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[ocelot]

Book meme from many...


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. (uh, no. I've never bought a book for that purpose.)

bold the ones you've read
underline the ones you read for school
italicize the ones you started but didn't finish
add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place. Skipping this part personally. If I liked it well enough to finish it, I found it enjoyable enough to recommend. Maybe not enough to insist you sit down and read it right this minute, but enough to not tell you it was horrible. If there were exceptions, I'll note them.

My own addition: * for a book I have a desire to read/finish someday.

Addendum
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights (I think)
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary (Not actually sure whether I finished this or not. I know the whole plot from class discussion, but I don't think I actually read most of the last 1/3 or so.)
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre* (I may have actually finished it during one of my numerous attempts. I love the first half or so, then lose it at the end.)
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 (Did I read part of this? I can't remember. I think I was supposed to for Women's Lit and didn't.)
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 (I was in the process of reading this for something like 2 years)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (We read a few of the tales in school)
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys* - I think I read the first page, but that's enough to not count as having started it.
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath*
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons (Ok, this breaks the "If I finished it, I recommend it" rule. It wasn't horrible, but I wouldn't mind having that two hours of my life back, either.)
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Did I read this? Did I finish it? I can't recall.)
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist (Chose to read this for a book report project in 8th grade. My partner and I ended up doing our project on something out of the first chapter or two because neither of us got past that. I don't think we got a very good grade, unsurprisingly.)
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables (I read through to the end of the book, but skimmed some of the French history lessons.)
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 (Um, I *think* I read the whole thing)
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 (Are you sensing a pattern on these school-assigned books yet?
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 (I'm pretty sure I started it, and don't think I finished, but not entirely sure on either of those)
David Copperfield

Incidentally, it seems to me that this meme has changed over the past few days. I'm pretty sure Brave New World was on there the first time I saw it.