Thursday, June 12, 2008

I've got some catching up to do.

I decided to do one of these book meme things instead of actually writing a post. YEAH BABY.

I wasn't tagged, but thanks Tara for the idea.

These are the 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. I've read the bold ones, underlined the ones I've started but not finished, and italicised the ones I plan to read.

Also I should note that I have never before been so tempted to lie in a meme.

Jonathan Strange & Mr 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

The 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

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales

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

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: a novel

1984

Angels & Demons

The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)

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 : 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

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 : 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

In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences

White Teeth

Treasure Island

David Copperfield

The Three Musketeers

6 comments:

clumsy ox said...

What a cool meme!

I think you've scored higher than I did. I've been meaning to read Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead for the last 15 years.

My current book is The Mayor of Casterbridge, and I've been half-way through for about a year. That was last summer's reading. Of course, I get some credit insofar as it's actually packed up for moving right now, and I can't get to it.

My least favourite book on your list (that I actually read) is Wuthering Heights. I kept having fantasies of bludgeoning Heathcliff. I really, really hate that book.

Did you ever get around to reading Chas. Williams?

Shan said...

The Mayor of Casterbridge is pretty good...Thomas Hardy is in my top three favourite authors.

I used to love Wuthering Heights. The first time I tried to read it I was thirteen and didn't get it. Tried again at 19, read it all the way through, and after the last page I turned back to the first again and did it all over. I'm not quite so fond now, though I still like how everything collapses into sadness and death in the end, and it ends happily for No One.

I did read Chas. Williams. I read Place of the Lion but to be perfectly honest it didn't really grab me. I'm not sure I understood what the heck was going on at times.

clumsy ox said...

Place of the Lion is not Williams' best. My favourite is Descent into Hell, but the place to start on Chas is All Hallow's Eve, which is a spiritual supernatural thriller.

I think Heathcliff got to me because of how vindictive and spiteful he is. I mean, I can't help but feel sorry for him at first, but the more I read, the more I realized he was hardly an innocent victim. Not that the word "innocent" really applies to anyone in Wuthering Heights...

Shan said...

Well, I must try All Hallow's then.

The first time I read WH, when I was 13, I didn't properly understand that Heathcliff is not the hero, but the villain. It wasn't til later that I realised that there IS no hero. Every character in the book is evil to some degree, except for Nelly Dean who is arguably guileless, but not completely innocent either...her virtue is merely the lack of active malice. In this respect I like the book...as a study of human weakness and decay.

The decline and fall of the Lintons and the Earnshaws is particularly full of pathos for me. It used to bother me that everything ended up in Heathcliff's hands, but on re-reading I got over it and saw the deeper issues.

Anyway. I must remind myself that you don't actually LIKE WH.
: )

Rachel said...

I'm doing a little bit better than you on the list but not much. These lists depress me because I feel like I'll just never have the time to read all the books out there I want to!

I'm hesitant to recommend anything to you because I am still learning your taste in books through your reviews...BUT. The Amazing Adventures of Kavelier and Clay is one I'd encourage you to consider. Because of the hype (and because it was supposed to be about comic books), I didn't want to read it for a long time...but it's a very unique story and one I couldn't put down once I picked it up.

Dave Hingsburger said...

I agree with Ox, this was fun. I borrowed it for my blog today as well. Like you I found it difficult not to lie ... like there were a couple books that I haven't read but I'd read the author before (like Neil Gaiman)and I thought that should count. But, I didn't lie - you set a good example. I made a few changes to the rules, I didn't do an 'intend to read' thing because I realized that I don't intend on reading any that I haven't already read. I'm too busy with other books so, sadly, my score will not improve over time.