for once, we can blame sugarcoatedlie

[seldnei]

Just because I thought wow, a lot of books I love are on this list, so now I'm curious. I think I did this meme a while back, also. Lame Laura.

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, 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.


*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 (twice!!!)
Ulysses (dealio started this and didn't finish it--he's *still* a better man than I)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (I started one translation for high school and didn't finish, then read another translation in college all the way through. I would suggest not reading a prose version.)
Pride and Prejudice (I should try this one again, actually--I was twelve when I tried it)
*********Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities (I should try this one again, too--again, junior high when I gave it my first shot)
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
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 (I posted about this, actually. Good book, but I'm burned out on the genre)
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 (I didn't finish it in high school, but did finish it in college)
*****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 : a novel
*1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
**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 (I'd recommend this to all my comics geek friends, but if you don't love comics I don't think you'll enjoy it quite as much)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury (twice!!!)
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
***Neverwhere (the series is pretty cool, too)
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
*The Unbearable Lightness of Being
*****Beloved (I read this for myself before I read it for school)
Slaughterhouse-five
*****The Scarlet Letter (twice!!!)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
**The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel (we need a symbol for books you think sucked)
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
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (I need to put this on my books list)
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

39 out of 106? Hm. I will say that I am a lot more likely now to stop reading a book than I was when I was younger. Partly because I am no longer required to read things all the way through, and partly because life is too short to read bad books.

Comments

[sugarcoatedlie.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOD! Will no one hear my plea! The Time Traveller's Wife! That's what I'm giving everyone for Christmas this year. You're all reading it, whether you like it or not! :)

How odd that you read a bunch of them in school and I didn't read any of them. I mean, you were majoring in English or Composition or something right? So you'd need to read some of them obviously. But, seriously, I read none of them in high school either.

I'm surprised that you liked Jane Eyre but not Wurthering Heights.

I need to read Love in the Time of Cholera. Maybe I should add that to my library list.

[stotangirl.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOD! Will no one hear my plea! The Time Traveller's Wife! That's what I'm giving everyone for Christmas this year. You're all reading it, whether you like it or not! :)

Oh my--well, I will put it on the list I have in my day planner of stuff to either get at the library or the book store.

I remember one of my grad school classmates being surprised at how much of the stuff we were reading was stuff I'd already read in high school. I suppose it says something for my school. I focused on a lot more modern lit in college.

I like Wuthering Heights, I just like Jane Eyre more. :) With Love in the Time of Cholera, just be prepared that the cholera isn't metaphorical. That got me.

[jkason.livejournal.com]

You know, I never realized how few books I finished in school until I started mentally italicizing stuff on this list. I was never fast enough, and then I was supposed to be starting the next book, and heck if I wasn't just as capable of discussing the book using what I had thus far read (in most cases. We shan't talk of my being called out for not having finished Handmaid's Tale before I spouted off in class), so I set them down and moved on and never looked back.

I did, however, read both Beloved and Midnight's Children all the way through both times I had to read them for classes. I don't expect that's much of an acheivement, but it felt like one at the time for some reason.

[stotangirl.livejournal.com]

I could fake my way through class with the book half-read in high school, but I couldn't quite manage it in college. The one time I tried, it was on a quiz and Larry used me as an example of a not-A essay. "This is too vague, no specific examples--the author has obviously not finished all of the reading ..." Yee-ah.

I will say, there were classes where I did a lot of skimming. But I've always been a fast reader, so I had an advantage.

Morrison and Rushdie are dense writers, so I'd say that's an achievement. :)