Some people say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

[constance]

Four days from the end of the month, and I am running out of things to say, but determined to finish anyway.


These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of whenever whoever started this meme looked). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but didn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina (this is one of those books that I have to remind myself I haven't read.)
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights (When I read it, I was years past the age when I thought Romantics were romantic. I acknowledge that the writing is brilliant, but I absolutely could not stomach a single character in the book.)
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose (I loved this enough to think reading Foucault's Pendulum would be fun. HAHAHahahahAha.)
Don Quixote (I've read bits and pieces of it, but never all the way through.)
Moby Dick
Ulysses I accidentally picked this up in my freshman year of high school when I was researching a project on The Odyssey for Latin class. All unwitting, I opened it up and my brain imploded. It was years before the scars healed enough for me to try again.)
Madame Bovary (Fucking Emma Bovary. Cry me a river, bitch.)
The Odyssey (In third-year, painfully slow Latin, no less!)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre (I liked Wide Sargasso Sea infinitely better.)
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife (I think I am the only woman in the world who read this and remained unravished by it.)
The Iliad (Again, in Latin.)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs Dalloway (You know, I like Virginia Woolf much better in theory than I ever do in practice.)
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas Shrugged (See note for The Fountainhead.)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex (listened to it on audio.)
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (Bits and pieces, excerpted in various textbooks.)
The Historian : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (When I was 16, my uncle, who likes to encourage my dorkiest aspects, gave me this because he knew I was a bookworm and knew I wanted to be an architect, and what better gift? Well, OH MY GOD. This book horrified me so much that I immediately went out and read Atlas Shrugged as well. I couldn't believe that people got away with advocating objectivism, when the very idea of objectivism made me queasy. This is still true of me.)
Foucault's Pendulum (*runs screaming*)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo (I had much more fun reading this than I ever expected to. Isn't it wonderful when that happens?)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King (I only read this for the first time a few years ago, and loved it.)
The Grapes of Wrath (Oh, those Joads. I got so sick of those Joads.)
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons (I hated The Da Vinci Code so much that I never bothered with this one.)
The Inferno (Bits and pieces, in classes.)
The Satanic Verses (The year this came out, I couldn't buy half my college Art History texts because they were published by Penguin which was also Rushdie's publisher and which was also part of the fatwa against Rushdie, hence lots of publication and shipping delays. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and why exactly it was I couldn't get books on the Ancient Near East; in the end, I just figured those fundamentalists, like all fundamentalists, kind of needed to relax a little.)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse (see above note on Woolf)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, you old sad sack, you.)
Oliver Twist (I always start Dickens with the best of intentions, then somehow mislay them.)
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables ( Do you know, I can't remember! I think I may have, but I don't remember for sure, so I won't count it.)
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune (It's all Sting's fault.)
The Prince (Bits and pieces.)
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 Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : A Novel (I checked this out from the Library and kept renewing it because I KNEW that one day I WAS GOING TO FINISH GODDAMN IT and then I never did. I must have had it about six months.)
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 (Latin.)
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

Comments

[kickthebeat.livejournal.com]

THIS IS GETTING SO HARD. i need more memes to do! i can't do this one; i have read like, sixteen books on this list! send help!


also, oryx and crake was delightful, imho; would you like me to send you my copy?

[tofty.livejournal.com]

would you like me to send you my copy?

You interest me strangely, old bean.

And you are not kidding about the painful lack of memes around these days! Whatever happened to the good old days when you couldn't open your friends page without seeing at least four different ones, all going strong? Stupid friends. *kicks livejournal*

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

would you like me to send you my copy?

I saw where tofty quoted this below and misread it as "would you like me to send you my crap?" And I thought, wow, I'd like some free books too! :D

[tofty.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't we all like free books? Why don't I be getting more of them?

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

I liked The Time Traveller's Wife right up until the first appearance of the geneticist, at which point I thought it fell to pieces in a giant tumble of implausibility. Because what I had liked about it was the plausibility of an otherwise implausible phenomenon, and the last third of the book was, in the erudite critical patios I learned in my one semester as an English major, a piece of shit.

