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

[(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