Meem

[spudtater]

"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. Here's the twist: 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."

Addendum
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell * — -ish; about 33% too long for its own good!
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 * — a must.
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
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 * — brilliant
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin — dull. Read The Handmaid's Tale instead
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods — not because I wasn't enjoying it! It was in a bag that was nicked.
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
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 * — slightly heavy, but good
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 — far too flowery in prose; gave me a headache
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time * — a very interesting perspective to write from
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 * — to geeks and to people who want to understand geeks   8^)
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything * — very readable
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five — a bit too postmodern for me to outright recommend
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves — not hugely exciting
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel * — -ish; thought-provoking, if a little slow
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion — got halfway through. Haven't officially given up on it yet.   8^)
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye — dull
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame — I'm sure it was ground-breaking when it was written...
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 * — read it yonks ago. Remember liking it, but not very much about it.
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit * — far and away my favourite book for a very long time
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island — read it to say you've read it. It's not great.
David Copperfield

Hmm... no actual underlines in my list. A lot of them I read while at school, but not for school. Yes, I was a nerd...

Comments

[spudtater.livejournal.com]

Maybe. There should also be a "couldn't even sit through the adaptation" option, which in my case would apply to most of the Victorian stuff.