Book meme
These are the top 106 books marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of lunchtime today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand.
(grabbed from here and there on the flist)
Oddly enough many (*not* all) of the books on here that I've read, or that I read and couldn't finish, are of the sort that pretty much left me feeling meh, okay, whatever. Not entirely coincidentally, a number of these also fall into my mental cluster of books I read That Summer, 'that summer' being the summer that I was waiting for my O level results and inhaling all the books that I vaguely felt like I ought to. You can probably make a good stab at which ones they are. They're almost uniformly pre-1900, with occasional forays into twentieth century literature. These largely left me feeling like I'd missed the point. As it happens, I think I was expecting the point to be more exciting, and I didn't realise that the horror of the banal was an entire genre in itself until some time during A level English, when Middlemarch in all its glory was forced down my throat. I read the entire collected works of Shakespeare too, that summer. Cover to cover. It was my mother's School Cert prize. And I seem to remember I got sunburnt, sprawled out in the back garden reading book after book after book. It kept my mind off panicking about my results.
It was a good summer.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and prejudice
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 (73)
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations
American gods : a novel
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
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys : a novel
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 : a novel
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 : a novel
Slaughterhouse-five
The scarlet letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu…
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas : a novel
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…
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into …
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's rainbow
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its …
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The three musketeers
(grabbed from here and there on the flist)
Oddly enough many (*not* all) of the books on here that I've read, or that I read and couldn't finish, are of the sort that pretty much left me feeling meh, okay, whatever. Not entirely coincidentally, a number of these also fall into my mental cluster of books I read That Summer, 'that summer' being the summer that I was waiting for my O level results and inhaling all the books that I vaguely felt like I ought to. You can probably make a good stab at which ones they are. They're almost uniformly pre-1900, with occasional forays into twentieth century literature. These largely left me feeling like I'd missed the point. As it happens, I think I was expecting the point to be more exciting, and I didn't realise that the horror of the banal was an entire genre in itself until some time during A level English, when Middlemarch in all its glory was forced down my throat. I read the entire collected works of Shakespeare too, that summer. Cover to cover. It was my mother's School Cert prize. And I seem to remember I got sunburnt, sprawled out in the back garden reading book after book after book. It kept my mind off panicking about my results.
It was a good summer.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and prejudice
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 (73)
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations
American gods : a novel
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
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys : a novel
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 : a novel
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 : a novel
Slaughterhouse-five
The scarlet letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu…
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas : a novel
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…
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into …
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's rainbow
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its …
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The three musketeers