I copied this from Elena23's blog. I thought it was interesting, and I've read more of them than I expected. Luckily, I don't give a rat's ass about having a book on the shelf to make me look smart. I'd rather sell them and pick up something I want to read. Anyway, have some fun with this.
Here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you looksmart 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.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion - I've read this several times. I like reading Middle Earth's entire history.
Life of Pi : a novel - ugh. Just could not finish this.
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey - I know the story, and I think I may have read it.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov (pieces assigned for class)
Guns, Germs, and Steel - actually watched him on PBS & mean to read this
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Iliad - I can't remember - may have read in school
The Time Traveler's Wife
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
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales - I do have a copy of this, and I always plan to read more. Some are quite fun
The Historian : a novel - I think it has vampires. It's on my to read list
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 (and the movie has Malcolm McDowell)
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 - freshman English in college. Hated this book.
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - actually quite good. Both Keith & I have read it.
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 - love this book.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter - heartily dislike this one too.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon - love this book.
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 - I'd much rather watch Oliver Reed & Michael York
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3 comments:
I can not tell you how glad I am to see that other people hated Tess, something about that book makes me shudder, and I've had to read it for three different classes.
I think I've read about 40 of those books. I'm a big Jane Austen fan, so I've read all of hers, and I've read a good bit of Dickens too. I just read Middlemarch fairly recently.
I was a little surprised to see 3 Neil Gaiman books on the list (Neverwhere, Anansi Boys and American Gods.) Gaiman's very readable, and if you do audio books, Lenny Henry's reading of Anansi Boys is WONDERFUL.
Obviously I don't read a lot of non-sf/fantasy modern books though. I've got Life of Pi and The Time Traveler's Wife sitting in my audiobook queue for ages now, and I can't remember why in the world I thought they would be interesting to listen to.
Lenny Henry reads them? I have a terribly difficult time seeing him in any other role than Gareth Blackstock. (I thought Chef was a roaring good time. When I saw Hell's Kitchen I realized just how real Chef could be.)
As for Tess, that made freshman English an absolute misery. That was an agonizing quarter.
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