a meme! about books!

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (they sit on the shelf to make the owner look smart or well-rounded). Bold the ones you’ve read for your own pleasure (or enjoyed reading in school, and *might* possibly read again, or even just finished), and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish (i.e. forced to read for school) and I also put an asterisk by ones I really, really want to read.


The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
*The Count of Monte Cristo (I will do it, I swear. I just need to be in the mood.)
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
*Dubliners (This one's sort of been on hiatus. I really do want to read it, though. Or finish.)
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault's Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver's Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
*In Cold Blood (So how long has Bernadette been trying to get me to read it?? I had it in my hand at B&N, too. But I'd already had my book-buying-binge for the quarter. You know, where you go to B&N once every 10 weeks or so and spend like 70 bucks. Wait... normal people don't do that?)
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
*Les Misérables (I know, how can I not read the book that is where my favorite musical came from?)
Life of Pi
Lolita
*Love in the Time of Cholera (I loves me some Latino drama. Why isn't "Like Water For Chocolate" on here?)
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Middlemarch
*The Mists of Avalon (Okay, so Bethany has been trying to get me to read this forever. And frankly, I don't disagree. Who wouldn't want to read names like "Gwenwyfar" over and over, while trying to pronounce them mentally?)
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere (I LOVE this book. LOVE)
*1984 (I really don't know why I haven't read this. Honestly.)
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King
*On the Road (Cormac McCarthy. It's on the list.)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
*One Hundred Years of Solitude (I loves me some Latino drama.)
Oryx and Crake
A People’s History of the United States
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice (My fav. Absolutely. In fact, I may just read it again over break. Cuz I can.)
The Prince
Quicksilver Exposition
*Reading Lolita in Tehran (Haven't been able to pick it up yet. I'll have to throw it on the library list.)
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
*Slaughterhouse-Five (I'll do it. For Kurt.)
The Sound and the Fury
*A Tale of Two Cities (You know, I really liked the end of this book - which is where I woke up in class and started paying attention - so maybe I'd like the beginning.)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
*The Time Traveler's Wife (It is sitting on my desk, I kid you not.)
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
*Ulysses (I know... Joyce. But it's so BIG... I'll just start with Dubliners)
*The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Also, sitting on my desk. But I'm not feeling like much of a schauvinist right now.
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down (Never. Again.)
White Teeth
*Wicked (I don't know. I think I might have to stick with the musical. It's on the book shelf, though, just in case.)
Wuthering Heights
Zatoichi
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance