Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Unread

Do you LibraryThing yet? What--no? Whazzamattayou?

Anyway, there's a fun LT meme going around: Start with the list of the top 106 unread books catalogued on LibraryThing. Bold the titles you have read. Italicize the books you've started but haven't finished. Asterisk those you own, but have not read.

Here's my list:

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hndred 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
Middlesex
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
*Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
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 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

Final tally:
41 Read
7 Owned but unread
58 Neither owned nor read

What a great list, right? As my LT friend Alaska Bookworm pointed out, lots of classics, but lots of excellent contemporary works, also.

I'm already in the middle of reading about four books, but the next one on the list that I'll be reading is The Three Musketeers, because I enjoyed The Count of Monte Cristo so, so much.

How about you? What titles have you read from the Top 106 Unread Books on LT?
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6 comments:

KMR said...

Goodness, checking this list is certainly humbling--at least for me! I've read 10, started 3, and own 7 that I haven't started yet. Of course, since this Ms Peevie posted this list on her blog, that means she approves of it, and since she's an Obama supporter she must also be elitist, so that means this is a list of books for elitists. ;)

(And on that logic, since I'm also an Obama supporter, but haven't read very many of the books, I'm only an aspiring elitist...)

One book that I was surprised to see on the list was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I highly recommend that book. I picked up a galley copy at the publisher's exhibit booth at a conference a few years ago, and read it right away. An amazing book, very enlightening and extremely touching. The blurb on the back of the book said it had already been optioned by Brad Pitt (or was it Matt Damon? --one of those boys) to produce a film adaptation, but I've not seen anything about that since.

May 14, 2008 at 12:06 PM
KMR said...

More on Curious Incident, in case you're wondering: The story is about an autistic boy and begins with his attempt to discover who killed a neighbor's dog. The story is told in first person by the boy. During his detective work, the boy (and the reader) learns so much more about his life and his family. Be forewarned: this is a weeper.

May 14, 2008 at 12:17 PM
Joel Hamernick said...

i feel utterly humiliated by that list! I don't read fiction pretty much at all . . . feel like a total loser for it.

But if we could talk about how many of those movies I've seen I might find a moment of solace!

Is there a list like that only focused on theology and church history?

May 14, 2008 at 9:59 PM
Joel Hamernick said...

PS. can we add some categories:

1. Books i've thought about reading. . .
2. Books I've implied to others I've read. . .
3. Books I've heard of. . .

May 14, 2008 at 10:01 PM
Anonymous said...

Excellent (but humbling) exercise! My count: 24 read, 4 partially read. Thanks goodness for those lit and classics courses I took in college; otherwise, my count would probably be a big zero.

I'm also clearly out of touch with those "contemporary classics". I was surprised at how many titles I'd never heard of.

May 15, 2008 at 8:10 AM
Unknown said...

Well, friends, now I feel a tiny bit bad. I would not hope to humble or humiliate any of my Green Room friends--and especially because I know you are all readers!

Really, this list is somewhat random--just books that happen to be tagged "unread" by a bunch of LT members. So, no worries, folks. We'll come up with our own list of titles that makes us feel better about ourselves.

Now I have to add Dog in the Night-Time to my short list of TBRs (to be reads), because it sounds great.

And for Hammerdad, I probably could pull a list of the top 100 books with a "theology" or "church history" tag from LT. Hey, that might be kinda fun!

May 15, 2008 at 9:26 AM

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