At Jockey full of Bourbon I found this pretentious book meme, which sounded like fun. Obviously those are the top 106 “unread” books at The Library Thing. Their purpose on the shelf is to make you look smart or well-rounded (or they could have been a gift). The meme has complicated rules as to underscore, make bold, put in italics etc. depending on the status of the book in your case. Too much effort, but I will make the ones I’ve read bold.
Btw, why anybody would think that putting books like “Angels & Demons” or “The Time-Traveler’s Wife” on his “unread” pile makes him look smart I don’t know. They might be bestsellers, but that’s about it. Give me a break!
- 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
- Ulysses
- Don Quixote
- Moby Dick
- 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)
- 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
36 out of 106, that is only 34%. But given that the list is not representative, I’m not too bothered. So, what books can you check off this list?
The only ones I’ve read are:
14. The Odyssey
23. The Ilyad
28. Great Expectations (forced to in high school)
36. Wicked
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (does it count if you got to page 26 before you gave up – mandatory university reading)
41. Brave New World (forced to in high school)
53. 1984 (forced to in high school)
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (forced to in high school)
104. Treasure Island
Can we count it if we’ve seen the movie or musical? LOL
Of those, only 4 were voluntary. I think my taste is far too pedestrian for most connoisseurs of “literature”.
.-= Tam´s last blog ..Happy Sunday =-.
Tam, thanks for your comment. Most of the books I’ve read I read before I was 20 or so. I did read them voluntarily back then, now I couldn’t be asked anymore. But, hey, you have read Homer, never wanted to go through all that, way too hard. I rather watch movies about Greek heroes, there usually is some eye candy involved (though Troy was a big diappointment).
Have a good Sunday!
My reading tends to be fairly minimal so the only ones I’ve read in full are Great Expectations, 1984 (both at school), The Hobbit and Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
Ones I’ve started but not finished are Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West, The Aeneid (which I did at school, and also had to memorise part of so I could translate it for a Latin exam), Gulliver’s Travels (which I read a truncated children’s version of which only covered Lilliput), Watership Down (which I did at school, but never liked enough to finish) and Gravity’s Rainbow (don’t think I made it past the first ten pages).
By the way, just to be pretentious, number 67 should be Kavalier and Clay, not Kavalier and Gray.
Hi Mark, great to hear from you again.
Oops, that’s what happens if you copy and paste without looking to close. Thanks for pointing that out, I corrected the book title.
I remember starting to read Gulliver’s Travel but found it rather boring, the same with Watership Down.
.
Anyway, I don’t think that this is a great list, some of the books are just too “un-pretentious” to be on it. I don’t know what people are thinking,
Thanks for stopping by, have a great week!
Looking at the list – I am surprse to actually see how much of it I have actually read..
about the same as yourself, and like you I am finding some for the choice’s ODD…
When did The Time Traveler’s Wife become one of the books to must read…
I am surprise To kill A mockingbird and Atlas Shrug is not in there.
Have a good week…
E.H>
.-= Erotic Horizon´s last blog ..Weekly Geeks: Getting your reading on with Graphic Novels =-.