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LibraryThing 106 Unread Books Meme

According to a LibraryThing survey, these 106 works are the ones most often marked as “unread”, That is, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones read solely as a curriculum requirement, italicize the ones you started, but didn’t finish.

Final touch: denote (*) the ones you liked, and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you did read them for school in the first place.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
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

they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded

I don't think that's a fair conclusion. Lots of us get books not so we can read them right that second, but because we know we want to read them eventually. And sometimes it takes quite a while to get around to it. Like a decade or two. And that's just fine.

What a weird list: oodles of classics, some popular stuff from the last decade or so (including nonfiction, oddly), very little in between. I wolfed down classics as a teenager, so I can bold a lot of these. So my version's strictly binary. Dune gave me pause: it was an awful slog, and I don't remember more the first couple of hundred pages, but I'm pretty sure I did manage to plow through it eventually, so it's bold. There are lots of books I haven't finished, witness the mountain next to my bed, but they aren't on this list. Which ones I "liked" is a huge mare's nest -- I'm so not going there.

On another topic entirely: when's the GMS graduation? I'd like to be there if I can.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights

The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
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
The thing that bothered me is that there's no notation for "books that are on my list because I really DO want to read them." I'm fine with not being interested in many of these, but for example, Wicked, Life of Pi, and Reading Lolita in Tehran actually are on my bookshelf to read and not because I think it'll make me look smart.

I thought of Eric S. recently because I read a review of Ulysses that made me actually want to read it for the first time ever.

Graduation is June 5 from 4-6, I think. Fair amount of emphasis on the think part. But it should be on the website at some point.
Wow, apparently I inadvertently cut a sentence or two from my comment so it didn't make much sense. Oh well -- evidently you got the idea. :)

Thanks abt. graduation date. I'll keep checking the website.

(Anonymous)

books

I needed a marking for "plan to read when I have time"..

done here (http://www.virtualcompsci.net/blog)

~Leigh Ann