books I own but have not read, so I thought that I should at least give it a try. If I don't like it after a few chapters, I will move on to other books. It's funny, though, people seem to either love that book or hate it. I never hear much in between.
Here's something in between: Vanity Fair is pretty fun, esp. if every few chapters you remember that Thackery was Virginia Woolf's step-grandfather. It's hilarious to imagine how Woolf would have reviewed him had she been his contemporary.
I'd love to see this meme replicated with 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, though that would involve copyright violation and insanity.
These lists always seem WAY over heavy with novels, and missing so many good poems and plays! (I think I counted three works in verse?) And they're also WAY heavy in recent lit. (And as much as I like it and it's interesting, how does Freakonomics get on the same list as the Iliad? Heck, at least it's not a novel!)
I think the origin of the list explains why there is such an odd combination of books. Since the people who tag books at librarything (like me) typically own the books they've listed and tagged, the list represents books that people own but have tagged "unread." So, you get the people who buy certain books thinking they "should" read them, books that are bought with good intentions and not read, and books that were gifts and never read. Plus, there are some people (like me) who sometimes buy antiquarian books but don't necessarily read the books.
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