Sunday, March 23, 2008

Oh My - Another? Book Meme!

Not my words, but I'll play along. I won't have anything on the list that we own that I haven't read. Because I use the public library. My personal library is filled with poetry, a few classics, cookbooks, needlework books, and gardening books. Oh, and books on writing.

To wit:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users [AVS note: according to someone on the internet; and I can't seem to find this one's origin either. So I don't know if these are still the top 106 unread.] As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, 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.***********

I think it would be interesting to know which ones people also own but have not read since that is the point of this list. If I don't own it, I shouldn't be responsible for reading it, right? How can we mark that? There's nothing left! I'll use a + at the beginning of the title. But then, a lot of these books are one's we own but have been read by the dude; if he buys and reads them, am I responsible for reading them too?

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenia
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* How many times have I read this? Probably one less than Little Women...
Jane Eyre*

A 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
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked
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 - Haven't read it, but totally enjoyed hearing the author talk about it at the National Book Festival
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
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
The Corrections
Les Misérables
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
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces - arrrgggh - hated it
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
Eats, Shoots and Leaves
The Scarlet Letter

The Mists of Avalon*
Oryx and Crake
Collapse
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye*
On the Road
* (undergraduate thesis)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*
Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit *
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Only book on this list that I absolutely couldn't stand was the Confederacy of Dunces. I don't understand why that book got such acclaim. It was unreadable to me and I've read a lot.

2 comments:

C Michael said...

Got to say, that list would be lots easier to complete if authors were included.

That being said, read American Gods BEFORE you read Anansi Boys. It is not a sequel, but the understanding of the second, which is not as good as the first, will be enhanced.

Not sure where all those titles came from, as many are "classics" in different genres, and some are recent "instant classics" by authors who are darlings in one way or another.

As usual, I comment, but refuse to play.

Donna said...

I agree with your comment on authors. I had to google two of these books because the titles sounded so generic I couldn't remember whether or not I had read them.

I promise to lay off the book memes.