I too hated The Grapes of Wrath and those ridiculous Joads, however. I, as a middle class white kid in the 1980s 'burbs - lower middle class, to be sure, but middle class nonetheless - found nothing in it to which I could relate. Stupid 11th grade American literature curriculum. I especially hated Rosasharn and how my teacher (who was so white as to be pale) pronounced her.

[tofty.livejournal.com]

Oh, I am all about implausibility made plausible (I'd never have made it through the Thursday Next series otherwise!), but there are ways and ways to make the implausible plausible, you know? I never really committed to the book, so I never really got past scoffing point -- and the fact that it's written like a particularly purple romance novel in places didn't help much.

I especially hated Rosasharn and how my teacher (who was so white as to be pale) pronounced her.

Here I must display my ignorance. How should I pronounce Rosasharn?

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

I think pretty much the way it's spelled. It just irritated me because my upper-middle-class, polished, middle-aged, pale white teacher insisted upon reading from The Grapes of Wrath and also Huck Finn in this horrible fake Southern accent. Dreadful.

I admit I was also predisposed to like The Time Traveller's Wife because a close friend gave it to me when I was just about to leave for a trip abroad that I did not want to go on. So I find it comforting to read because I remember being somewhere I didn't want to be and finding comfort from it then. It's really rather meta.

[bowdlerized.livejournal.com]

Oh no you hated Jane Eyre! :O

I loved Time Traveler's Wife almost all the way through to the end, at which point I began to hate it violently.

[tofty.livejournal.com]

It seems your response is not uncommon. Hmmm. I have to say, though, that I am not one of your number: I hated TTTW right from the beginning.

In the case of Jane Eyre, I admit to exaggerating for effect. I read it when I was about twenty, and I found Jane and Rochester both to be decidedly unsympathetic characters, but I freely admit that I was, again, of the wrong age and mindset to appreciate their charms properly. I'm a more sympathetic reader now, and I've sometimes wondered if I ought not reread the book to see if I don't feel differently about it; but I've never got round to it.

It looks from this as though I just hate the Brontes, doesn't it? But I don't! I love Villette and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

I THOUGHT THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE WAS SO PROBLEMATIC I NEED TO NOW TALK ABOUT IN CAPITAL LETTERS

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

ABOUT IT, ahem

[tofty.livejournal.com]

WE SHOULD DISCUSS IT IN ALL CAPS SOMEDAY!

[friendly.livejournal.com]

Am I the only person on your flist who loved TTTW the whole way through. I cried at the end. I'm so sorry. :|

[tofty.livejournal.com]

Hahahahaha, you. I was truthfully convinced that I was in the vast minority when I said I hadn't liked it -- and then people started stepping up.

I still think that most people do like it! Apparently the people on my friendslist are cynics and antisentimentalists, and that's our problem, not yours. :((

[friendly.livejournal.com]

See, I am strange with books. I do not read book reviews or recommendations or hunt for The Perfect Book, I just read the backs of them and think, This sounds exciting, and then I buy it and find out if I am right or not. I wanted something to read whilst on my work travels over the past few days, and in the airport bookshop amongst lots of other books was TTTW, and as I alluded to, I couldn't put it down. I don't know. I really, truly loved it. I had no idea it was this hugely popular Book Of The Times. :( I do believe I am a huge romantic, though.

[tofty.livejournal.com]

I do not read book reviews or recommendations or hunt for The Perfect Book, I just read the backs of them and think, This sounds exciting, and then I buy it and find out if I am right or not

I do the same thing, and as a matter of fact, it is how I ended up reading TTTW, too! :O

I don't know how popular the book was there, but in the US, it was a bestseller for quite a while.

[friendly.livejournal.com]

Oho, maybe it is in fact the norm of book purchasing and I didn't realise that either! I do keep myself in quite a bubble. :))

I imagine it was probably somewhat popular, to be on the limited shelves at an airport, but I can not find it on Angus & Robertson's Top Five for any genre. Not right now, anyway. It's probably been out for a year or so though. Adjflkjd. I'm going back to my bubble.