Book meme

[lyorn]

Gakked from legionseagle

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today whenever this meme started). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell -- sufferning from the "eight deadly words" at the moment.
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude -- the old paperback I had was so mouldy I couldn't finish it.
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey -- read that in a students' edition, probably abridged.
Pride and prejudice
Jane Eyre
A tale of two cities
The brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies -- give me another day and I'll finish it.
War and peace
Vanity fair
The time traveler's wife
The Iliad -- read that in a students' edition, probably abridged.
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 -- I guess one shouldn't read fanfic is one is not in the fandom.
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
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 -- read that in a childrens' edition, probably abridged.
Gulliver's travels -- read that in a childrens' edition, probably abridged.
Les misérables
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The prince -- Didn't read it start-to-finish, but over the years probably read all of it.
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 Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
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 -- couldn't finish it because the bookstore was closing and they kicked me out.
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 -- read that in a childrens' edition, probably abridged.
David Copperfield
The three musketeers

It's amazing how many books I didn't finish not because I hated them, but just because I couldn't be bothered to pick them up again.

Comments

[mad-freddy.livejournal.com]

Book lists are a strange thing - I went through the list and started wondering how it happened that I read some of these books and why I didn't read the others...

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

The ones I didn't read are basically three categories:
a) Never heard of them.
b) Everything I know about the book and the author convinces me that I'll be bored to tears before getting to page 10.
c) Meant to read them, haven't yet gotten around to them.

Having unread books around feels very strange.