The Island of Unread Books

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.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and punishment
4. Catch-22 (One of my favorite books ever.)
   
5. One hundred years of solitude
6. Wuthering Heights (Love that Heathcliff!)
7. Life of Pi : a novel
8. The name of the rose (Latin nerds unite!)
   
9. 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.)
10. Moby Dick (Read about 30 pages in a B&B earlier this year. Actually liked it—I was surprised.)
11. Ulysses (Haven’t worked up the courage.)
12. Madame Bovary (I played the heroine herself in a brilliant high school video that my teacher carelessly misplaced. God that was a good video.)
13. The Odyssey
14. Pride and prejudice (It took me several tries to get past the first chapter, but now I love Jane.)
15. Jane Eyre (Not this Jane. She was kind of annoying.)
16. A tale of two cities
17. The brothers Karamazov
18. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
19. War and peace (Took me forever. I think I picked the wrong Tolstoy.)
20. Vanity fair
21. The time traveler’s wife (Best romantic book ever.)
    
22. The Iliad (Yeah, the whole thing, even the catalog of ships. For best effect, read near smoky campfire.)
23. Emma
24. The Blind Assassin
25. The kite runner
26. Mrs. Dalloway
27. Great expectations
28. American gods : a novel
29. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
30. Atlas shrugged
31. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
32. Memoirs of a Geisha
33. Middlesex
34. Quicksilver
35. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West …
36. The Canterbury tales
37. The historian : a novel
38. A portrait of the artist as a young man
39. Love in the time of cholera
40. Brave new world
41. The Fountainhead
42. Foucault’s pendulum
43. Middlemarch
44. Frankenstein
45. The Count of Monte Cristo
46. Dracula
47. A clockwork orange
48. Anansi boys : a novel
49. The once and future king
50. The grapes of wrath (Never got around to it. As a native Californian, I think I’m betraying my state.)
51. The poisonwood Bible : a novel
52. 1984
53. Angels & demons (John had to read this one, ha ha. Don’t bother, everyone—it’s the same book as The Da Vinci Code.)
54. The inferno
55. The satanic verses (Loved it)
    
56. Sense and sensibility
57. The picture of Dorian Gray
58. Mansfield Park
59. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
60. To the lighthouse
61. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
62. Oliver Twist
63. Gulliver’s travels
64. Les misérables (Sooo much more boring than it had to be. Read the abridged version.)
65. The corrections (Wonderful)
    
66. The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel
67. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
68. Dune
69. The prince
70. The sound and the fury (Wrote my AP English essay about this one. “Caddy smelled like trees.”)
71. Angela’s ashes : a memoir
72. The god of small things
73. A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
74. Cryptonomicon
75. Neverwhere
76. 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.)
77. A short history of nearly everything
78. Dubliners
79. The unbearable lightness of being
80. Beloved : a novel
81. Slaughterhouse-five
82. The scarlet letter
83. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu…
84. The mists of Avalon (OK. I’m not really into the women stuff.)
85. Oryx and Crake : a novel
86. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
87. Cloud atlas : a novel
88. The confusion
89. Lolita (One of my favorite books ever.)
    
90. Persuasion
91. Northanger abbey
92. The catcher in the rye
93. On the road
94. The hunchback of Notre Dame
95. Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of… (John read it)
96. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into …
97. The Aeneid
98. Watership Down
99. Gravity’s rainbow
100. In cold blood
101. White teeth
102. Treasure Island
103. David Copperfield
104. The three musketeers
105. Cold mountain (I knew this one would be on the list!)
106. Robinson Crusoe
107. The bell jar
108. The secret life of bees
109. 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.)
110. The plague
111. The Master and Margarita
112. Atonement : a novel
113. The handmaid’s tale
114. 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.