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-22One 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:
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?
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.
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...
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.
: )
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.
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.
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