LibraryThing's unread books
Gacked from mpoetessWhat we have here is 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 (Did I read it? Didn't I? I seem to recall that I did, but I remember nothing about it. I italicize.
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose (More than once, even - I love Umberto Eco)
Don Quixote (I read it, but in an abridged version.)
Moby Dick (d:o)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (d:o - clearly I read too many abridged versions. The library is full of them.)
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 (This one was actually the real one, but I only read one song.)
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
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 (Again, did I? Didn't I? Was it the real one or the abridged one? I have no idea.)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses (I read Haroun... as well as The Ground Beneath Her Feet, but so far only a few pages of The Satanic Verses. I do own it, though, so someday I will read it.)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park (The only Jane Austen book I couldn't finish. I hated everyone.)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels (Lalala, abridged, lalala.)
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (I will, though. I've borrowed it from the library.)
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 (I read a couple of her books before I got tired of the ”men are made of fail” crap.)
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 (Another abridged version - at least I think it was abridged.
David Copperfield
To summarize: My school only forced me to read very few novels, and even then I usually had a choice (I had to read a dystopia, for instance, and chose Brave New World). I read through quite a few classics on my own, but have very little clue about the moderns, unless possibly if it's some weird fantasy stuff. I tend to finish the books I start reading, but I've read waaaay too many books in abridged versions. And sometimes I can't remember whether I've read a book or just soaked up its plot through osmosis.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Did I read it? Didn't I? I seem to recall that I did, but I remember nothing about it. I italicize.
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose (More than once, even - I love Umberto Eco)
Don Quixote (I read it, but in an abridged version.)
Moby Dick (d:o)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (d:o - clearly I read too many abridged versions. The library is full of them.)
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 (This one was actually the real one, but I only read one song.)
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
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 (Again, did I? Didn't I? Was it the real one or the abridged one? I have no idea.)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses (I read Haroun... as well as The Ground Beneath Her Feet, but so far only a few pages of The Satanic Verses. I do own it, though, so someday I will read it.)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park (The only Jane Austen book I couldn't finish. I hated everyone.)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels (Lalala, abridged, lalala.)
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (I will, though. I've borrowed it from the library.)
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 (I read a couple of her books before I got tired of the ”men are made of fail” crap.)
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 (Another abridged version - at least I think it was abridged.
David Copperfield
To summarize: My school only forced me to read very few novels, and even then I usually had a choice (I had to read a dystopia, for instance, and chose Brave New World). I read through quite a few classics on my own, but have very little clue about the moderns, unless possibly if it's some weird fantasy stuff. I tend to finish the books I start reading, but I've read waaaay too many books in abridged versions. And sometimes I can't remember whether I've read a book or just soaked up its plot through osmosis.