Another Book Meme

[intertext]

Seen all over

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, italicise 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. <lj-cut>

I've also marked with an asterisk anything I liked particularly well.
Works marked with a "U" were read as required texts for University. Works marked with a "P" were for PhD reading list. Works marked with an "O" were read in their original language

*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) P
Moby Dick (86)
*Ulysses (84) U
Madame Bovary (83) U
The Odyssey (83) U, O
*Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
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) U, O
*Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70) P
Great expectations (70) S, U
American gods (68)
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) U, O
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63) U
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61) P
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
*Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59) U
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)
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) U, P
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53) U
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) U
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) U, O
*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)

On my personal to-read list:

Jane Eyre
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Guns, Germs and Steel
The God of Small Things

Comments

[gillo]

My goodness me, you've never read

Persuasion

? I love it, and I'd have thought you would have done too. OK, so I'm a total Austen geek, but even so...

[intertext.livejournal.com]

No, somehow I missed it in my Austen sweep one year. I should put it on my "to read" list! Especially as I love the movie (though I've heard that book purists do not like the movie, so...)

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Just what I was going to say! It's wonderful - almost my favourite, though I've a hard time picking. The first time I saw the film I was horrified (kissing in the street in Bath?!?) but then came to see it as quite cleverly compressed to show character in a short space of time.

Oh, the book though!

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Another comment (I just added up numbers to be sure I wouldn't humiliate myself by doing this myself, and we have exactly the same number read) or question rather - you didn't love Middlemarch?

[gillo]

Both films have weaknesses, especially in the ending (the BBC series with Ciaran Hinds and Amanda Root and the recent ITV two-hour version with Tony Head as Sir Walter) - when would any Austen heroine run or kiss in public? However, they are good fun with some strong performances in each. The book is better, though. But you probably guessed that, anyway.

It's one of those books for the humiliation game - what's teh best-known book one has never read? (With me it's an entire writer, Dostoevsky.)

[inaniac.livejournal.com]

These lists simply exist to remind me I spend way too much time on the internet.

In other words, I've not read enough of them to even contemplate emboldening many of them.

[lidocafe.livejournal.com]

Wow, do I love that icon. :)

[inaniac.livejournal.com]

It's all over the place. I thought it was cool, so I acquired it.

I love the idea of bookshops, but I don't have the patience to spend time in one. When will they develop search for a bookshop! (Probably just after they perfect the 'where're my keys search'.)

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Dorothea Brooke annoyed me intensely. Otherwise I liked bits of it. But I wouldn't say I loved it, no. I'm not big on Big Victorian Novels. I read 'em, but tend to think that as much can be said in less space.

My whole author never read is Trollope - he's on my "to read" list, too.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Okay! Okay! You've both persuaded me (hahaha). There's a great new edition available in the Folio Society - I shall purchase it and read it!

[intertext.livejournal.com]

I think, in fact, you can do search for a bookstore in Google... somehow through Google maps or something. And then probably get a satellite view of it :)

[inaniac.livejournal.com]

Oooh ... If Google further develops their street view to bookshop view, with a little camera roaming all the bookshops in the world ...

Or I could just go to Amazon! :D

[pure-obscurity.livejournal.com]

read my journal to see my list :)