Unread Books

[lederhosen]

Via quizzicalsphinx: 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.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude Read small snippets of it (my parents owned it), never got into it.
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote - I *may* have read the whole thing, it was a long time ago.
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
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 - good start, but the last third of the story was impossible to swallow.
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged - in the sense that people have subjected me to lots of excerpts thereof.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Quicksilver Exposition
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales - I was named after Chaucer, bless my parents.
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera - see '100 Years of Solitude'
Brave New World
The Fountainhead - see 'Atlas Shrugged'
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo - snippets only
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses - my parents bought this on principle, but I don't think they ever read it. I skimmed snippets, didn't get into it.
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 - the long version with all the obscure political allegory.
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince - may have read the whole thing, can't recall.
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
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
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 - snippets only.
The Aeneid - think we did bits in Latin.
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit - had read it many times before we did it in school.
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Comments

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

If that's Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian I see in the list... I read that recently. It meanders a ton and some people really dislike that, but I rather enjoyed it. It put ideas into my head of visiting Old Country #2 (ranked in no particular order) even though I'm willing to accept that the book described its eastern European spots far more romantically than the post-Soviet versions of them appear to the naked eye.

Even if such ideas are ill-founded, it's not like I can afford that sort of thing right now. :)

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Watership Down? Really? Who buys Watership Down just to put on the shelf?

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

> Who buys Watership Down just to put on the shelf?
Fudds masquerading as symps, naturally.

I see he's a Tolkien addict like me too. I remember in elementary school, we didn't read books, we read from readers, with the most insipid stories imaginable. Then one day I took home The Hobbit and my brain caught fire because I COULD SEE THE ENTIRE WORLD he wrote about in my head. I could smell the Misty Mountains, felt the stifling air of Mirkwood Forest, tasted the dryness of Lonely Mountain. I don't think any other author has been as good at doing that as Tolkien, Shakespeare had better dialogue etc., but for making you feel like you're there, Tolkien is #1 in my book.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

That surprised me too. It's not that hard to read...

[moxie_man]

Well...let's see:

Wuthering Heights (hated it)
The Silmarillion (picked it up, started it, got busy and never got back to it.
Moby Dick
The Odyssey
The Canterbury Tales (we only read part of it)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dune
The Scarlet Letter
Watership Down
The Hobbit
Treasure Island (and then read it again as an optional assignment in school)

[quatranoctal.livejournal.com]

12 read in full, including 4 for school, 3 read bits of. Feel free to guess which ones :P

[bookwoman72.livejournal.com]

For school, I've read: David Copperfield.
For pleasure: The Hobbit; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Odyssey; Iliad; Aeneid; Watership Down; Freakonomics; all of Austen except Persuasion; Catch-22; Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Frankenstein; Mists of Avalon; Once and Future King; Divine Comedy; the Prince; Confederacy of Dunces; Brave New World; Dracula; Catcher in the Rye; Dune; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; Gulliver's Travels; One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest; Dorian Grey; Grapes of Wrath

Started and didn't finish: Sillmarillion; Hunchback

[bookwoman72.livejournal.com]

Oh- and read Canterbury tales both for school and pleasure