Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Are you well read?

I found Library Thing about a year ago, and thankfully have not become obsessed with it. It could happen, very easily. There has been a meme going ‘round, and this is one of the lists being been used. Since the count changes with people joining and adding their libraries, you can only hope for so much continuity. So here is my breakdown of my list of the top 106 books tagged “unread” on LibraryThing. The rules:

bold = what you’ve read ( ) school reading requirement, which I added
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1.            Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

2.            Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

3.            One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

4.            Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

5.            Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

6.            (Catch-22 by Joseph Heller)

7.            The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

8.            Don Quixote by MIguel de Cervantes Saavedra

9.            (The Odyssey by Homer)

10.       The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

11.       Ulysses by James Joyce

12.       (Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert)

13.       War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

14.       Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

15.       A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

16.       The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

17.       Moby Dick by Herman Melville

18.       The Iliad by Homer

19.       Emma by Jane Austen

20.       Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

21.       Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

22.       The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

23.       The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

24.       Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

25.       The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

26.       (Great Expectations by Charles Dickens)

27.       The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

28.       The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

29.       Life of Pi by Yann Martel

30.       Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

31.       Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

32.       Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

33.       Dracula by Bram Stoker

34.       (The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck)

35.       A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

36.       Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

37.       Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

38.       Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

39.       Middlemarch by George Eliot

40.       Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

41.       The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

42.       Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

43.       The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

44.       Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

45.       Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

46.       American Gods by Neil Gaiman

47.       Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

48.       The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

49.       Wicked by Gregory Maguire

50.       A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

51.       The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

52.       Dune by Frank Herbert

53.       The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

54.       Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

55.       Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

56.       The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

57.       The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

58.       The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

59.       Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

60.       (The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand )

61.       To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

62.       A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

63.       (Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy)

64.       The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

65.       Persuasion by Jane Austen

66.       One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

67.       (The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne)

68.       Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

69.       Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

70.       The Once and Future King by T.H. White

71.       Atonement by Ian McEwan

72.       The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

73.       A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

74.       Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

75.       Dubliners by James Joyce

76.       Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

77.       Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

78.       Beloved by Toni Morrison

79.       Collapse by Jared Diamond

80.       The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

81.       (In Cold Blood by Truman Capote)

82.       (Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence)

83.       A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

84.       Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

85.       Watership Down by Richard Adams

86.       (The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli)

87.       The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

88.       (Beowulf by Anonymous)

89.       A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

90.       Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

91.       (The Aeneid by Virgil)

92.       Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

93.       Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

94.       (David Copperfield by Charles Dickens)

95.       The Road by Cormac McCarthy

96.       Possession by A.S. Byatt

97.       Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

98.       The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

99.       Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

100.   The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

101.   Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

102.   Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire

103.   Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

104.   (The Plague by Albert Camus)

105.   Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

106.   Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

The tally:

What you’ve read: 46 (14 while in high school or college)
Books you started but couldn’t finish: 2
Books you hated: None on this list – there are books I just hated, though
You’ve read more than once: I’ve only read two books twice – The Stand by Stephen King and Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Books you own but haven’t read yourself: 20

I surprised myself a little. It also reminded me of how much I loved to read and how little I have read this past year or so. I need to exercise my brain.

 

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