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Pinched from Lauredhel at Hoyden About Town
What we have here is the top 100 or so 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.
Not going to do the underlining because often I'd already read for pleasure books that were later assigned as school reading. So, bold means I’ve read it, whether for school or for fun. Italic means I started and didn’t finish. Plain text means I haven’t even tried.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 (and re-read but not recently)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (just once, couldn't finish it on subsequent re-reads)
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote (I meant to finish it but I think I got distracted by something else)
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (I've dipped in but not had a serious go at it)
Pride and Prejudice (Many times)
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities (I remember picking this up and starting it one night when my family was visiting friends of my parents and we kids had been put to bed while the adults had grown-up time)
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
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
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
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 (this one is beside my bed)
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
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 (many, many times)
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (many, many times)
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
A Night & Day Of Eatin’ Good In San Francisco
4 hours ago
4 comments:
I have read very few of those (about 9 or 10), although I have read the Silmarillion at least three times (I took notes each time I think!). I am currently reading Great Expectations, and adored Wuthering Heights. I tried to read the Mists of Avalon, but it was just too damned depressing!
I think the only books on that list that I have attempted to read were 1984 and Pride & Prejudice - both for school and I didn't finish reading either of them. They would make us watch the film/show at the same time as reading the books and being a slow reader, I never got around to finishing them. Plus with P&P, as well as studying it for year 12 english, reading the book and watching the awesome BBC series, I was also in the local Musical Union production of the musical version of Pride & Prejudice! I'd had quite enough of it by the end of that semester!
I´m so jealous of your book collection. I live overseas and can´t get enough books. I forgo bringing back clothes when I go overseas to pack my bag with books from op shops (trip to Australia in December where I hope to bring 40 kilos books back) Although I must say, some of my favorite books are on your no read list. I loved the Kite Runners, Middlesex (although it is long and can get a bit windy) and Memoirs of a Geisha. These are books I have read over and over again.
Hi Ingrid :)
I don't own all those books, though I do own pretty well all the ones I've read. What I do have is an embarrassingly large sci-fi and fantasy collection. I'd hate to live somewhere where I couldn't get access to books easily, I bet December seems much too far away!
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