LibraryThing thingy

[vilakins]

Yep, it's the latest book meme, copied from several people by now.

This is a list of the books most often tagged "unread" on LibraryThing. The rules are: bold what you have read, italicize what you started but didn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The number after each title is the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

I've also added some comments.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and Punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117) - about three times, the first time at 15, the same age as Huple. I love this book.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi: A Novel (94)
The Name of the Rose (91) - I even drew up my own map of the library--and when I found the one in the book, it was the same
Don Quixote (91) - I have the version illustrated by Salvador Dali :-)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A Tale of Two Cities (80)
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (79)
War and Peace (78) - twice. Why do people make this an unclimable peak? It's a very entertaining novel.
Vanity Fair (74)
The Time Traveler's Wife (73) - excellent story and (for once) I thought the present tense worked well for the structure.
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (70)
American Gods (68)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
Atlas Shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66) - not as good as Cryptonomicon
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury Tales (64)
The Historian: A Novel (63)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's Pendulum (61) - I should read this on the strength of The Name of the Rose.
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (59)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (57)
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56) - another one that's surprisingly entertaining. Read the Dorothy L Sayers translation with notes.
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's Travels (53)
Les Misérables (53)
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52)
Dune (51)
The Prince (51) - I won a debate using arguments from this!
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50) - geeky fun!
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49)
The Scarlet Letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake: A Novel (47)
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46) - not as good as Cryptonomicon
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's Rainbow (44) - I should read this; friends recommend it.
The Hobbit (44)
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The Three Musketeers (44)

Are there any you think I should read?

Comments

[kerravonsen]

Are there any you think I should read?

The Count of Monte Cristo.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Thanks! [adds to list]

[kerravonsen]

If you like "The Three Musketeers" and things of that ilk, then you will like it -- nobility, betrayal, revenge (oh, what exquisite revenge) and redemption.

And after that, read "Tiger! Tiger!" (aka "The Stars My Destination") by Alfred Bester. You will notice resonances.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Cool! I'm sure I read "The Stars My Destination" as a kid but I don't remember it now. I'll see if the library has it.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

In Cold Blood. I only read it last year, and it really does live up to its reputation.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I don't think I could handle that.

[san-valentine.livejournal.com]

I bought this, read it from start to finish, grazed through some bits of it at intervals, then decided I could use the shelf space for something I liked better, so gave it away.

It may have been a new approach to writing true-crime at the time, but I didn't think it stood up very well now.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

About the only one on your list that I've read and you haven't is Northanger Abbey. I think you might like it. The heroine could be described as a very early fangirl.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I do actually have all the Austens, so that one will be easy. :-)

Library Thingy

[ultrapsychobrat.livejournal.com]

Try The Sound and the Fury and The Canterbury Tales. It's been years since I've read either, but I remember loving them at the time.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recs! Added to my list.

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

American Gods and Anansi Boys, like pretty much everything Gaiman has written, are worth reading.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I've been intending to read those for a while. I should move those up the list. :-)

[the-summoning-d.livejournal.com]

I feel bad now. The only ones I've actually read all the way through are 1984 and The Hobbit. But I've read both multiple times, and I read The Hobbit when I was six. Surely that counts for something?
And there are many, many others I started but never finished.

I discount ones my school forced me to read.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I think you'd really like "Cryptonomicon" (geeks!) and "Snow Crash" (a hell of a ride!)

Oh, so do I! I don't think there were any on that list. I actually rather enjoyed some of the other classes' books that I read without any pressure to analyse them to death.

[the-summoning-d.livejournal.com]

I'll try to get round to reading them. I've been meaning to read American Gods for a while: I read Good Omens, which Neil Gaiman co-wrote with Terry Pratchett (My all-time favourite author) ages ago, and I've been meaning to read his other stuff for while.

I hate it when you have to kill good books by analysis. Catch-22, for example, I think I would have loved if I hadn't encountered it via my Higher English course.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Catch-22 is seriously cool. I bought it for myself at 15. Why do people ruin good books by making kids study them?

I haven't read any Gaiman. I must rectify that, and catch up with my Pratchett.

[matildabj.livejournal.com]

The Kite Runner. Amazing, moving, beautifully written.

The God of Small Things. I should re-read this myself!

Life of Pi... although the ending is a bit of a let down, it's an incredibly original idea.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I'm still reading "A Suitable Boy" in between other books, but I do rather fancy "The God of Small Things" as I enjoy books set in other cultures.

I'll check out "The Kite Runner"; I don't know anything about it.

"Life of Pi" I heard had an ending I wouldn't like, though I can't remember what was said now.

[matildabj.livejournal.com]

The Kite Runner is about two boys from different social classes in Afghanistan. I mean, it's about far more than that, but that's the main thread of it. I was recommended it by a colleague whose opinions I respect, and I wasn't disappointed.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

That sounds very interesting! I'll check that out.