Meme: top 106 "unread" books

[moon_orchid]

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.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of

Comments

[angel_one]

I haven't read hardly any of these because I got out of high school really early and thus missed all the "required reading" assignments. I find it incredibly bizarre that so many of Neil Gaiman's Books are on this list (Neverwhere, American Gods, Anansi Boys). I mean - reallly - people stock their bookshelves with THOSE books to look smart? and then don't READ them? I have read each of those books twice or more. Neverwhere and American Gods are 2 of my favorite books of all time.

[moon_orchid]

Yeah...I know what you mean. I left HS after the 9th grade, so the only books from this list that were required reading for me in school were The Scarlett Letter and The Odyssey.

I'll have to check out the Neil Gaiman books...

[oddharmonic]

People buy Gaiman and don't read it for the same reasons they buy David Foster Wallace or House of Leaves, except that Gaiman is eminently more readable.

[oddharmonic]

I think you'd really like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; it's written from the point of view of an autistic narrator.

And I was serious about The Corrections being awful. revme mailed it to me after he got about 100 pages of the book and decided he couldn't bear it any longer; I read the whole thing aand wished I'd quit about two-thirds of the way through.