LibraryThing’s 106 most unread books. Bold what you have read, italicise what you attempted, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list. If you haven’t heard of them, just leave ‘em alone.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
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
The Iliad
Emma*
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver*
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
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
1984
Angels & Demons*
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes*
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 5*
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
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: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
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
(I’ve heard of the rest, and some I’ve read — the abridged versions — as a child.)
I would read Cryptonomicon again if I ever get it back from my brother.
I have started Life of Pi twice. Does it get better after more than a quarter of the way in?
Comment by Terry — 4 October 2007 @ 5:51 pm
Umm… I haven’t read any of those… seen the movies for a few though!
Just started “The Raw Shark Texts”, was going to get “Life of Pi”, but remembered good coments about the Shark Texts, and changed my selection.
Did start 1984, but can’t remember why I didn’t finish it…
Comment by Tutu — 4 October 2007 @ 11:48 pm
Life of Pi – I enjoyed it, Terry, I’ve read it more than a few times. If you’re not into his style of writing you’re just not going to like it. Kind of like me and William Gibson. I just can’t get into his writing, godfather of cyberpunk or not.
Tutu, TRST is pretty good, there’s some really complicated card game out there a fan created, you can find it in the UEC on http://www.rawsharktexts.com.
1984 is good but weird.
Comment by Andrea — 5 October 2007 @ 8:17 am
You are about average for my group of friends. And you *like* a lot more of what you read than I do. I have a short attention span, so I’ve read about three chapters of most of these books, but that’s it.
Comment by Virginia — 6 October 2007 @ 11:13 am
Unfortunately, but a godsend to publishers, I tend to be quite uncritical if I like a writer’s style!
Comment by Andrea — 8 October 2007 @ 8:27 am