Dec. 14th, 2008 03:13 pm
Unread book meme
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unjapanologistNicked from amanuensis1's journal.
"These are 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."
Quite a few of these don't ring a bell, but in my defense, I'm not a native speaker of English. (Edit: Hah. "In my defense". Seems I really do want to look smart and well-rounded.)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment (reading this one right now through DailyLit, a rather awesome service that mails you a bite-sized chunk of a book each day. Some paying, most in the public domain and thus free, gratis and for nothing.)
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights (the Semaphore Version was good too!)
The Silmarillion (I must have started reading this during my Tolkien craze some three years ago, but I don't actually remember)
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose (thought this was some long-winded philosophical doorstop until I actually picked it up out of boredom somewhere. Monks and murder and labyrinthine libraries and Inquisitors! Books don't get much closer to perfect than this. Think I'll go re-read it now, actually. I ended up using Umberto Eco's theories on semiotics and aesthetics as a cornerstone of my Ph.D research, which I may not have done if I hadn't known him as the author of that fabulous novel I first read in high school.)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses (my God, this one was scary)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre (slugged through this one when I was still young and responsible because I thought it would make me look good to be reading this Olde Famous Novel, only finished it out of sheer stubbornness. I'm never starting a book for that particular reason again, ugh ugh ugh.)
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
Zatoichi
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations (I think I've 'started reading' pretty much every Dickens novel, as in 'read the first page')
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Quicksilver Exposition
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum (reading now)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo (fairly sure I read this, but I might be conflating the actual book with several vaguely interesting movies)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King (want to read for the title alone, I love that phrase)
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible (this sounds kind of cool ;)
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (also reading through DailyLit)
The Satanic Verses (stole from grandmother's closet somewhere in primary school because I'd heard about it on tv, found it boring and confusing but might want to give it another chance now ;)
Sense and Sensibility (liked the movie, considered reading this, but my 'Jane Eyre'-induced period drama phobia hasn't abated even after a decade)
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 (first SF book I read that was truly awesome. It felt incredibly real. Paul Atreides starting out as a Skywalker-like Plucky Young Hero but turning into a fearsome and nasty, nasty rebel leader with unnaturally blue headlight eyes was good, too ;)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (this title's always sounded utterly terrifying, and I've never even known what it's about)
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon (I think...)
Oryx and Crake
Collapse
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 (I'm no longer able to stomach any book/film/whatever featuring animals, I'm always afraid they're going to suffer and/or die. No problem whatsover with cute defenseless human being suffering on screen, though)
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield (this will have to be another DailyLit one, I really do want to read it but can't hold it for any serious amount of time without throwing it aside)
"These are 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."
Quite a few of these don't ring a bell, but in my defense, I'm not a native speaker of English. (Edit: Hah. "In my defense". Seems I really do want to look smart and well-rounded.)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment (reading this one right now through DailyLit, a rather awesome service that mails you a bite-sized chunk of a book each day. Some paying, most in the public domain and thus free, gratis and for nothing.)
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights (the Semaphore Version was good too!)
The Silmarillion (I must have started reading this during my Tolkien craze some three years ago, but I don't actually remember)
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose (thought this was some long-winded philosophical doorstop until I actually picked it up out of boredom somewhere. Monks and murder and labyrinthine libraries and Inquisitors! Books don't get much closer to perfect than this. Think I'll go re-read it now, actually. I ended up using Umberto Eco's theories on semiotics and aesthetics as a cornerstone of my Ph.D research, which I may not have done if I hadn't known him as the author of that fabulous novel I first read in high school.)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses (my God, this one was scary)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre (slugged through this one when I was still young and responsible because I thought it would make me look good to be reading this Olde Famous Novel, only finished it out of sheer stubbornness. I'm never starting a book for that particular reason again, ugh ugh ugh.)
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
Zatoichi
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations (I think I've 'started reading' pretty much every Dickens novel, as in 'read the first page')
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Quicksilver Exposition
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum (reading now)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo (fairly sure I read this, but I might be conflating the actual book with several vaguely interesting movies)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King (want to read for the title alone, I love that phrase)
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible (this sounds kind of cool ;)
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (also reading through DailyLit)
The Satanic Verses (stole from grandmother's closet somewhere in primary school because I'd heard about it on tv, found it boring and confusing but might want to give it another chance now ;)
Sense and Sensibility (liked the movie, considered reading this, but my 'Jane Eyre'-induced period drama phobia hasn't abated even after a decade)
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 (first SF book I read that was truly awesome. It felt incredibly real. Paul Atreides starting out as a Skywalker-like Plucky Young Hero but turning into a fearsome and nasty, nasty rebel leader with unnaturally blue headlight eyes was good, too ;)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (this title's always sounded utterly terrifying, and I've never even known what it's about)
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon (I think...)
Oryx and Crake
Collapse
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 (I'm no longer able to stomach any book/film/whatever featuring animals, I'm always afraid they're going to suffer and/or die. No problem whatsover with cute defenseless human being suffering on screen, though)
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield (this will have to be another DailyLit one, I really do want to read it but can't hold it for any serious amount of time without throwing it aside)