(no subject)

[coraa]

From avani

These are the top 100 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today, 2 October 2007).

(I suspect, based on the fact that people presumably don't add these books to LibraryThing unless they own them, that this is really mostly a list of books people think they ought to read.)

Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. I also marked red those on my TBR or am currently reading list.



Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude (though I should take another stab at it)
Wuthering Heights (I almost struck this, because ARGH Catherine and Heathcliffe GET OVER YOURSELVES, but it was a fun read.)
The Hobbit
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
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
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The kite runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great expectations
American gods : a novel
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged (and please don't try to tell me why I should like it. been there done that.)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
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 : A Novel
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
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist (not so much couldn't finish as just didn't, though.)
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 : a Novel
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach...
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a Novel
Collapse : how Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas : a Novel
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road (heresy, I know! I just couldn't stand Kerouac, or his novel persona, or whatever)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid (in translation and original Latin! ph34r my madd translation skillz)
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island



BTW, if you read Freakonomics, skip the introduction(s) and jump straight into the first chapter. The introduction(s) are painfully self-congratulatory and somewhat offputting. The actual meat of the book is interesting, though, even if I don't always agree with his conclusions.

Comments

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

Based on your comment about Heathcliff and Catherine you might check out the Thursday Next books, if you haven't. I found them very, very amusing.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip! I have a copy of Eyre Affair kicking around the house somewhere...

[jmpava.livejournal.com]

Yes you do. I read it at some point. Rather enjoyed it, in a not quite Dirk Gently sort of way.

Shrug this!

[(Anonymous)]

You already know mopie, yes? So have you already read the best Ayn Rand review ever (http://www.mopie.com/blog/2006/01/atlas-shrugged-by-ayn-rand.html)?

Re: Shrug this!

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yes. :D And I adore it.

Re: Shrug this!

[jmpava.livejournal.com]

I still hold that Sewer, Gas, Electric has the best Ayn Rand 'review' ever :->

[neonelephant.livejournal.com]

Angels & Demons was less "can't stand it" for me than Digital Fortress, but ... yeah. The latter would have to be bolded and struck through for me :-)

If you want to borrow Foucault's Pendulum, I've a copy I could loan you. It was strange.

Your reaction to Cryptonomicon will probably determine whether or not it's worth reading the Baroque Cycle. I'm in the camp that feels that all four volumes are awesome, although not in the same undiluted way that, say, Snow Crash was.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I think Dan Brown reads one book (or article in Newsweek, or whatever) on a topic, gets very very excited about it, and writes his novel right then, no additional research needed. I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear that the CS and math in Digital Fortress were as bad as the history in DaVinci Code.

I've heard good things about Foucault's Pendulum, or at least interesting things, but it's never wandered across my path. I may take you up on that!

[neonelephant.livejournal.com]

The plot and whatnot of Digital Fortress were vaguely interesting, in that over-the-top-24-esque-thriller sort of way. But yeah, it seemed like every 10 pages or so he'd bust out with some total fabrication about CS or crypto or something.

Part of the reason that Angels & Demons was less horrifying for me was that he may be making stuff up about Italian architecture, but I haven't got the first clue about that. I was able to write the antimatter off as a McGuffin.

[jmpava.livejournal.com]

that, say, Snow Crash was.

So... if I couldn't stand snow crash....

[jmpava.livejournal.com]

I almost feel compelled to do one where I indicate 'which books I haven't read but you've got so I now I'm just REALLY being a lazy philistine by ignoring them.' Almost. :->

Except for the Aeneid. I ain't reading original Latin :->

[epj.livejournal.com]

Most women I know say that they didn't like "On the Road". I am most definitely among them.

BTW, hello, I friended you because of all your outstanding comments re: MalePrivilegeFest!2008 (aka the OSBP) on the_red_shoes journal.