I’m writing ’bout the book I read
Sat 6 Sep 2008, 12:20 pm
I’m at least one memetag behind, but I just saw this and thought it would be fun to mark up the list.
Looks like this one has been making the rounds for a while, but I hadn’t really noticed it until I got tagged by The Sheck (aka Sarah Cohen).
This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked “unread” by LibraryThing users. The rules: 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 (assigned in high school, never finished)
- A Tale of Two Cities
- The Brothers Karamazov
- Guns, Germs, and Steel
- 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 (best novel of the 21st century)
- The Confusion
- Lolita
- Persuasion
- Northanger Abbey
- The Catcher in the Rye
- On the Road
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Freakonomics
- 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 (assigned in high school, read about about a quarter of it, burned the book at the end of the school year)
- The Three Musketeers

Reading 1/4 Copperfield should count for something. My high school experience with old David was quite similar.
Am I picking up on a Talking Heads reference in your title?
Comment by Tom — September 8, 2008 @ 5:45 pm
Tom, I guess they think that high school kids will relate to Copperfield’s coming-of-age story. But its Just. So. Damn. Long.
And yes, that’s a Talking Heads reference in the title. Glad you noticed, as I thought it might be too generic/obscure.
Comment by Steve Lawson — September 8, 2008 @ 9:04 pm
I hate Dickens, although I can’t say I’ve ever burned his work.
Comment by laura — September 9, 2008 @ 11:14 am
I did not know you were the kind of guy who didn’t necessarily read the assigned reading in high school. But then, you were the Homecoming King. I keep forgetting we are not equally nerdy.
Comment by Jessy — September 10, 2008 @ 4:36 pm
I’m not proud of not finishing the books, but that’s the reality. 19th century English lit just didn’t agree with me. The burning was taking things a bit too far, I admit. I regret the burning. This is why I’ll never be President of the ALA.
Comment by Steve Lawson — September 10, 2008 @ 4:40 pm
The only written work I ever burned was a (particularly awful) Mechanical Physics midterm…
But then, I was raised on Dickens.
Comment by Marianne — September 20, 2008 @ 11:14 pm