Friday, May 9

106 Books to (maybe) Read

Below are listed the top 106 books tagged ‘unread’ on LibraryThing (or at least these were once the top 106). I am not a current LibraryThing user, but I've thought about getting in on the fun (after the mid-summer move). My friend and co-worker Jen is, though, and I ganked this list from her blog. I thought it would be fun to see how I fared in the world of the commonly unread.

The rules for marking them are:

Asterisk – I own the book
Bold – I’ve read the book
Italics – I’ve started the book
Stricken – I hated the book
Underline – on my current TBR list

Jonathan Strange & M. 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
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
*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
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
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
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
*The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

So: I own 28, have read 32, have started 8 others, hated 2, and 19 are on my 'to be read' list (which is a constant work in progress).

How do you fare against the masses?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you do give in (and I suggest you do), the fastest, easiest way to add your whole library to LibraryThing is to use a barcode scanner to scan the ISBNs. Brian bought me one when I was doing my library, so I didn't have to enter 400+ books. You're welcome to borrow it, if you like.

lindaruth said...

So we've read some of the same books, but you're better read than I. But I will give you a couple of recommendations on books to read that you haven't yet: The Count of Monte Cristo is a good story. I read it in high school I think and enjoyed it.
There's some books by Neil Gaiman on the list and I would encourage you to read American Gods and Neverwhere. Neverwhere is a fast read and both are highly imaginative and well-written.
I read Watership Down years and years ago and remember it as a lovely story.

Not that you need more books on your list. :)

MeganBritt said...

Well, Mom, I was a lit major, which accounts for a good portion of the classic novels I have read... and the weird postmodern ones. :)

Anonymous said...

i've actually read 40 of these... crazy, huh. i'll go figure out the rest some other time... there's at least half a dozen that i've started, none that i've hated (though if i could split books in half, the second half of a staggering work would be there), and i own some of those that i haven't read... oh how i love books!

Anonymous said...

took another study break - i've started 11 others

Accept, O Lord, my thanks and praise for all that you have done for me. I thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love. Above all, I thank you for your Son Jesus Christ; for the truth of His Word and the example of his life; for his steadfast obedience, by which he overcame death; and for his rising to life again, in which we are raised to the life of your kingdom. Amen.