This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked “unread” by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
- 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
- A Tale of Two Cities
- The Brothers Karamazov
- Guns, Germs, and Steel
- War and Peace
- Vanity Fair
- The Time Traveler’s Wife
- The Iliad
- Emma
- The Blind Assassin (gripped me from the first paragraph)
- 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 (on my shelf waiting to be read)
- 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
- 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
School was so long ago that I probably have read most of the classics, but honestly do not remember. I have kept a list of every book I've read since graduate school days. My list is now in a database with over 1,200 titles.
So many books, so little time.
1 comment:
Thanks for the list. I've read 28.3 -- the .3 is Inferno, but not the rest. I read Inferno as a follow-up to a book by Gloria Naylor, whose title escapes me at the moment.
I read Middlemarch when I was part of a reading group, years ago. We chose a "long classic" because there was going to be a longer-than-usual hiatus between meetings. I was prepared to be bored, but I loved it. I then read Mill on the Floss, and loved that. So the, I decided to reread Silas Marner because I had thought it unutterably sappy in high school --and boy, had I been right. Just why that was chosen is beyond me, apart from the fact it's short. Hope it's still not used.
I reread Tale of Two Cities recently as my hairdresser's son was reading it in high school -- I thought the opening was very cinematic, but the father/daughter love was too sentimental, without quite tipping over into sappy -- her son hated the whole book.
Mrs. Dalloway was the first Virginia Woolf novel I read. It was recommended by a friend who said it was more accessible than some of her other novels. I liked it a lot, plus her collection of short stories, Mrs. Dalloway's Party. Try Mrs. Dalloway.
Believe it or not, I read War and Peace after reading the first really long Harry Potter novel. I thought, well, if kids can read a book this long, I can read W&P. I did skip the appendices with Tolstoy's thoughts/philosophies. There's a book out on the graphic depiction of statistics that usually has as its example in ads and, for some editions, on the cover, a map with a thick/very thin line showing the size of Napoleon's army going to and then retreating from Moscow. Very revealing.
Hope your other readers, the non-posting ones (surely they are out there?) enjoy the list as much as I did.
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