The Latest Book Meme, or, Jon Never Passes Up a Chance to Brag

[woodwardiocom]

"These are the top 106 books most often marked as 'unread' by LibraryThing's users." The ones I've read are in bold.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime And Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (Keeping a copy of The Atlas of Middle-Earth at hand made it easier to get through.)
Life Of Pi: A Novel
The Name Of The Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick (Only the good bits, thus far.)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride And Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale Of Two Cities (Required high school reading.)
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 (Required high school reading.)
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged (Though I skipped lightly through chapter III.7.)
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 (Most of it, in a college Chaucer class.)
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 (And I've also read Island of the Day Before, so [nyeah].)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count Of Monte Cristo
Dracula (Many times.)
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once And Future King (Many times.)
The Grapes Of Wrath (Required high school reading.)
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
1984 (Many times.)
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense And Sensibility ("And I'm Alan Rickan.")
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 (Required high school reading.)
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 (It's in my to-be-read stack.)
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher In The Rye (Required high school reading.)
On The Road
The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (It's in my to-be-read stack.)
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 (Many times.)
In Cold Blood: A True Account Of A Multiple Murder And Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island (Technically, I listened to the unabridged audiobook.)
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

So, hmm, 39 out of 106.

Comments

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

I will again recommend "Freakonomics" as an excellent bathroom read. The book is not all that long, and it comes in well-woven anecdotes (with cites!), so it is perfect for that venue.

As for "Atlas Shrugged", I've widely heard it said that there are three ways to read it: read everything except the Galt speech, read only the Galt speech, or read everything. Very few choose the latter option.

I've done the first two, separated by years.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

My colleague whswhs recommended reading Atlas Shrugged as a "pulp fiction outlier", and I found it much easier to appreciate it on that level. (Doc Savage would fit into it quite neatly, as would Captain Nemo.)

[tactical-grace.livejournal.com]

39 is a pretty good number. Despite a number of appalling gaps, I have actually read 50 books on this list.

As for "Atlas Shrugged", I actually did read the whole thing all the way through. There was a definite slowdown for the length of the Galt speech.

Josh

[dani-namaste.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised - I wasn't expecting to have read too many of these, but I've actually read a number of them - many different from the ones you read. For example, Lolita and Dubliners have been two of my favorite books since high school, and I've read both at least half a dozen times.

I don't know if I'd make it to 39, but I'm guessing I'm close to the 25 mark.

[dani-namaste.livejournal.com]

correction: as far as I know I've only read 16, but 10 of those are in my list of all-time favorite books. Confederacy of Dunces and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are, in particular, well worth the read.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Confederacy of Dunces and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are, in particular, well worth the read.

[nods] Zen, at least, is definitely on my list to take a look at.

[dani-namaste.livejournal.com]

if you're mostly a sci-fi/fantasy person, Confederacy of Dunces might not be your thing. But it's a great story about characters too ridiculous to be true, and it's one of the few books that had me laughing out loud within the first chapter.

[chadu.livejournal.com]

62.

CU

[chadu.livejournal.com]

I've also altered the meme, as I am wont to do, because so many of my favorite books are on it.

CU

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

62.

I fear you.

[chadu.livejournal.com]

I fear you.

As is right and proper.

(This is why I don't do those "how many books have you read this year?" style memes.)

CU

27.5

[cathijosephine.livejournal.com]

The Silmarillion - liked it
Life Of Pi: A Novel - horrid
The Name Of The Rose - required, easy read, but generally lame
Moby Dick - required but enjoyable
The Odyssey - required but fun
Pride And Prejudice - lame
A Tale Of Two Cities - required and hated
The Iliad - required
Emma - lame
Great Expectations - required
Atlas Shrugged - all the way through in one quick go; liked the sex, but the rest was lame
Reading Lolita In Tehran: A Memoir In Books - meh at best
Wicked: The Life And Times Of The Wicked Witch Of The West - meh
Dracula - loved it
The Once And Future King - required; hated it
The Grapes Of Wrath - required
Angels & Demons - if it's the one I'm thinking of, it was disturbingly hillarious
Sense And Sensibility - didn't like it
Gulliver's Travels - required
Les Misérables - all the way through once, the rest in bits and chunks throughout the years
The Prince - required a few times
Slaughterhouse-Five - good book; bad war
The Scarlet Letter - required
Lolita - thinking about it still gives me chills
The Hunchback Of Notre Dame - a favorite
The Hobbit - a few times
The Count of Monte Cristo - read the first half several times

Re: 27.5

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Innnteresting . . .

[trg.livejournal.com]

hummm... not a bad reading list.... only 60 to go.

[supercheesegirl.livejournal.com]

Ooh, now I have to go do this!

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

At first as I was reading this list, I was struck by the alarming similarity of our reading patterns. Hey, I've read that one! And I skipped those ones! Wow! This is amazing!

Then about halfway through, I had a "duh" moment. Uh, yeah. Of course he's read the SF and not the self-indulgent literary darlings. That's why I read this blog. The biggest difference appears to be that I bought a Jane Austen novel anthology when I was pregnant, and read them all through.

[pale-chartreuse.livejournal.com]

Read - 41, but System of the World isn't even on the list!
Not finished - 11
Can't stand, can't make me - 7, including Fountainhead for the obvious professional reasons.
On the To Read shelf - 2

I'm very impressed with anyone who can slog through Strange/Norrell. I picked it up and couldn't figure out why this was so well reviewed. Then I found out that her husband is a professional literary critic.

Haven't had the guts to pick up Oryx and Crake since Readercon 2003. One of the pros described it as "made me doubt my worthiness to breathe".

[(Anonymous)]

Then I found out that her husband is a professional literary critic.

1. Partner. 2. Professional writer (and hence inevitably occasional reviewer). But with a perfectly good body of genre novels to his name. (Also a very nice guy, but I doubt that his influence over the critical establishment is especially amazing.)

Me, I found Strange & Norrell an amazingly easy read - and it's not like I'm an Austen fan or a fairytale addict or anything.

By the way, does reading The Canterbury Tales in modern translation count? Because slogging through the Old English would be beyond me, but the Coghill Penguin version is pretty easy. Of course, it merely summarises the Parson's Tale.

--
Phil Masters