That book thing

[lathany]

What we have here is 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 (and I feel there should be other categories in here and have thrown in my OU books!), italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place.

The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin*
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas*
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma*
Foucault’s Pendulum*
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : a novel
The Hobbit*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad*
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : a novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon.
Moby Dick
The Name of the Rose*
Neverwhere
1984
Northanger Abbey*
The Odyssey*
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oryx and Crake : a novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion*
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice*
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility*
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife*
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

(And, yes, I did take a quick look at how many I'd read before deciding to follow this sheep)

I found this a tricky one as Foucault’s Pendulum, for example, took me more than one attempt to get through but was worth it in the end. Plus there are books I might recommend in specific circumstances (such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Catch 22 and Treasure Island) but not most of the time. And as for The Canterbury Tales; I've read and finished individual tales but never started a cover-to-cover read (although I do own a copy with that in mind). Also I wondered if book club books should be considered in the same camp as school ones - ones I'd never have thought of reading for myself otherwise (and a great source for new authors).

In other news - I'm missing a family. I think it must be Bea's dance class.

Comments

[sosoclever.livejournal.com]

Ha! I just did this, too! But mine aren't in alphabetical order.

I had the same problem with Canterbury Tales. We read something like seven of them in class. They were great, and I want to read the rest of them. Of course, the_original1 will try to make me read them untranslated, with my luck.

[secretrebel.livejournal.com]

Wow. I know I've read a lot of those. I'm going to do this meme to see what I've missed out.