Blog Meme: Unread Books
Posted by: roscivs, in UncategorizedSo there’s this blog meme going around recently (like the Fifteen Game) in which you take the top 100 books tagged “unread” on librarything.com and note whether you’ve read them, started but couldn’t finish, didn’t like, etc. I’m going to do it a little differently and just organize them into sections so as to take up less space.
Never Heard Of
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149), One Hundred Years Of Solitude (115), The Name Of The Rose (91), Vanity Fair (74), The Blind Assassin (73), The Kite Runner (71), Mrs. Dalloway (70), American gods (68), A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius (67), Middlesex (66), Quicksilver (66), The Historian (63), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63), Love in the time of Cholera (62), Anansi Boys (58), To The Lighthouse (54), The Corrections (53), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52), Angela’s Ashes (51), The God of Small Things (51), A People’s History of the United States (51), The Sound and the Fury (51), Neverwhere (50), A Confederacy of Dunces (50), Dubliners (50), Beloved (49), Slaughterhouse-Five (49), Oryx and Crake (47), Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47), Cloud Atlas (47), The Confusion (46), On The Road (46), Gravity’s Rainbow (44).
Heard Of But Haven’t Read
Classics which I probably should have read in school but never did: Anna Karenina (132), Wuthering Heights (110), Don Quixote (91), Moby Dick (86), Ulysses (84), Madame Bovary (83), A Tale Of Two Cities (80), The Brothers Karamazov (80), War And Peace (78), Emma (73), Great Expectations (70), The Canterbury Tales (64), Middlemarch (61), Frankenstein (59), The Once And Future King (57), Sense and Sensibility (55), The Picture of Dorian Gray (55), One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (54), The Prince (51), Persuasion (46), Northanger Abbey (46)
I’ve seen the movie, does that count?: The Count of Monte Cristo (59), Gulliver’s Travels (53), Oliver Twist (54), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45). (Okay, probably not, since it was the Disney version.)
Musicals: Wicked (65), Les Misérables (5)
Books I’ve heard about recently that sound interesting: Life of Pi (94), The Time Traveler’s Wife (73), Reading Lolita in Tehran (66), Memoirs of a Geisha (66), Foucault’s Pendulum (61), A Short History of Nearly Everything (50), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49), Eats, Shoots & Leaves (48)
Books that do not look particularly interesting: Dracula (59), A Clockwork Orange (59), The Grapes of Wrath (57), The Poisonwood Bible (57), Angels & Demons (56), The Satanic Verses (55), Mansfield Park (55), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54), The Mists of Avalon (47), Lolita (46), Watership Down (44)
On my own “to read” list:
Brave New World (61), The Fountainhead (61), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52), Cryptonomicon (50)
Books I’ve Read
Crime and Punishment (121)—one of my most-quoted books for many years
Catch-22 (117)—an excellent book that captures very poignantly for me the horror of war
The Hobbit (104)—good story, Tolkien doesn’t get as long-winded as in LOTR
The Odyssey (83)—read this for school, but I love the Greek classics
Pride and Prejudice (83)—first half was boring, last half I couldn’t put the book down
Jane Eyre (80)—one of the most enjoyable “classics” I’ve read
Guns, Germs, and Steel (79)—I have a dozen essays waiting to be written because of this book; a must-read!
The Iliad (73)—same as “The Odyssey”
Atlas Shrugged (67)—maddening book because I agree with so much and yet disagree with so many of the premises
1984 (57)—frightening and oft-referenced
The Inferno (56)—read this for school too, but didn’t appreciate it very much; I imagine the original Italian is much better
Dune (51)—excellent book; got a friend of mine hooked on fiction
The Scarlet Letter (48)—read for school
The Catcher in the Rye (46)—a great book to read as an angsty teenager
Freakonomics (45)—very thought-provoking book even if I question some of the particular conclusions
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (45)—a very strange (but good) philosophical book that has nothing really to do with Zen or Motorcycles, but much to do (surprisingly) with being a teacher
The Aeneid (45)—see also “The Odyssey”; did I mention I love the Greek classics?
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October 8th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
The Aeneid, well…it isn’t Greek. Have you read Ovid’s /Metamorphoses/? You’d probably like that, too.
I see you are not a fan of the Dracula? It really is quite a good book, in my opinion. And there aren’t many books that introduce a new archetypal figure to world literature.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Good eye, sealionii! I should have said I’m a fan of the Greco-Roman tradition. (I was thrown off, perhaps, by its name being in Greek form.) I have read Metamorphoses (of my own free will, in fact, not being compelled by the educational system), and liked that a great deal as well.
Regarding Dracula, I’m not a big fan of that genre in general.
October 9th, 2007 at 8:21 am
By “that genre”, do you mean “horror” or “Gothic”? It’s a very different kettle of fish from, say, Steven King. I would say if you like the (original) Sherlock Holmes stories (especially “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, which is the most like it in tone), or H. Rider Haggard, you’d probably like Dracula.
October 10th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
I meant Gothic. I dislike horror; Gothic I merely am not a big fan of.