Book meme...what the heck.

[gategrrl]

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, 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) - LOVE Ancient Greek Lit.
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80) Can't stand Dickens
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) loved loved LOVED this book
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)
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) Love Dumas
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)
The inferno (56) wonderful
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) read this for a book report in high school, what a riot!
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) I was a real nut in high school
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)

 

Comments

[amycooper.livejournal.com]

Crime and Punishment is great, but you really have to drag yourself through the first 50 pages or so. I have never read a more boring murder. It is post-murder that the book becomes interesting and pulls you in. But I can really see how people never make it to the good stuff in that book.

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

When I was a Junior, I had the opportunity to take an English AP class, but I hadn't realized that there was a summer reading list that we were going to be tested on in September.

I remember the Valedictorian of the class rolling her eyes at me when I discovered this reading list - and the first book I tried out was Crime and Punishment, and believe me, it was NOT the right book for a depressed kid to try and read. The translation I started on was dense and difficult and it was so dark and murky, I couldn't make it past the first two or three chapters.

I ended up not taking the Eng AP class, and instead took some really interesting Lit courses like Early English Literature (which introduced me to Jane Austen and Jonathon Swift and other fabulous writers of those eras), and Classical Lit where we read The Illiad and Odyssey and a Shakespeare Class which was just about the awesomest class ever.

Meanwhile, the AP kids had to read those dreary "Literature" novels. The only problem I had with it, was the AP kids were the only ones able to get on the Yearbook committee, which sucked. They had NO graphic apititude and the yearbook that Senior year was full of cliquey rubbish.