So this list is going around revealing the top unread books in the Library Thing catalog. It’s apparently all over, but I saw it on SPM’s blog, pages turned, so I’m going to give her all the credit. Her poor husband has RLS and her parrot has gout, so for god’s sake she deserves it.
Anyhow, the list of books is below!
But before I post them…For the record, I don’t think the list says a whole lot about reading habits, or even the actual books that got nailed. Anyone who is going to be on Library Thing is a big fat nerd (in a good way, of course!), so I highly doubt these folks are opting for Your Best Life Now! instead of Foucault’s Pendulum. This list is composed of classic literature and contemporary literary bestsellers, books that well-meaning readers just haven’t gotten around to yet. But it’s still super fun and so I had to jump in and share my own anecdotes. You’re supposed to do all this fancy formatting to indicate your various shades of affection for the titles, but I just bolded the ones I’ve read.
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
- Anna Karenina
- Crime and punishment
- Catch-22 (One of my favorite books ever.)
- One hundred years of solitude
- Wuthering Heights (Love that Heathcliff!)
- Life of Pi : a novel
- The name of the rose (Latin nerds unite!)
- Don Quixote (I bought this from a homeless man for $4 about 10 years ago, but haven’t read it yet. Now that I think about it, he probably stole it. But I hope not.)
- Moby Dick (Read about 30 pages in a B&B earlier this year. Actually liked it—I was surprised.)
- Ulysses (Haven’t worked up the courage.)
- Madame Bovary (I played the heroine herself in a brilliant high school video that my teacher carelessly misplaced. God that was a good video.)
- The Odyssey
- Pride and prejudice (It took me several tries to get past the first chapter, but now I love Jane.)
- Jane Eyre (Not this Jane. She was kind of annoying.)
- A tale of two cities
- The brothers Karamazov
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
- War and peace (Took me forever. I think I picked the wrong Tolstoy.)
- Vanity fair
- The time traveler’s wife (Best romantic book ever.)
- The Iliad (Yeah, the whole thing, even the catalog of ships. For best effect, read near smoky campfire.)
- Emma
- The Blind Assassin
- The kite runner
- Mrs. Dalloway
- Great expectations
- American gods : a novel
- 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 : a novel
- The once and future king
- The grapes of wrath (Never got around to it. As a native Californian, I think I’m betraying my state.)
- The poisonwood Bible : a novel
- 1984
- Angels & demons (John had to read this one, ha ha. Don’t bother, everyone—it’s the same book as The Da Vinci Code.)
- The inferno
- The satanic verses (Loved it)
- 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 (Sooo much more boring than it had to be. Read the abridged version.)
- The corrections (Wonderful)
- The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel
- The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
- Dune
- The prince
- The sound and the fury (Wrote my AP English essay about this one. “Caddy smelled like trees.”)
- 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 (John gave this to me about 10 years ago, telling me how the author died a failure before his book got published and went on to great acclaim. I hadn’t been published at the time. Somehow he thought this story was supposed to be inspiring.)
- A short history of nearly everything
- Dubliners
- The unbearable lightness of being
- Beloved : a novel
- Slaughterhouse-five
- The scarlet letter
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu…
- The mists of Avalon (OK. I’m not really into the women stuff.)
- Oryx and Crake : a novel
- Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
- Cloud atlas : a novel
- The confusion
- Lolita (One of my favorite books ever.)
- 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… (John read it)
- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into …
- The Aeneid
- Watership Down
- Gravity’s rainbow
- In cold blood
- White teeth
- Treasure Island
- David Copperfield
- The three musketeers
- Cold mountain (I knew this one would be on the list!)
- Robinson Crusoe
- The bell jar
- The secret life of bees
- Beowulf : a new verse translation (I don’t know about this “new verse translation,” but I’ve certainly read some translation, and that counts, dammit.)
- The plague
- The Master and Margarita
- Atonement : a novel
- The handmaid’s tale
- Lady Chatterley’s lover
Isn’t this fun? It makes me feel like I should go read one of the titles I have in my library but haven’t read yet. It also makes me think of that homeless man. I hope he’s okay, even if he did steal Don Quixote.
I love this list! I mostly love it because I can lord over the vast percentage of the population and say: I have read over half of these books…
Unfortunately, ‘Angels & Demons’ is one of those I’ve read. Not so proud of that, now am I, but otherwise I’m doing pretty well.
Lisa