Book Meme
What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. 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
The 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 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) (Do they mean Divine Comedy?)
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
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
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
The Three Musketeers
I had not realized how many books I never finished. I need to get a library card. This list brings back memories if my dad’s beautiful leather bound book collection (which hopefully is willed to me. Is it sad that I always know where I would put their case in anywhere that I live?)
May 6th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
I would heartily recommend The Life Of Pi.
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May 6th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I’m not sure how to bold things so I’ll just leave the ones that I have read:
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
Wuthering Heights (boooooooooooring!)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice (loooooooong!)
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
War and Peace
Vanity Fair (the magazine, once at the dentist)
The Iliad
The Kite Runner (depressing)
Great Expectations
Atlas Shrugged (pretentious)
The Canterbury Tales
Brave New World (this is very cool)
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
The Grapes of Wrath
1984
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (Yes, the Divine Comedy)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables (in the original french! boring!)
The Prince (this is the best book on this list)
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Cryptonomicon
A Confederacy of Dunces (this is also very good)
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter (I hate this book;it has no redeeming value)
Lolita (boring)
The Catcher in the Rye
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics (this is also interesting)
The Aeneid
Watership Down
The Hobbit
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
You’re missing some that need to be on there though:
The Communist Manifesto
In Defence of Global Capitalism (they go together)
Malcolm X Autobiography
The Gulag Archipelago (it’s a trilogy, bonus points if you slug through it in the original Russian)
The Book of Five Rings
Stranger in a Strange Land (grok?)
The Neon Bible
There’s more, but all of the above are excellent and/or important books… the only tough one is the Manifesto, which is mercifully short… but it’s only tough if you find marxist bullshit drivel to be annoying. (which I do most of the time)
Good job on reading a lot of the classics, you’re ahead of the curve by most standards I’m sure.
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May 6th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
If it weren’t for Dad’s leather bounds I don’t think I would have gotten through most of those “classics”. Of your extended list there I’ve read The Communist Manifesto (not “In Defence of Global Capitalism” though, is it also short, hope so…) and Stranger in a Strange Land.
Other then Dune, I think my favorite on the list was 1984…
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May 6th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I have read some on your list and I’ve also seen the movie versions of
others and some are really, really good. ‘Unbearable Lightness of Being’
stands out. That is such an awesome movie. I seldom buy
Fiction just to let it sit. Have a bunch of bio’s and non-fiction
I have yet to get too. But from your list:
Les Miserables (my fav novel of all time)
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Lolita (great opening lead but liked the movie version better)
Scarlet Letter (for school and I barely got through it)
Gulliver Travels (for school)
The Picture of Dorian Gray
1984 (one of the best political books of all time)
Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenence …I got lost in the Zen and
couldn’t finish.
Movie Versions
Unbearable Lighteness of Being (own it)
Moby Dick (both major movie versions)
The Three Musketeers
Anna Karenina (made me glad I didn’t read the book)
Catch-22
Treasure Island
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Jack Nicholson at his best)
Grapes of Wrath
Dracula
Clockwork Orange
Count of Monte Cristo
Frankenstein (& Young FrankenSTEIN
War and Peace
Tale of Two Cities
Five Books that come to mind that I would put on my list from the
intelligent side of the bookcase:
The Lover (just an awesome..awesome book - & so is the movie)
To Have and Have Not by Hemingway
Tough Guys Don’t Dance (Not Norman Mailer’s best ever book but who
can argue with a title like that?)
The Diary of Anne Frank ( a bit of a tedious read at times but insightful.
I did manage to get through the whole thing.)
10 Days That Shook The World by Jack Reed who is only one
of two Americans buried in the Kremlin (I visited his grave once..threw the
tour guide for a loop.) His first hand account of the Russian Revolution.
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May 6th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
I read Diary of Anne Frank in school and saw the play on a field trip. It is a need to read in my opinion though as far as that genre goes, I was more deeply affected by Alicia: My Story, by Alicia Appleman-Jurman
Since I am a pretty heavy reader sometimes I have problems seeing the movie versions of stuff (they can and often do truly butcher stuff.) Not a classic by any means but they most notably exceeded at the butchering of Jurassic Park. Dracula too, of course the book was written in journal form which is hard to carry over to movies.
Funny, I like my books deep and full of intellectual meaning and my movies relatively shallow with awesome special effects. (I saw Iron Man the other day, it was awesome…)
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May 6th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Glad you said you liked Iron Man (I always like a friendly recommendation) as I was planning to see it this week but work has pretty well messed that up so it may have to wait until next week.
You know I am usually just the opposite of you on movies.
I think it is the writer in me and I expect just as much from a movie as I would a book I picked up. But as you indicated…Hollywood doesn’t seem to read that much.
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May 6th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
I read your blog faithfully, pray for you and the new little one - my 1st great - somehow my comments get lost in the mountains of mexico. Those book lists contain some of my favourites. I am still an avid reader when time allows.
Love you and Michael I have yet to meet.
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May 7th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Your comments previously were getting moderated, once I approved them they showed up on the site. No worries, I got them!
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May 10th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Collapse (which I’ve not quite finished) is rather interesting. I had read Guns, Germs, and Steel previously, and went to a public seminar held by Princeton University featuring Jared Diamond (he had not yet written Collapse.) During the Q&A period, I asked how he could have been so hopeful about the US, and he said at that time that he really expected the US would get its act together.
Sometime after that, he wrote Collapse… Both books are interesting, although Collapse is looooonnnnnnnggggg….
Neverwhere: unless you’re *really* familiar with London, especially the Underground, you’re better off with the movie. American Gods, on the other hand, was written after Gaiman moved to the US, so it’s much more comprehensible to Americans. Anansi Boys won’t make much sense unless you read American Gods first.
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