This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked unread by LibraryThing users. The rules: 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
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi : a novel     
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• 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
• 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
• Dracula
• 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
• 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
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers

That’s 15 I’ve read on my own, 5 in school, and 6 that I started but never finished (a couple of those I’ve started more than once).

So I’ve read 18.8% of the books tagged “unread.” I guess I shouldn’t feel too embarrassed. To be honest I have no interest in reading quite a few of the titles on this list. Although two of them (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) are currently in my pile of books to read. Some of the books on the list have been in the back of my mind as “classics I should read” for a long time now. I really should read those! Of the ones I did read, my favorites were Dune, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and The Three Musketeers.

I normally let memes die in my presence, but I might be drummed out of the librarian corps if I let a reading meme die, so I’m going to tag Armlessbear.

Life-changing books are not just your favorite books… but books that altered your behavior, changed your mind, redirected the course of your life. Books as levers.

An interesting question worthy of pondering. Here are mine.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams’ wonderful novel (and subsequent sequels) became popular during my college years, when reading for me turned into a chore. It was hard to read just for fun — it was something I HAD to do to get good grades. The Hitchhiker’s Guide changed all that. It was the first book that made me laugh out loud. In addition to the humor, Adams includes many poignant life philosophies as well.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
by Dee Brown
Reading the tragic history of the American Indian, told from their viewpoint, first sparked my interest in Native American culture.

John Hedgecoe’s Complete Photography Course
by John Hedgecoe
I bought my first single-lens reflex camera (a Fujica) when I was in high school. Soon after I got it, friends of my parents (Eric and Doreen) visited my family and gave me this book. It opened up the world of photography for me, teaching me concepts such as depth-of-field, composition, aperture, shutter speeds, ISO, etc. This particular book is long out of print, but Hedgecoe has many others, including some specifically on digital photography. Highly recommended.

Tales of Known Space
by Larry Niven
This collection of short stories was one of the first science fiction books I read. After reading Niven’s thought provoking writing, science fiction titles were the only ones on my book shelves for quite a while.

Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web
by Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos
This book was required reading for a class I was taking in the Web Developers Certificate Program at Marquette University. It showed me the simple yet complex beauty of CSS and designing for the web, and solidified my interest in web development work.

The Black Stallion
by Walter Farley
Farley’s Black Stallion series were outstanding adventure stories for a boy in junior high school to read. I remember spending hours with my friends pretending we were in the stories. They were probably the first books I read that made me really enjoy reading.

My favorite reads are those that let me escape. Whether I am bored in a waiting room, worried about something, or just trying to clear my head so I can sleep, books that can transport my mind to another place are worth their weight in gold. The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild by Craig Childs is a wonderful example of such a book.

In The Animal Dialogues, the author vividly describes various encounters he has had with wildlife. The book is set up so each species has its own chapter: Bear, Coyote, Rainbow Trout, etc. Within each chapter are a few stories about different encounters with that species. And “stories” is an appropriate word to use here. The author’s vivid descriptions of these encounters read like a novel. Here’s an example from the chapter “Bear”:

The bear’s shore and mine were separated by twenty feet of water. There was no solace in this distance. I had seen a bear swim a mile of swift, cold water here, much swifter and colder than this. The bear walked downstream, fixing on me now and then…  Across the river from our camp, the grizzly took a seat. It found a cluster of birch trees, and it rolled onto its rear like a very large person sitting to tell a story.

Most animals show themselves sparingly. The grizzly bear is six to eight hundred pounds of smugness. It has no need to hide. If it were a person, it would laugh loudly in quiet restaurants, boastfully wear the wrong clothes for special occasions, and probably play hockey. It would also pursue secret solitude, disappearing for weeks on end while people were expecting it at upcoming meetings. At the moment, it was bold and aloof, making sure we knew we were being watched, but keeping its distance. As a function of time and patience, our uneasiness faded. We kept looking and the bear kept sitting.

Whether keeping an eye on a nearby grizzly, or being bullied by mosquitoes that act like “backstreet thugs,” Craig Childs’ writing puts you right at his side, highlighting the beauty and wonder of the wilderness. In another chapter, the author is hiking alone in Arizona when he stumbles upon a mountain lion. As the animal moves ever closer, he fights the urge to run (which would only trigger an attack response). The rest of the story is the most suspenseful tale I have read in years, as the author stares down the mountain lion, posturing himself to convince the animal not to have him for lunch.

Anyone with at least a mild interest in wildlife will thoroughly enjoy this book. If you need further convincing, an excerpt of The Animal Dialogues is available from the publisher’s website.

I thanked ArmlessBear for not giving any spoilers away, and I won’t here either. But I just finished reading the final book in the saga, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” and I was not disappointed.

It’s probably not the best book of the series — there was a bit in the middle that went on little longer than I thought it should. I also could have done without the epilogue. When good books end, part of the enjoyment is fantasizing your own postscript. However, author J.K. Rowling certainly kept me turning those pages over the past few days. I was up one night reading “The Deathly Hallows” until 2am! When I realized what time it was and decided I should try and get some sleep, I couldn’t because the story was keeping the neurons in my brain so very active.

I thought Rowling did a great job of keeping you guessing about the final outcome. At one point I decided things would happen one way, then a chapter or two later I changed my mind, and then a little later I would settle on something else. The previous book left us with a big question as to whether one of the characters was good or evil. I won’t say how it turned out, but I will say that I knew it! When he…

Oh that’s right, I promised no spoilers.

I’ve only read the seven Harry Potter books once. And the last few, I really just flew right through. Now that my eagerness to read the end of the story has been satisfied, I think I’ll start over and really savor things. The story line is so rich and detailed, it’ll be interesting to discover all of the things I didn’t catch the first time around.

Henry’s disappearances (and subsequent shifts to other times) are unpredictable. At times they can also be humorous and distressing, making the book funny, sad, romantic and even a little suspenseful. The way the author created that emotional combination made The Time Traveler’s Wife one of the best books I’ve read in a while.

What a great speaker! He was funny, poignant and very thought provoking. I really enjoyed his take on American culture, current events and just life in general. I also liked his philosophy that a great deal of the world’s problems can be traced to the fact that people think their way is the only way, what they believe is right and people who believe otherwise are wrong. Wars, religious conflicts, political conflicts, discrimination and so forth can all be traced to the fact that somebody thinks they are right. Near the end of his talk, Sherman (I can call him that, he autographed a book for me!) asked the audience to think about one thing in the next 24 hours. “You might be wrong.”