well, if queenpam did it, I'd better.

[zwol]

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. Add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place.

I want to add quite a bit more information to — which books I mean to read/finish reading, which books I wish I could un-read, which books I would recommend to everyone, which I would recommend only to people with compatible tastes. But that would be work.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
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: the fates of human societies
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 : a novel
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
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
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince*
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 : a novel
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
The Three Musketeers*

Comments

[elisaana.livejournal.com]

What's up with The Once and Future King and The Grapes of Wrath? Didn't finish, but recommend? (Actually, I'd almost recommend not finishing The Once and Future King--I finished it on the way to work, and started crying once I got there. And The Grapes of Wrath was a bit of a letdown at the end. But how could you know without finishing??)

[zwol.livejournal.com]

In both cases I've read enough of them to feel that other people are likely to enjoy them, or at least get something out of them. If I were actually recommending books to people I would warn them that I never actually finished either - something like, "as a 13-year-old I read all of the part of The Once and Future King with Arthur as a child, and then got bored by the rest of it, but I'm pretty sure that's because it was over my head and it would continue to be good if I reread it now." Or, "I didn't have the intestinal fortitude to finish The Grapes of Wrath, it was just too depressing, and I've never been able to pick it back up again, but if you can cope with really depressing it's a good book."

Which is a lot to try to cram into italics plus asterisk, alas.

[elisaana.livejournal.com]

Which is a lot to try to cram into italics plus asterisk, alas.

That's what the bastard html tag blink was made for. ;)

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

So, what did you like about Wuthering Heights?

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Well, there's a bunch of things. Brontë managed to do a novel with nearly no sympathetic characters that nonetheless I didn't want to throw across the room after ten pages; that's sort of a meta-reason to keep reading but it was there. On a more concrete level I liked the depiction of place and the exploration of different sorts of madness. And then there's all the references to the novel in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels which I now get. :)

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Heh. I did want to throw it across the room because of the characters, and I guess I couldn't manage to get past that to find the enjoyable bits.