Ganked from amurderofcrows.

[camwyn]

The list is the 106 books most often noted as unread by Library Thing users. Bold is for books you've read. Italics for books you've started but haven't finished. Strikethrough is for books you found unreadable.


* 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 DickI tried, man, I tried so hard...
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary What a whiny, self-absorbed little bitch. I wouldn't've bothered with this if I didn't have to read it for college. Emma Bovary was a selfish prat who killed herself rather than face the consequences of her actions. I'm not sure if she ever had a long-term thought in her bratty little head.
* The Odyssey
* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre - Jane could TOTALLY KICK EMMA BOVARY'S ASS.
* A Tale of Two Cities Again, I tried so very hard, but I kept reading the same three or four pages over and over and it JUST DID NOT WORK...
* The Brothers Karamazov
* Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies - I might have read this once. I don't remember. I read a lot of epidemiology and history books.
* War and Peace
* Vanity Fair
* The Time Traveler’s Wife
* The Iliad
* Emma
* The Blind Assassin
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations First book where I ever had to get hold of the Cliffs Notes to figure out what the hell was going on. You know you have a problem when reading Russian novels is easier than reading something written in your native language by a native speaker.
*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 - Never did get all the way through, though it wasn't bad.
* The Fountainhead
* Foucault’s Pendulum
* Middlemarch
* Frankenstein Dr. Frankenstein: profound misogynist and moral infant. Sit down and read it one day and notice how not once until the very end does he stand up and take actual moral responsibility for the consequences of his experiments and researches. Oh, he thinks about it early on, but as soon as it looks like someone else is going to take the fall for him he flounces off and lets it happen. Bastard. You deserved what your creation had planned for you, Doc.
* 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 - I love this book. I also love its granddaddy, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which was the granddaddy of all dystopian novels about weirdly regimented dictatorships. Brave New World, not so much.
* Angels & Demons
* The Inferno AND the rest of the Divvina Commedia thank you very much. Seriously, if they really wanted 'famous books people don't actually read' they should make it the entire Divine Comedy, because the majority of people who actually try to read it probably never get past 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 : 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 - Everybody in this was a twit.
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
* 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
* 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 - Fun book, but you could tell Dumas was being paid by the word. Same for Monte Cristo.

Comments

[newredshoes]

Good heavens, three Neil Gaiman books on that list?

I'm kind of amused by how many of those are books I've read for school -- not to mention how many of them I've adored and enjoyed. (Moby-dick! Ulysses! OMG OMG OMG, I fangirl them both so hard.)

[maxineofarc.livejournal.com]

That there are a gabillion Jane Austen books on this list does not so much surprise me, but the Neil Gaiman ones sort of do.

[lasa.livejournal.com]

I've read a rather amazing amount of the books on that list, but I know why. I lived for three years in Germany, and the only English books in the library were the classics on this list. You /can/ plow through some of these if it's honestly the only thing in your language you've got to read! (Still didn't make it through The Sound and the Fury or War and Peace, even under those conditions, though.)

[camwyn]

Gah! I forgot to bold one of my favourites- Crime and Punishment. I have to go back and fix that. I loved that book.

I keep meaning to read my Aeneid and never quite getting around to it.

*squints at list again* Now that I think about it, I read Oliver Twist, too. I remember reading it after playing Mr. Sowerberry in the school production of Oliver! and going "... huh." at some of the differences, though just now I can't remember what they were.

[(Anonymous)]

Crime and Punishment, yup :) I read that one, too.

I was surprised there wasn't any Kafka on that list. The Castle? The Trial? Both weirdly wonderful.

[camwyn]

My guess is that people who own Kafka actually read it, instead of merely owning it for the sake of owning it.

[tundra-no-caps.livejournal.com]

Don't forget you can both bold and cross a book, if you've read it AND hated it.

[ouatic-7.livejournal.com]

The Scarlet Letter - Everybody in this was a twit.

And Pearl should have been drowned at birth. I had happily put this book out my head but my brat had to read it recently and her rantings refreshed my memory.

[bodldops.livejournal.com]

The Scarlet Letter - Everybody in this was a twit.

I love you. *sporfles*

[camwyn]

I swear, the only thing that made this book bearable was playing diagnostician about the reverend's symptoms and trying to determine whether he was genuinely being poisoned or not. Otherwise, pretty much everybody needed to wake up in a burlap sack next to a brick.

[rooth.livejournal.com]

There's only one book I've read that you haven't. Which shouldn't be so surprising: I'm a slow-ass reader, so I don't do it often, and when I do, it's either because I have to, or because the book is a good bet for entertainment.

Or I'm trapped in my car, and have nothing better to do.

Freakonomics was one such book. Okay, it was an audiobook, but it was unabridged, and it's the best use of an 8 hour drive to see my folks that I can think of. Please don't sue me. ;)

I actually found it quite fascinating and a bit enlightening, even.

[camwyn]

No worries. That's how I absorbed Norman Schwartzkopf's autobiography- from an audiobook played during the drive from new Jersey to Virginia to move a friend to college, years ago.