Unread books meme
I’m glad I spoke my truth the other day. It feels good to come out and finally find that I am not alone. I have read them because people told me it took a while for JKR to hit her stride. I have read them because I wanted to be included, part of the crowd. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have liked the Harry Potter books as a kid (among other things, I had this thing against reading any book that gave the protagonist’s address in the first chapter). It seems I had more stamina for espousing an unpopular opinion as a kid than I do now, and I’m not sure I’m happy with that realization. On the other hand, I think I took iconoclasism to unhealthy extremes when I was younger. I desire a healthy balance there, and coming out as not liking JK Rowling's books feels like a courageous step forward.
There's this "unread books" meme going around that seems amusingly appropriate for me this week. Here's my contribution (for the record, there are no books by JK Rowling on the list.)
"Below the cut are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users at the time the first person to post this meme posted it.
As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an *asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list."
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment (I loved this book when I was 17)
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (good for insomnia)
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice (I've picked it up several times and never gotten beyond a few pages)
Jane Eyre
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
The Iliad (I think I only read exerpts in school)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway (still on my table)
Great Expectations
American Gods
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
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 (I read almost all of it, though)
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
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* (LOVE IT!)
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
White Teeth
Treasure Island*
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
There's this "unread books" meme going around that seems amusingly appropriate for me this week. Here's my contribution (for the record, there are no books by JK Rowling on the list.)
"Below the cut are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users at the time the first person to post this meme posted it.
As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an *asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list."
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment (I loved this book when I was 17)
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (good for insomnia)
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice (I've picked it up several times and never gotten beyond a few pages)
Jane Eyre
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
The Iliad (I think I only read exerpts in school)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway (still on my table)
Great Expectations
American Gods
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
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 (I read almost all of it, though)
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
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* (LOVE IT!)
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
White Teeth
Treasure Island*
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers