Booklist

This meme has been showing up all over the place and I thought it might be interesting to both try it and maybe pick a few things from it as summer reading...

The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school (I will make these bold plus a star as I am not sure how to underline), italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. I'll add ** for ones I actually want to read/finish and >> for ones that I reread because they were really good!

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina (have started multiple times and never finished)
Crime and Punishment (I'm pretty sure I read this)
>>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 (some mean person nicked my copy when I was half way through)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (only in translation but that's OK right?)
>>Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities I can;t do Dickens. Yuck!
The Brothers Karamazov (I'm pretty sure)
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair (I found this incredibly boring)
The Time Traveler’s Wife
>>The Iliad (again, only in translation)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations (More Dickens, more getting bored)
**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 (not in translation - loved them! And they're quite a slow read so great to take when travelling as you get a lot of hours for quite a small weight of paper)
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
1984
Angels & Demons
>>Inferno (again, only in translation)
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 (I've tried quite a few Dickens. He's just not to my taste)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince (in translation)
**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 (I've read most of her stuff but it started getting nastier and nastier so I've not read the last few - I don't like nasty in books, it gets into my imagination and won't go away)
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 (about 4 books in the original Latin, all of it in translation)
Watership Down (and I cried buckets!)
**Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (nasty. No)
White Teeth
>>Treasure Island
David Copperfield (Dickens again - I NEARLY finished this one)

Hmm, apart from my unreasonable and probably unpatriotic dislike of Dickens, the lack of bold-starred texts shows more that I skipped out of English Lit class as soon as possible at school rather than that my school's syllabus missed these texts - we'd done 'To Kill a Mocking Bird, The Crucible, Julius Caesar and quite a lot of poems - I quit because I COULD and the next thing up was Charles Dickens! The pattern generally shows that I don't read much modern 'literary' fiction (I read modern mind candy mostly or history - if it's won a literary prize or critical acclaim I usually wait until I find it dirt cheap second hand as I've been disappointed or bored or repulsed too often by supposedly 'wonderful' modern books).