Via k8 at Harmonia’s Necklace, I came upon a meme that, despite my usual apathy toward memes, I simply must participate in. The explanation:
This is a list of the top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.
Rules: Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
k8 added another rule, wherein she added an asterisk for books she read on her own and then later read for school. We’ll see how often I actually need that one. I’ll probably end up with more combinations of underlined and italicized books that I was supposed to read for school and never actually did beyond the first page.
Find the list below the fold, if you’re coming from the front page, since I’m not sure everyone will be quite as interested in the full list of 100+ as I am.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude (In Spanish)
Wuthering Heights (It’s the same book two times, and both of them depressing)
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
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 (I think we only read an excerpt in class)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera (I was in middle school; it was boring)
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein (I really hate the excess punctuation of the writing from this time period)
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 (I was extremely bored and trapped in Taiwan)
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
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (I read this for work, does it get underlined?)
Dune
The Prince (We read an excerpt for class)
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir (I was evaluating it for using in an ESL class)
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 (I caught the flu while reading this, and it gave me horrible nightmares)
Oryx and Crake
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion is this
There is 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 Spanish!)
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Fountainhead? For class? Tell me at least it was a survey of capitalist philosophy.
I’ve never quite understood the Anglophone world’s wild dislike of Wuthering Heights; this leads me to conclude that other people aren’t as liable to insane bouts of obsession and depression as Emily Brontë and I are.
(Last question: was the boringness of Love in the Time of Cholera related to the fact that you were in middle school, or is it a book you would find more interesting today?)
The Fountainhead was for my tutorial on Frank Lloyd Wright, because the main character is supposed to be loosely based on FLW. I think our teacher was reaching for something to satisfy the requirement that we actually read something lengthy. The accompanying “reading journal” assignment was horrible and ineffective, but the book wasn’t that bad. There was actually a group of students who took the tutorial specifically because that was the book we were supposed to read, though.
I mostly just wanted to slap all the characters in Wuthering Heights. I really sympathized with Thursday Next when she was assigned to go babysit them in an effort to keep all the rancor from expanding beyond the confines of the book.
I think the exact boringness of Love in the Time of Cholera was mostly related to my being in middle school at the time. It is possibly a book I would find more interesting today, but in general I have found that I am not the Garcia Marquez fan people expect a Spanish major who enjoys fantasy to be. Magical realism is a very hit-or-miss genre for me overall.