Unread Book Meme

[selenite0]

From bright_lilim

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and Punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (115)
The Wuthering Heights (110)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104) - not worth it
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The Name of the Rose (91) - liked it but you do have to appreciate theological debate
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A Tale of Two Cities (80)
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (79) - for heaven's sake read Nonzero instead
War and Peace (78)
Vanity Fair (74)
The Time Traveler's Wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (70)
American Gods (68)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
Atlas Shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66) - hopefully someone will do a "good parts" edition
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Historian : A Novel (63)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61) - why the gov't should not have control of technology
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's Pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59) - back before anybody learned to write good SF
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (59)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57) - beware, starts as cheerful kid's book, ends depressing as hell.
The Grapes of Wrath (57) - only for English class
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel (57)
1984 (57) - recommended for the vocabulary
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56) - I don't think Niven & Pournelle's version counts
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (54)
To the Lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist(54)
Gulliver's Travels (53)
Les Misérables (53)
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52)
Dune (51) - great book. sequels, not great.
The Prince (51) - a useful reference for understanding politics
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50) - I love it
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being(49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49) - eh
The Scarlet Letter (48) - English class again. I still think the ex poisoned the lover.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : A Novel (47)
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed(47) - Jared, get some medication. Seriously. That level of depression is not healthy.
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry into Values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's Rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The Three Musketeers (44) - Crips and Bloods in lace

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Does it count if I finished The Mists of Avalon only in French, and that only because there really wasn't anything better to do in Paris on a Friday night? (I'm not making this up!! I had NO MONEY, and by none, I mean I was cadging food. Seriously. And I didn't want to do the obvious thing for a young penniless woman to do of an evening just to get some money. So hey, Mists of Avalon.)

[new-iconoclast.livejournal.com]

Having read The Mists of Avalon, I am forced to comment that you might have enjoyed yourself more had you done "the obvious thing." :) Points, however, for having read it in French!

[selenite.livejournal.com]

That's more voluntary than reading it as a class requirement, which is what I did for a couple of them.

hmmm ...

[btripp.livejournal.com]

Well, I've read 29 of those and there is just one on the list that I own but have never been able to get more than 10% into (Atlas Shrugged). I blame the 29 on my Liberal Arts education, the other is all Ayn's fault.

Of course, I generally don't put any books into my LibraryThing catalog (http://btripp-books.com) that I haven't actually read.


(http://www.btripp.com)

Winfred Slothrop? WTF?

[bitpig.livejournal.com]

I have tried and failed to finish Gravity's Rainbow several times. I've never met anyone who's gone the distance.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

Eh, being well-read is overrated. Whose standards are we using, anyway?

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I think this is arguably a list of the most overrated books ever.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

Heh. So true. I feel that way about many "classics."

There are some good ones on there, but yeah.

Library Thing Must not be for Librarians I'm Guessing

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

Erm.

Well.

Some of these books I re-read. A lot. As in one case (***does brief mental calculation***) at least 25 times. There are some seriously amazing books on this list: Jane Eyre--? What is not to love about that book?!

I've read most of the rest.

Only "Freakanomics" would I not touch with a ten-foot pole.

Re: Library Thing Must not be for Librarians I'm Guessing

[selenite.livejournal.com]

A book can be good and overrated. For ex., I think Dune is very good but I can come up with a bunch of books I'd rank higher.

Re: Library Thing Must not be for Librarians I'm Guessing

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

Oh sure. But if SF has a canon, Dune is on it...