2 October 07
Reading "Unread" Books
These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (as of yesterday). Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. (Via Steve Rubio’s online life)
What have I learned? That my knowledge of the grand Russian 19th century novel is poor; that I’ve never given Dickens much of a chance, and I’ve never given any later English Victorian novelists much of one either; that I’ve deliberately never given Ayn Rand any kind of chance at all, and I’m sure that’s not going to change; that I’ve never been able to stand Hardy (I really, really tried, read a lot of it, just get bogged down); that I really ought to try the Iliad and the Aeneid since I liked the Odyssey so much; that I ought to finally go through the Canterbury Tales since a copy’s sitting on my bedside table. Also, that I have a psychological or cultural aversion to starting a book and not finishing it even if I’m not really enjoying it. (I finished Don Quixote because I had to for college; I read Moby Dick in a public garden in Santa Barbara in 1996 and loved it but would have hated it in school; I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance before I had any business doing so but I kept going, not sure why, since I’m sure I didn’t get most of it; that “seminal” books of the American high school experience have mostly escaped me. I’d love to hear if folks think I should have a go at any of the unmarked books on here… Oh, I think Jared Diamond should be among them. And I usually read anything by Margaret Atwood, not sure how I missed the Blind Assassin. And I’m absolutely unsure about how I missed Northanger Abbey…)
I finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell yesterday. Hilarious that it’s the first entry.
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: the fates of human societies
War and peace
Vanity fair
The time traveler’s wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
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 (64)
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
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
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 Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
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 : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
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
I think you should try Tolstoy again, if it’s many years since you gave up on Anna Karenina and War and Peace. I recently reread AK and read Resurrection for the first time, and absolutely loved both, having found Tolstoy rather hard going when I was young. Such timeless evocation of psyches, life and work.
Jean — thanks. I just might. It really is a lot of years since I gave up on those…
I can’t live without War and Peace. It’s one of the few books I read so often that I’ve worn out multiple copies of it.
I might find it hard to read if I were coming to it for the first time. Always hard to know, with books you grew up & took shape with. I wonder that about Lord of the Rings, too.
I have a really difficult time with Hardy, too. He takes a weird amount of pleasure in the suffering of his characters, it seems to me. Sets my teeth on edge :-)
I should try this meme – though I bet my “bolds” are going to be pretty sparse!
Dale and Jean: I went and got a copy of War and Peace out the library last night, a 1940s edition with the Clifton Fadiman foreword denouncing the Nazis, interesting in itself. I started it. Seems like the wrong kind of book for ten minutes before I fall asleep, but so far, so good. Thanks for the encouragement.
Rana, I think the list is very arbitrary, and so are the bolds. It was instructive, though, to see the pattern of what I hadn’t read…
Hi Pica,
A mutual birding friend (you know me from the BBC) just sent me a link to your bird art blog and I wandered over here.
The list careens from classics to present day “book club” style selections.
As far as ones I’d recommend you try, The Catcher in the Rye springs to mind. (And To Kill a Mockingbird, although it’s not listed, if you haven’t read that.)
It was fun seeing where my own experience fell on this list.
http://auntjane.livejournal.com/22720.html
I caught this meme from you and posted it to my personal blog, not the one for work where you usually find me. I do heartily recommend Jared Diamond.
I’m thinking of doing a blogpost on books that I’ve put down more than 80% of the way through. Peter Carey’s Theft is the latest. There’s a particular stroke of insight that comes only at the beginning of the climax, when I realise that despite all these pages, I just don’t care.
Your resistance to easy sentimentality is admirable, btw.
Jarrett: thanks. I’m not sure which ones of these you might classify as “easy sentimentality” other than perhaps the Hugo, which certainly qualifies and which I felt no great need to read, having seen a dreadful Spanish TV dramatization in the late 60s… some of his poetry was okay, but goodness ME a little of that goes a long way.
I think I need another category for “books I read under pressure and finished and thought ‘meh’ rather than I actually hated” — Geisha, for instance.
Missing from this list is Walden. I started it and thought it self-indulgent nonsense. Oh, another lacuna for me: Faulkner…
It’s an interesting exercise, though.
I suppose I was replying to your response to Martel’s Life if Pi. If found the book well-constructed and yet so direct in its appeal to my sentiments as to seem almost cynical.