Reading meme/list

[altivo]

Lifted from vimsig and several others:

The top books that LibraryThing users have tagged "unread." The usual: bold the ones you have read, italicise the ones you started but couldn't finish, strikethrough the ones you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of Library thing 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 (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) [I assume this means Machiavelli]
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela's Ashes(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) [One of the few I was made to read for school but hated]
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)

Seems odd that The Lord of the Rings isn't on this list. Or the Bible.

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

It is odd. I tend to be of the opinion that reading the Bible is pretty much crucial (no obscure pun intended). Not that everyone should be an accomplished exegete, with their own little copies of apocryphical texts gathering dust somewhere in the bookshelf, but that they could have a working knowledge of it. I think I remember you saying it should be taught as a part of basic literature study, and I completely agree.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

(It also occurs to me I have no idea how to pronounce "exegete.")

[heavens-steed.livejournal.com]

Strange indeed that neither one of those titles, LOTR or the Bible made the list, both of which are probably my favorite books of all time :) Even stranger that both The Silmarillion and the Hobbit are listed.

[dongstyle-ltd.livejournal.com]

Heh. I remember trying to pick up the Pirsig some years ago. I might have to go over it again, just to see if I just didn't get it or I couldn't stand it.

Strangely enough, many of the books on this list actually comprise a large proportion of the "Borders' Top 100 Fiction" list. And out of this list, I'm actually currently reading Crime and Punishment. Call me ignorant of the times, but I didn't expect my translation to be quite so...Dickensian.

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

Predictably well-bolded. Should pick up "One Hundred Years.." though, great book.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, it is, after all, a list of books that people buy but never get around to reading. Still, I'd have expected both to be on the list. I know a lot of people bought LotR and never read it because either they started and hated it or they were daunted once they realized the size of it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

English speakers usually say "EKS-uh-geet" with the last syllable rhyming with "eat." A proper Greek pronunciation would be more like "eks-eh-GAY-teh."

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Since it's a list of books that people own but have never gotten around to actually reading, I really think the Bible probably does belong on there. It's probably the nature of LibraryThing that keeps it off. First of all, most people list their favorite books on it. Second, even if they did include the Bible, it has so many editions and translations that the computer database wouldn't necessarily realize they were all the same thing. And third, but by no means insignificant, this is a list of books that people admitted were "unread" in their collections. Probably a lot of folks are embarrassed to admit that they haven't actually read the bible.

I have, because I had to for course work. Otherwise there are certainly vast portions of it that I would have slept through. :) Other parts, though, are excellent both as literature and as moral or historical instruction.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I actually had to read Pirsig for a contemporary theology class when I was in grad school. As you might guess, the class was very strange. We also went on a field trip to see a Sarah Lee bakery. (It was a large, mostly automated and robotic factory that manufactured danish pastries.) Most amusing was the fact that on the day we were there, the line was down, and yeast dough was rising and bulging out of various parts of it. ;p

Other required reading for the course included Future Shock and 1984. It was all very strange and disorienting, frankly.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Maybe when I start to gain ground on my own mountain of unread titles here, none of which were on that list.