book meme from redjo

[snugglekitty]

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand.

My Note: Wow, this is a meme of brutal honesty! Or, to put it another way, it looks like a lot of people have not been able to finish the same books I've not been able to finish. I'm also adding a star to those I hope to read someday. At present, I have read 37 of the titles listed.



Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Once you start it, you'll wonder why you didn't start it before.)
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 (What's particular amusing about the fact that I've read both of the Eco titles on this list is that I read them both as a teenager. Yup.)
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
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius *
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (I finished this book but can't say I liked it much.)
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver (As much as I love Stephenson, I also hate the Colonial era, and I just couldn't get through this.)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The historian : a novel (This was as dull as dust.)
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 (It's validating to hear that other people found this hard to read.)
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 (I love this book so much.)
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 (Awesome book.)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (Funny, this book was just suggested to me.)
Dune (I love this book and have read it multiple times.)
The prince
The sound and the fury (Unlike redjo, I hate Faulker. Goddess.)
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 (In my own defense, the way I was reading this book involved reading aloud back and forth with a partner, with whom I broke up before we finished it.)
Slaughterhouse-five
The scarlet letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation *
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas
The confusion
Lolita (I hate this book, and in fact, this author, with a fiery blinding passion. And you can't take away my English degree. Ha ha ha!)
Persuasion*
Northanger abbey*
The catcher in the rye
On the road (It's interesting that people find this hard to get through. I really liked it.)
The hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (Now this I don't get. I found this book very engaging and easy to read.)
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 (You would think this would just be an adventure story. What people fail to mention is the subtle political commentary, which went way over my head and made me put the book down before even one swordfight.)

Comments

[katkt.livejournal.com]

What are the asterisks?

There are a number of these I simply can't fathom as "hard to read". Amongst them is, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation," which I enjoy immensely and imagine you would also.

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

The asterisks, as I noted at the top, mean "I hope to finish this book someday."

This list was also a good reminder of some books I've been meaning to read, including ESL. :)

Oh, bother.

[avivasedai.livejournal.com]

Just go read my post. I did it correctly over there. *grin*