another one of those lists of books

[truepenny]

Caught from peake.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler's wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
American gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64)
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53)
Les misérables (53)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)

And here, some stats of my own:

Read for pleasure
The Silmarillion
The name of the rose
Pride and prejudice (P&P was on the Master's Exam, but I'd read it before that)
Emma
American gods
Foucault's pendulum
Dracula
Sense and sensibility
Mansfield Park
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere (although the TV series is better. srsly.)
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
Watership Down (more times than I can count)
The Hobbit (ditto)

Read for pleasure as a teenager, when my ability to power through anything retroactively astonishes the hell out of me
Brave new world
The Count of Monte Cristo
A clockwork orange
1984
The satanic verses
Dune
A confederacy of dunces
The mists of Avalon
In cold blood

Read of my own volition, but out of a sense of obligation to be "well read" or something
Catch-22
Mrs. Dalloway
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Beloved (although I did genuinely enjoy it, above and beyond)
Lolita (ditto)

Read for high school English classes
A portrait of the artist as a young man (loathed)
The grapes of wrath (loathed)
The scarlet letter

Read for undergraduate English classes
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Wuthering Heights (three times!)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Jane Eyre (two times)
The inferno
To the lighthouse
Gulliver's Travels
The prince
The Aeneid

Read for graduate English classes
Don Quixote
Gravity's Rainbow (even though I ended up dropping the class, I am grateful for being forced to read this book)

Read for the Master's Exam
Moby Dick (which I adored)
Ulysses (which I loathed)
Great expectations
The Canterbury tales
The sound and the fury

Read because I was teaching it
Frankenstein
Slaughterhouse-five

Books on my own To Be Read list
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (I'm working on it!)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
Vanity fair (although this is one of those obligation ones, and I probably won't)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time

Comments

[bibliolicious.livejournal.com]

Vanity Fair was sort of an obligation read for me (I'm a compulsive accumulator of books, but also feel obliged to read anything on my shelves, eventually), but I found it a pleasant surprise. There was something about the serialised format that kept the pages turning, Thackeray's authorial voice is just the right side of self-deprecating, and Becky is a thoroughly enjoyable anti-heroine. I'd recommend it. :-)

(I also blogged about it here:
http://evesalexandria.typepad.com/eves_alexandria/2006/09/a_viper_in_the_.html )

Oh, and ditto on having read Watership Down more times than I can count...!

[1crowdedhour.livejournal.com]

I second the Vanity Fair recommendation. Becky makes it worth the time.

[gillyp.livejournal.com]

One of my favourite books of all time. ::nods::

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

I only got round to Vanity Fair this summer (I read it in case it turned up on the All Souls exam, which it did not) and was very pleasantly surprised. Thackeray's voice can be a bit intrusive sometimes, but once you get used to it, the book moves fairly quickly. And Becky is great fun. I was shocked when I reread Gone With the Wind soon afterward and realised just how much Scarlett O'Hara resembled her (and Melanie resembled Amelia, for that matter).

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

My very thought. Maybe GWTW was actually an early rewrite like Clueless was of Emma, etc.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

I would definitely speculate that it was an influence -- though if it was a rewrite, that would be very interesting, given what Mitchell does with her setting versus what Thackeray does with his.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Oh, very true. Mitchell is a long way from having Thackeray's sardonic view of it all.

[belmanoir.livejournal.com]

Indeed...Dickens may be more truly a gentleman, but Thackeray is the better writer!

[romp.livejournal.com]

I was shocked when, as an undergrad, I was assigned Jane Austen. Loved them but they were way too fun to be Literature.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Dickens hit me that way too--I never read any until grad school.

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

After getting through a master's degree without being required to take *any* English-lit courses (music major, math minor, AP-tested out of breadth requirement), I eventually picked up Vanity Fair -- and I'll agree with the recommendations above -- and all of Jane Austen and some others on my own. There were also some plays and books read for schoolwork, in that operas have been based on them, and I'm never going to read Faust again if I can help it. It added up to about 25% of the list. I'm slightly amazed never to have been made to read Moby Dick, and have no intention of ever reading anything else by Dickens after being put through Great Expectations in high school, but otherwise still wonder what I'm missing on a lot of the standard and not-so-standard classics. There's still time...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Which Faust? Goethe or Marlowe or Gounoud or ... ?

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

Goethe, mainly. Marlowe's was easier to swallow, but wasn't the version drawn on by 19th-centura opera composers. The treatment of Marguerite/Margrethe seems less appalling with Gounod's pretty music; there's an essay in the topic of how operatic music gives even the most unfortunate operatic heroines psychological weight -- their suffering *matters*, in the musical universe -- than the storyline alone usually does. (I thought Catherine Clement's Undoing of Women missed this point bigtime, but possibly someone's picked up the theme since then.)

At any rate, while the parts-of version in opera seems too facile (although I love the sugar coating), the whole double play seemed too, well, convoluted. I also have difficulty sustaining suspension of disbelief in the God-Satan-salvation themes, which I can't take seriously as anything but a very dangerous, historically destructive, delusion.

[melusinehr.livejournal.com]

Great Expectations was, I think, the only book I absolutely refused to read in high school--I'm pretty sure I faked my way through whatever test we had to take, I hated it so much. And then the Ethan Hawke movie came out after I'd finished college and I thought to myself, "The book has got to be better than this piece of crap," which led me to try the book again. Nowadays that one's still not one of my favorites of his (I much prefer David Copperfield and Bleak House), but I've become a huge Dickens fan. So, um, thanks, Ethan Hawke?

Vanity Fair

[mevincula.livejournal.com]

Well, for another point of view. I hated, hated, hated it. I don't even have the adjectives to describe how much I loathe that book. Odd, I've never had to argue my opinion about that book with anyone before, although I've had lively discussions about how much I dislike Jane Eyre - which is NOTHING LIKE Jane Austen - who I still read obsessively. I annotated my own list just for kicks.

http://mevincula.livejournal.com/648.html

[pcw-rcw.livejournal.com]

We see that you have Guns, Germs and Steel on your To-Be-Read list. This is, indeed, a book not to be missed. Not only is it fascinating reading, but it also gives tremendous insight into why it was the Europeans who conquered the New World, and not vice versa.

Collapse is also to be recommended for its insight into the [often puzzling] 'whys' of the rise and falls of world civilizations.

Another nonfiction book not to be missed, is Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Amusing, as all Bryson's books are, and very informative, in fact, about 'nearly everything'.

Hmmmmm

[selkith.livejournal.com]

There is only a handful of those I have read on the list. But there are a few that should be on it, which I have.

Les Miserables, 14 yrs old
The Phantom of the Opera, 15 yrs old
The Merlin Trilogy, Mary Stewart

Lord of the Flies, read by choice same summer as Les Mis, freshman teacher accused me of lying about having read it when it was assigned reading in class
Lord of the Rings Trilogy, at least five times
The Crucible, loathed it
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Trilogy, Tad Williams, in 2 weeks
The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
The Transitive Vampire, A Guide to Proper Grammar
Numerous herbal guides
multiple encylopedias, because I was that kind of kid

[svalar-unnir.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is unfinished because you're just in the middle of it, or because it's slow going. I felt like I really had to slog through the first two-thirds, but by the end I couldn't put it down. I think I'll need to reread it at some point, much more attentively : )


(Hallo, I was pointed here because of your The Dark is Rising reviews and I've popped in occasionally since.)