Andy, the Information Tyrannosaur, tagged me with the following meme. So any embarrassment I might incur is his fault!
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.
The Time Traveler’s Wife is still one of my favorite books. I can’t remember if you recommended it to me or if I recommended it to you, but I’m glad one of us discovered it!