Ga*ked from lahosken

[darcydodo]

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, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

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 (actually, my shameful secret is that I never read all of the final book; I ran out of time and then never got around to it)
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 (I would maybe have finished it, but I lent it to leech; and then when I got it back I didn't have time to 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 (I think I read all of it)
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 : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
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
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 (or maybe I did read it all... clearly it made little impression)
The Mists of Avalon
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 : 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 (though I never had a copy in my hands; I had, or maybe still have, a .txt file on my computer)
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Comments

[sovay]

in my head: "I am I, Don Quixote"

Have Jacques Brel's "L'homme de la Mancha," which is extraordinary. I recently acquired his translation-version of the musical; I am trying to figure out if it's some kind of betrayal of Richard Kiley if I prefer Brel.

[darcydodo]

That is rather fantastic.

[tlaad.livejournal.com]

Wow...I skimmed the list, and have read quite a few of those books. However, the vast majority were read during Peace Corps. So it *does* broaden one's horizons!

[earthtomeryl.livejournal.com]

I read most of mine on public transit... amazing how productive I am when bored. We should all move to rural places in our early 20s so as to get a real education.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

*snag*

:)

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I've read 31 of those books - surprisingly, this includes many that were published after 2000, which is when the amount of reading that I do seems to have dropped precipitously. I guess the kind of books I like to read are often one kind of book that people like to buy and intend to read, but don't actually read.

[arrowedumbrella.livejournal.com]

I've read about that many too (~33, I wasn't keeping close count). Many of the books I've read on the list, I read because I ran across multiple references to them. There's probably a high correlation between that and the "kind of book that people like to buy and intend to read." :)

[cwinant.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, read 22 in completion, but embarrasingly, half of those were required reading in pre-college school: gradeschool (Treasure Island) Middle School (Jane Eyre, Catcher in the Rye) and high School (many others). There are a couple of books there that I was _supposed_ to read in high school, but didn't (senioritis), and some that we read selections of (Cantebury tales)... but yeah, I've only read 11 of those 22 books out of my own choosing.

But, I dont think that of those books listed, I only own the ones that I have read. I do have some other poser lit on my shelves, like "Finneganns Wake", Goethe's "Faust" and Mann's "Dr. Faustus". I _did_ read the copy of Mann's The Magic Mountain, which I own.

Not even going to mention how many of those listed works I've seen on TV or as movies.

I also own lots of books in french which I have not read.

[jholomorphic.livejournal.com]

Oddly, as someone who not only buys books much faster than he reads them (or at least bought; I've cut down) and thus has read an embarrasingly small fraction of books on my shelf, and reads mostly nonfiction anyhow even though maybe half of what I own is fiction, the books on this list that I own I've mainly read (24 read, 4 parly read, 11 owned and not read). In contrast to Kenny, I neither own nor have read any of the books on the list published after 2000.

[lahosken (from livejournal.com)]

"I would maybe have finished it..."

What this meme needs, in hindsight, is a notation that means "I completed reading this book, but could have got along without it. You folks who didn't finish need have no regrets."

[zdamiana.livejournal.com]

I would be extremely unimpressed if I were to see a copy of "Angels and Demons" on someone's shelf. I am struggling to find words to describe just how terrible a book it is.

[darcydodo]

:)

I haven't actually read it, but The Da Vinci Code (which I read in PDF format back when the Da Vinci Code Quest thing was going on, just in case it was relevant) was appallingly bad, so I'm not surprised to hear that Angels and Demons was terrible as well.