Via pretty much everyone in my feedreader (well so far Pavlov’s Cat, Ampersand Duck and the Hoydens), here is a book meme.
What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Confusingly, everyone seems to create their own code at this point, but I’m going to stick with this one (from the Hoydens).
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 [A] 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
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
1984 [I did my HSC in 1984. Say no more - and I copied this comment from Ampersand Duck!]
Angels & Demons
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 - finished it for school (but a struggle – would never have finished it voluntarily)
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 – although it’s on my bookshelf ready…
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
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
I’m fascinated how much Jane Austen is on the list – I find it hard to imagine not finishing one of those you started. And I’m struggling to remember what I did read for school now. Not much, it feels like, going through this list.
*Edited – my formatting must have gone awry last night – I was claiming to have read 90% of these books! It’s now at a much more reasonable level.
Most relieved that your bolding had indeed gone mad! I was feeling very inadequate.
I reckon this meme would have more teeth if one were required to CAPITALISE the titles that are sitting unread on one’s bookshelf per the initial premise for the list.
[...] book meme, of course May 16, 2008 Posted by (un)relaxeddad in toddler. trackback Via Penguin Unearthed, a long list of the 106 most unread books on shelves. The rules, as interpreted by la Penguin are [...]
Hmm, must do this one. Interesting.
What on earth happened with Watership Down? Nearly finished?
Dune was a book a teacher at my primary school lent to me when I was nine or ten. Made an immense impression. I must have read it a dozen times.