Knit a little, read a little, watch a little

Friday, May 09, 2008

More meme-y stuff

Not a lot of creativity in my brain lately. Therefore, memes.


What it is: the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. 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

The 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
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 (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 : 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

Oliver Twist is only half-bolded because I only read about half the book. Someone in my high school English department decide it was a good idea to read it in the following manner: Chapter 1, chapter 3, chapter 5, chapter 9, continue hopscotching until Oliver gets rescued and goes to the country (I think), skip the entire happy bit, pick up again when Oliver returns to London and continue hopscotching until the end. This is NOT a recommended method of reading any book. (Dickens still gives me shudders. We were supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities two years later, and I'm glad it got skipped entirely.)

As for the books I read for school, Oliver Twist, 1984 and The Grapes of Wrath were all assigned high school texts; Brave New World was one of two choices for a compare-and-contrast essay with 1984 (Fahrenheit 451 being the other choice, which I read later); The Scarlet Letter and Lolita were both read for independent study components in high school (Lolita got picked because I was on a conference and had to get a book during my lunch hour that would fit the "We want a creative writing course, and we will get it even if it means subverting every attempt the teacher makes to deviate from our plan" plan - the essay ended up on perverted behavior in literature); and The Prince and Crime and Punishment were assigned college texts.