It’s been a very long time since I posted anything, and I’m not even sure why. Nor when I may post again. That said, here’s a new book meme I got from Mary Poppins.
The below listed books are the top 106 books most often marked as being “unread” by LibraryThing users.
The instructions are simple:
Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your TBR list. (I can’t figure out how to underline, so I just added TBR. Life is too short. If someone wants to enlighten me re: underlining, I’ll appreciate it.)
(I added a ? for those I’ve never heard of. Also couldn’t resist a few personal comments.)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina (Got almost all the way through it when I was 16. Then I asked my mon—who loved it—whether anything was ever going to actually happen, and she said, after thinking about it—“Not really.” So I never finished it.)
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22***
One Hundred Years of Solitude
***
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion ?
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose (I think I finished it, but I wouldn’t swear to it. A bit high-flown for me.)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses I think I got 3 pages into this, and figured out it was never going to make any sense to me. Word salad. I’ll just have to take other people’s word for it that it’s a great book.
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (a high school requirement)
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 (I can still hardly believe I got all the way through it. And by the end, I even understood why it’s considered a great novel.)
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife ?
The Iliad (another high school requirement)
Emma
The Blind Assassin ?
The Kite Runner TBR
Mrs. Dalloway**
Great Expectations
American Gods ?
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ?
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver ?
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
(Hated it—don’t know why I finished it.)
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian ?
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (Read this and Atlas Shrugged one right after the other in late adolescence—went from love to hate in the course of reading them. In fact, it’s not too much to say that they moved me a step toward adulthood as I got over my initial blind infatuation with her heroes.)
Foucault’s Pendulum ?
Middlemarch**
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange (Hated it, but read it as an adolescent—it was reputed to be “cool”, so I persisted to the end.)
Anansi Boys ?
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath***
The Poisonwood Bible
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
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
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 ?
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed TBR
Cloud Atlas ?
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*
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth ?
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Addofio 