Sorry about two in a row of these. Why is it that I can never resist these things? Is it bragging? Is it the impulse to share in the culture of books and the cultural literacy of my particular group of people? Probably a little of both. Book people tend to talk about books a lot, and recommend stuff we've read to other people who like the same sorts of books we do. I think that's part of it. I'm not yet a user of LibraryThing because I'm afraid I'd get sucked into that and be lost forever. There's nothing I love more than talking about books, the way other people talk about movies and television shows. But they're not mutually exclusive, by any means. I've gacked this from LJ pal Gloriana, a fellow Star Wars fan; last time we met we spent a significant part of the conversation talking about Peter Greenaway films, for which I have a particular weakness.
On to the meme:
What we have here 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.
(I have a limited amount of shelf space, so unless otherwise indicated, the unread ones or half-started ones aren't even on my shelf. Neither are a lot of the ones I've read, if they weren't keepers.)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell [Normally I love stuff like this, but I couldn't get past the first ten pages; that's my limit. Life is too short to read books one doesn't like when not reading them for school.]
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude [keeper]
Wuthering Heights [keeper]
The Silmarillion [keeper]
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose [keeper]
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice [I just can't make myself love Jane Austen they way I'm told an English major should]
Jane Eyre [The Brontes, now, they're a different matter entirely, though my favorite of the lot is still Vilette, an unsung classic.]
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace [I can only take so much of the Russians; this was too much]
Vanity Fair [and the movie, too]
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad [I'm working my way through the Robert Fagles translation right now]
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner [keeper]
Mrs. Dalloway [keeper]
Great Expectations [one of the few Dickens I haven't read, even though I can't stand him]
American Gods [keeper]
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius [Dave Eggers just really irritates me; I don't even know why]
Atlas Shrugged [drivel]
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books [this was so marvelous that I bought it as an ebook first, then wanted a hardcopy; and I bought one for my mother]
Memoirs of a Geisha [I read the book it was based on, instead]
Middlesex
Quicksilver [I still have to get to this trilogy. Truthfully, I'm a little afraid of it because I got so engrossed in Cryptonomicron.]
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales [Once for school, once for fun, now and then ever since; my excuse is that I was a medievalist ]
The Historian: A Novel [And threw across the room at the end. What a crap ending! Loved the rest of it, though.]
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera [one of my top five favorites; keeper]
Brave New World [keeper]
The Fountainhead [see above]
Foucault’s Pendulum [On the 'to try again' pile]
Middlemarch
Frankenstein [plus the Polidori short story from the same evening, sez Gloriana. Me too!]
The Count of Monte Cristo [and all the Musketeer books, with relish]
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
1984 [keeper]
Angels & Demons [wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole]
Inferno [I was reading the newish translation on the train and got into a long conversation with an NYC cop about it; he'd read it in Catholic school and loved it]
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray [keeper]
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse [keeper]
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections [And not likely to ever read it either, if Franzen's essays are any indication of his style. What a whiner!]
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune [keeper]
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 [could not put it down]
Neverwhere [keeper]
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being [which became the unbearable weight of boredom]
Beloved [keeper]
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon [keeper]
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita [Genius, but ew! Makes me want to take a shower afterwards. Alone. Ew!]
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 [Twice, believe it or not]
The Aeneid [as a kid, in a very condensed version]
Watership Down [Am I the only person who thought this was really stupid?]
Gravity’s Rainbow [V was so much better]
The Hobbit [keeper]
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
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