Yet another book meme!
This one via Florinda.
The below listed books are the top 106 books most often marked as being “unread” by LibraryThing users.
The instructions are simple:
Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your TBR list.
(I used two asterisks for those I’m sure I’ve read three times or more. There are none underlined, because there’s nothing here I want to read that I haven’t already!)
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
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 Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
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(I may have finished it. It was a long time ago.)
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
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
This is interesting. I think the list turned out strangely, since a lot of these are popular books that everyone I know is reading, or else classics I had to read in school. I have a librarything account, but it’s a free one and I don’t see where to mark it read or unread.
I’d play but I’ve read only about 10% of those books and it seems like more work than it’s worth. 😛
Some great ideas though for my next trip to the library.
What a great booklist! At least half of my library picks are chosen because I can’t think of what I’d like to read. I see a half-dozen I’d like to read, and more that I may like.
I’m reading A Confederacy of Dunces right now for probably the 5th time. It is such a hilarious book.
Kelli: I agree about the uneven-ness of the list. Seems to me a list of “books you know you SHOULD read” would be comprised of classics. Who feels they should read best-sellers? That’s like feeling should should eat Doritos.
Which is a ‘should’ I could really get into, come to that. But then I wouldn’t be able to get into my clothes…
Sheri: Good call! I only decided to copy the meme when it was clear I’d read enough to warrant the effort.
MJH: Do you also find that, when you’re in the library, some days the books just leap off the shelves, they look so interesting, and other days you can’t find one single thing you’d like to take home?
HennyPenny: I’d heard of this book before, and to be honest, I also thought it was written either by Jonathan Swift or Mark Twain.(Shows what I know!) However, I googled it, and discovered it was – as you obviously know – written by John Kennedy Toole. When I read this review, I decided that it should definitely be underlined on this list. (Except that I don’t have the option in my wordpress edit box, and I don’t know the code.) But I will DEFINITELY be reading it!
I’ll have to do this one! I’ve never visited librarything so I will have to check that out as well–thanks!
(And DO read A Confederacy of Dunces!! I’ve read it twice!)
I’ve done this over at my blog. I agree that it was an odd mixture of classics and current book club picks, but I can’t resist doing these, if only because they remind me of a few books I need to put on my TBR list. (I use goodreads instead of librarything.) I’m trying to read a classic or an important biography every month. Last month: The Scarlet Letter. How I got through years of literature classes without reading that one is a mystery.
Oh, and do read A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s a lot of fun, and Ignatius is an unforgettable character. Since you like Jane Austen so much (as do I), I highly recommend Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It’s like a Jane Austen novel with magic in it. It works, I promise.
Good lord! I’ve read at least 3/4 of them (but I’m a huge dork getting a phd in lit) – but…CRYPTONOMICON???? Are you KIDDING me? That’s one of my favorite books ever! Who picks that up and can’t finish it?? Aaaauuuuuugh!
I think I’ll put this up tonight. I just was directed to your blog by Q…he thought I might like yours, and he’s right.
Love the list! Another good one is “The Red Tent”! Anyone read that one?
[…] this from the redoubtable MaryP. I found it an interesting list, as per usual. These are the 106 books most often marked unread […]
Pingback by Did I Mention I Read A Lot? « Red Pen Mama | November 27, 2007 |