Sunday, October 14, 2007

Unread Books

I couldn't resist this meme I saw on Dooney's World and Pea Soup. These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users.

"The books I've read are in bold,
the ones I started but couldn't/didn’t finish are in italics,
what I couldn’t stand has a strike through,
those I've read more than once have an asterisk*,
and those underlined are on my To Be Read list."

I have started and not finished more books than this list would make it appear. With the green background of this template, it is difficult to distinguish between bolded letters and normal letters. Try temporarily increasing the font size of this page to make the distinction more obvious.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22

One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
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
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assasin
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
The 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 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
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
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
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
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Mark has been systematically going through his lifetime to be read list lately. It would be interesting to see his list.

Tomorrow is Blog Action Day. I am putting together a photo essay; I still need to take a few more photos today on my walk.

5 comments:

  1. I read a confederacy of dunces and it was, without a doubt, the worst book I ever read. I have no idea why I finished it other than I kept waiting for it to get better. It was supposed to be this great, wonderful book, but I found it painful, stupid and nonsensical.

    But that's just my opinion - LOL.

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  2. Anonymous08:32

    Guns Germs and Steel. Love it or hate it, you'll find it interesting.

    Vanity Fair. If you have lots of extra time on your hands, like say you're doing five-to-ten for tax fraud, it's a pleasant enough way to kill that time. Otherwise....

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  3. Does seeing the movie count?

    I am amazed at how many books on that list I have read only because they were required reading in either high school or college. Most of the time, I enjoyed them once I got into them but one wonders if I would have read them if left to my own devices.

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  4. Hey gaia -- So many people have told me I was nuts for hating "A Confederacy of Dunces." You have no idea how thrilled I am to find someone else who thought it was crap.

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  5. Anonymous18:58

    How nice to see your version of this. I keep wanting to know the backstory, what is hidden behind all those read, didn't get through it and so forth notations. It took me several attempts to get through " The Unbearable Lightness of Being" for example even though I never got through "The Silmarillion". And the books disliked category is very misleading because one doesn't have to say why. One of my most disliked books has a treasured place on my shelf because it lead me to so many other things.

    Any way, perhaps I do need a life. And I have been reading your wonderful posts, even if I have been sometimes incapable of stringing together a comment.

    ReplyDelete

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