literary meme
It's a listing-related book meme, and we all know how I feel about listing. And books. There are several on here I am coming out of the lit-hipster closet about. No, I've never read Catch 22. I have been planning to for a long time. Also it seems I fear and avoid Russian lit. Maybe I should remedy that.
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.
add * beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read them for school in the first place.
Edit: on
helpimarock's suggestions, books I'm most anxious to read but am quite interested in reading are in red.
The Aeneid*
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
American Gods [I've heard it's good...but I love Gaiman the graphic novelist, not so much Gaiman the prose stylist, so I never got to it]
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved*
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas*
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners*
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma*
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein*
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things*
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations*
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius* [I know, I know, people love him or hate him. I actually liked this book. Sue me.]
The Historian: a novel
The Hobbit*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame*
The Iliad*
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences [Okay, yes, I know. I'm not sure how I haven't read this one yet. It's on the damn list.]
The Inferno*
Jane Eyre*
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables*
Life of Pi: a novel [I absolutely despised this book.]
Lolita************ [Absolutely one of my favorites. Because it's brilliant, not because it's dirty. Maybe also a little because it's dirty.]
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex [It's on the list. I am pretty sure I'll love it when I get there.]
Mrs. Dalloway******************** [Transcendent. And I wouldn't use that word lightly.]
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick* [Okay, honestly, I'd probably skip the cetology stuff the second time through]
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere [This book is one of several reasons I in fact did not read American Gods.]
1984
Northanger Abbey*
The Odyssey*
Oliver Twist*
The Once and Future King
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*
Oryx and Crake
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Pride and Prejudice*
The Prince*
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter*
Sense and Sensibility*
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five [It's on my nightstand. Soon.]
The Sound and the Fury******************** [Faulkner's finest, and one of the most important books in my life]
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses*
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down*
White Teeth*
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights*
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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.
add * beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read them for school in the first place.
Edit: on
helpimarock's suggestions, books I'm most anxious to read but am quite interested in reading are in red.
The Aeneid*
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
American Gods [I've heard it's good...but I love Gaiman the graphic novelist, not so much Gaiman the prose stylist, so I never got to it]
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved*
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas*
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners*
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma*
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein*
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things*
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations*
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius* [I know, I know, people love him or hate him. I actually liked this book. Sue me.]
The Historian: a novel
The Hobbit*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame*
The Iliad*
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences [Okay, yes, I know. I'm not sure how I haven't read this one yet. It's on the damn list.]
The Inferno*
Jane Eyre*
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables*
Life of Pi: a novel [I absolutely despised this book.]
Lolita************ [Absolutely one of my favorites. Because it's brilliant, not because it's dirty. Maybe also a little because it's dirty.]
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex [It's on the list. I am pretty sure I'll love it when I get there.]
Mrs. Dalloway******************** [Transcendent. And I wouldn't use that word lightly.]
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick* [Okay, honestly, I'd probably skip the cetology stuff the second time through]
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere [This book is one of several reasons I in fact did not read American Gods.]
1984
Northanger Abbey*
The Odyssey*
Oliver Twist*
The Once and Future King
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*
Oryx and Crake
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Pride and Prejudice*
The Prince*
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter*
Sense and Sensibility*
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five [It's on my nightstand. Soon.]
The Sound and the Fury******************** [Faulkner's finest, and one of the most important books in my life]
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses*
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down*
White Teeth*
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights*
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance