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Monday, October 8, 2007

Looking for reading ideas?

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users as of a few days ago. From what I gather, this means that the individual owns the book and has not read it. I've bolded the ones I've read, and noted that I actually own, unread or partially unread, a few of these myself.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrellthis is a huge book, and it took me almost a month to listen to as an audiobook, so I can understand why many people would have it "unread". I loved it and have considered buying it in hard copy to flip back through my favorite parts. I think I cried a little at the end.
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
it took me several false starts, but when I finally finished it, I found I had really enjoyed it
Catch-22 – own it, never read it
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick – I’ve never heard of someone who read this book and was glad they did, so I figure, why bother?
Ulysses
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 – I want to read this book, but I’ve heard from a few sources that there is a fair amount of gratuitous explicit content, so I haven’t dived in yet.
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway – I made the mistake of going to see The Hours; I will never read this book
Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha – I am about halfway through this, and stuck there
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
Hundred Years of Solitude
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch

Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
- OK, the abridged version, and am partway through the unabridged
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 – started it, couldn’t handle the foul language. I do own it.
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and ClayI read this for a book club, and Michael Chabon is a very gifted writer, but I can’t really recommend this book based on content.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – flipped through it at the airport book store and it looked good, but there was an f-word on every page, so I skipped it
Dune - multiple times, currently about 3/4 through a re-read
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir – started it, was depressed by it, and I don’t do well with depressing books in the depths of winter, so I have not gone back to it yet
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon – have looked at this at the book store numerous times; it just looks so intimidating and huge, not sure it would pay off
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces – started it, hated it, never finished
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 – bought it, got about ¾ of the way through, hated it, now stored in a box somewhere
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye – I have no intention of ever reading this. Teenage angst. Ugh.
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – started it as a book club read, couldn’t get into it. I fear this may be another book I purchased which is gathering dust somewhere.
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 – my dad was forever bugging me to read this book growing up, but as far as I can remember, I never did
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers – another book I own and haven’t read

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