(no subject)

[primroseburrows]

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of 30 September 2007). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish,and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list. (my addition: underline what you started and plan to finish eventually).


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 (it was for a class, but it still counts)
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 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

Why are these mostly nineteenth century novels? I'm pretty sure I hate just about all nineteenth century novels. Except Poe's stuff (who was way early in the century) and Oscar Wilde and cool people like that. And I'm willing to give Dickens an honest shot, just for the first line of A Tale of Two Cities, but other than that, no thankya (and before you ask, I've TRIED to read them. Honest.) The reason all of these are unread is probably because a whole lot of people hate nineteenth century novels. The theory doesn't seem to work with Neil Gaiman's novels because he is one of the most talented people in the universe and why everyone in said universe is not agog with wonder over the greatness of his books is beyond me. No, I'm not opinionated, why do you ask?

Comments

[patchfire.livejournal.com]

you around?

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

Yes, but am v. v. tired. Bed soon. I hope.

[patchfire.livejournal.com]

I should sleep but I didn't do enough today to get really tired, so that sucks. I did go to IHOP. They have pumpkin pancakes. Pumpkin pancakes rock. You don't even need syrup with them.

Okay, looking at that paragraph, maybe I need sleep more than I realized.

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

I must learn to make pumpkin pancakes. Mmmm.

'night, dear. :)

[topaz7.livejournal.com]

English major. all those 19th century novels...zzzzz....

Jonathan Strange etc. has been on my bookshelf for two years. Still haven't read more than the first few pages.

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 (got it from the library this evening - quel coincidence!)
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
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

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

American Gods is the first fantasy and most likely even fiction my sister has read for ages. She's an athiest who avoids most references to religion, and she also generally hates reading what she calls "pretend" (feel free to headdesk along with me). She liked the book though, which says a lot about how awesome Neil is. The last book she read was The Stand (which now that I think of it, has a major religious/spiritual theme.)

[topaz7.livejournal.com]

She doesn't like religion or "pretend", but I like pretend religions ;)

Whatever that means. Neil Gaiman is a rockstar so I've been avoiding his books. But Anansi boys was an excellent read, so I think I'm slowly being sucked into the vortex.

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

Neil's a fecking genius of a rockstar. Read his stuff.

[topaz7.livejournal.com]

Y-yes ma'am!

*trembles*

[the_antichris.livejournal.com]

I could never get on with Dickens either, possibly because of attempting The Pickwick Papers when I was 12. (Bad idea.) I also don't feel I need to read the ones that are on there because they've had a lot of media play in the last couple of years.

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

I only want to read AToTC because of the awesome first line. Usually a good first line says something about the rest of the book, so who knows.

[topaz7.livejournal.com]

It's got a good last line, too. ;)

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'll have to look into that. For a second I thought you meant The Gunslinger. Which? Has a great first AND last line.

[newleaf31.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it will absolutely not come as a complete shock to you when I gank this meme, right? Steal, steal, steal.