Friday, June 6, 2008

LibraryThing's Top 106 Unread Books

Anali posted this meme on LibraryThing books that are tagged unread. In bold are those books I've have read, in bold with asterick* are the titles I've read for school, and italicized are those I've started but didn't finish. I'm a total busy-body when it comes to other people's bookshelves and what they've read and are currently reading and I loved going through Anali's list. Fair's fair, here's mine:

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
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad*
Emma
The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner (on the to-read list)
Mrs. Dalloway (I've never even heard of this book, so now I'm feeling a little dim)
Great Expectations*
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver (this is sort of a prequel to Cryptonomicon--someday I'll pick it up again)

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 (a book with kind of title ought to be more interesting)
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 (I don't feel too bad about this one now b/c Anali, the queen of sci-fi hasn't read it either)
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 (yep, this book has made it onto three separate book lists on my blog)
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 (coming back to this one)
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: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down (I've heard people talk about this book in life altering terms, someday I'll get around to it)
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island David Copperfield

I look at this list and see lots of ambition, but not a lot of follow through : )

4 comments:

  1. Bugger - you got to this post idea before me. I have the list on my computer just waiting for me to post it...way to go for getting it up quicker than I did. :)

    Again I must strongly recommend Dune, which I first read in high school. I'm not quite sure what I think of Anali's idea to experience it as an audiobook. It's long and wordy; I think listening would put me to sleep, but reading it is an experience you should not miss.

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  2. I've only read 8 on this list which makes me think I've spent waaaay too much time reading Scifi/Fantasy novels and series rather than literature. However, I did read Dune (because, you know, it's scifi/fantasy). There's a few on there I might add to my list that perhaps may expand my horizons.

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  3. You are not dim for not knowing about Mrs. Dalloway. It is an important book written by Virginia Woolf, but that doesn't mean everyone's read it. It's mentioned in The Hours by Michael Cunningham (and the movie by the same name.)

    I think a lot of it depends on what your schooling was like, what your interests are and what your friends and the people you liked in high school and college read. And how fast you read.

    Here is my list. http://rumbarb.blogspot.com/2008/06/books-read.html
    I have read a lot of them, but I _do_ have a b.a. and a master's in English. I tend to get snippy when people who are getting phds. in English haven't read Faulkner or some other basic novel or text.

    And I feel heartened that not only me could finish Beloved. I read Jazz, but I couldn't finish Beloved to save my life.

    And appropos of nothing, I am not sure about the color of the text on my blog; the purple is too dark, the yellow is too light, and the white is too white. Any suggestions??

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  4. By the by, the Gabaldon books seem to be quite addictive, as you may be finding out for yourself. :). Haven't read them of course, but have heard good things and that they seem to be satisfying.

    Am reading The last girls by Lee Smith which I'm liking a lot and am reading too quickly and getting into it. Of course, I _was_ on a plane for 5 hours last night.

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