books

[meganursula]

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, italicize the ones you own but have not read.  I choose to also make comments.

Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment - i've read a bit of this, but not all of it.
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote - i've read excerpts from this one, too.
Moby Dick - i hated this book.  I'm pretty sure i didn't actually finish it, despite my efforts.  It did cause me to stand up in the middle of english class one day and proclaim 'if we spend another day discussing this drivel i'm going to scream'.  I was forced to follow through.
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies - but Josh liked it.
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 - i have tried to read this a number of times, but couldn't get into it.
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 - although i'm not sure i read quite all of it.
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 : a novel
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 : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces - i really really hated this book.  It is a complete waste of carbon.  or electrons.  or really anything.
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 : a novel
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
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

for someone who reads as much as i do, i'm not very well read.  *sigh*

Comments

[cheesepuppet.livejournal.com]

I've only read fourteen. Although what's funny is that I have about ten more from the list on my shelf that I haven't read, because that's one of my big problems with bookstores: eyes bigger than reading pace. I should make an OGRES post about that.

[mh75.livejournal.com]

Josh and i each have a shelf of 'books to read'. But in the last year or so i've put myself on a book buying diet, and i try not to buy so many while there are still some on the shelf. It helps, although i still have a big stack.

[cheesepuppet.livejournal.com]

I've tried that a few times. It hasn't worked really well for me, and I finally figured out that I have some kind of priority list going in my head that these books just aren't on. They'll sit forever. I also discovered I have the same problem with books that I do in other areas of my life: shoulds.

"I should read that, I should know that."

"I should learn that."

"I should go do that sometime."

My friend Llyra (she's the one I brought to your house that time) dressed up like a Clue Fairy once year for Halloween, complete with a Clue Bat to give people a clue. I keep thinking I should dress up as the Should Fairy.