A meme going around (I found it at Caleb Deupree's fine blog):
The top 100 or so books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
[If blogspot has underlining capability, I don't see it--suffice it to say that some of the below were read for school, maybe five or six. The Iliad, Odyssey and the Aenied stand out to me as things I should really get to.)
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
The 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
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 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
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
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
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: 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
What an odd list. Why *two* Ayn Rand books (and why have you read both :))?
ReplyDeleteps: "In Cold Blood" should be on your to read list.
ReplyDeleteOh, I read my share of Rand in college. I still think she's an interesting, if flawed, individual but it's impossible to discuss without people going ballistic, so I won't.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't remember if I had actually read In Cold Blood or not, or if I was confusing that with the movie--in either case, it was long enough ago that I've forgotten.
I'm surprised that Proust isn't on the list (I'm currently 2 1/2 volumes in).
Interesting. I'm going to ask friends what they have read and see if it corresponds to what I imagine they have read. My reading is better than my counting, I think it was 86 of those that i had read, but i did keep losing count. And some of the others I had not even heard of.
ReplyDeleteI've read two Ayn Rand but it was We the living and not Atlas Shrugged, it was a long time ago and I don't know what i would make of her if I read her again now, maybe i will. I was in secondary school when a friend recommended her and I read her with no realisation she was so controversial.
The list is interesting for it's omissions, and why The Simarillion? are they testing staying power?
Seems like there were a fair number of SF/Fantasy readers in the survey, presumably more than a few who have difficulties with length.
ReplyDeleteI thought Stephenson's Cryptonomicon was a rollicking good read and will potentially be a wonderful SF/adventure movie if well-handled. I looked forward very much to Quicksilver but only made it through about 150 pages, bored to tears and severely aggravated by the arch pseudo-archaic use of language. Major example of irritating style over substance.