All the cool kids are doing it

[oneiriad]

Have abducted this book meme at gunpoint - quite possibly from hils

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's (as of today). Have you read them?

Bold what you have read, italicize 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) if it's the one I'm thinking of, then why aren't people reading it? It's got Half-cocked Jack Shaftoe in it?!
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) I am embarrassed to admit it
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) 

So, tell me - which is it a scandal that I haven't read?

Comments

[fairlyironic.livejournal.com]

Wow, when you start things, you finish them; I don't see any italicized there at all. So you read the Aneid but not the Odyssey? And you didn't like it, what didn't you like about it?

[oneiriad.livejournal.com]

Wow, when you start things, you finish them
Yeah, that's a bit of a bad habit of mine - I'm stubborn about some things and I like to finish what I start. Admittedly, that's also an excellent thing to be when facing those books that start slow... that said, I have a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories on my shelf that I managed to run out of steam for a few chapters into "Hound of the Baskervilles". I'll probably go back to it some day, though...

So you read the Aneid but not the Odyssey? And you didn't like it, what didn't you like about it?
Oh, the Odyssey is standing on my shelf, has for a few years - it's just an inconveniently sized book - far too big for a train book. I'll get around to it sooner or later. As for the Aeneid, well, bear in mind that I read it quite a few years ago, but as I recall, it simply irritated me. It was like the author had stolen liberally from Homer's plots, mixed well, added a female character who, despite being a queen and supposedly a strong person, wastes everything on an ungrateful son-of-a-bitch and then proceeds to commit suicide because of him, also added some kissing-of-Roman-Emperor-ass), and served. I think it annoyed me the same way "Sword of Shannara" annoyed me - it felt like the author was telling me a story that somebody else had already told, only they (the somebody else I mean) had done a better job. But like I said, it's been some years. Maybe I'll go back and read it again some day, you never know.

[juliet-whisky.livejournal.com]

I decided yesterday, it is a crime that I havent read Moby Dick. Therefore it is a crime that you havent either. (How can a whole story be about one whale?)

[hippediva.livejournal.com]

AHHHH! So YOU were responsible for this thing! *wink* I'd say go for Jane Eyre. It's one of those classics that everyone's read at some point or another. And On the Road is fantastic! *G*

[hippediva.livejournal.com]

depends on whether or not they cut the scene where Moby and Ahab sing a duet. *giggle*

[soho-iced.livejournal.com]

Well, I think Margaret Atwood is great, but if you haven't read any than I wouldn't necessarily start with either Oryx & Crake or The Blind Assassin: Alias Grace, maybe.

'The Curious Incident...' is well worth the read particularly as it won't take you long: it's not really a kid's book although told from a (very unusaual) teenager's point of view.

If you're looking for serious brain food, I'd recommend 'Collapse'. There's a lot there: it starts from talking about extinct societies and why they died out, and that's fascinating, but just the start. It really made a great impression on me.