Book Meme: the real list

[slyvermont]

I was intrigued enough by the bizarre list of 106 most unread books that I decided to do some google searching. 106 seemed like such an arbitrary number, and too many great books that no one has read were missing (I mean, nothing by Faulkner? Melville? Proust?)

So I found the source, www.librarything.com/tag/unread&more=1, with 200 books, plus the authors’ names.

I’ve bolded what I’ve read, (to lazy to figure out the difference between what I read for me and for school) and italicized what I started and never finished, or only read parts of. I’ll underline what I want to read. It's a good list to help me figure out what to get out of the library next.

   1. The ultimate hitchhiker's guide by Douglas Adams
   2. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
   3. The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
   4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
   5. Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
   6. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
   7. Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
   8. One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
   9. Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
  10. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
  11. Ulysses by James Joyce
  12. War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
  13. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  14. The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  15. Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
  16. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
  17. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
  18. Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson
  19. A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens
  20. The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie
  21. Middlemarch by George Eliot
  22. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
  23. The name of the rose by Umberto Eco
  24. The Kor'an by Anonymous
  25. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  26. The Odyssey by Homer
  27. The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
  28. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  29. The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
  30. The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
  31. Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco
  32. Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand
  33. The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
  34. The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  35. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  36. The sound and the fury by William Faulkner
  37. The Iliad by Homer
  38. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  39. Emma by Jane Austen
  40. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
  41. Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence
  42. Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift
  43. The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  44. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
  45. Dracula by Bram Stoker
  46. Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence
  47. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
  48. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
  49. The once and future king by T. H. White
  50. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
  51. To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  52. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
  53. Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood
  54. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  55. Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
  56. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
  57. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
  58. The corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  59. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
  60. Underworld by Don DeLillo
  61. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
  62. The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
  63. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  64. The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
  65. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
  66. Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
  67. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
  68. Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  69. A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
  70. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
  71. The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri
  72. The inferno by Dante Alighieri
  73. Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
  74. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
  75. Swann's way by Marcel Proust
  76. The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (and hated every page)
  77. The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon
  78. Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen
  79. The portrait of a lady by Henry James
  80. Silas Marner by George Eliot (worst book ever)
  81. The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  82. The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas ??
  83. The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
  84. The book thief by Markus Zusak
  85. The confusion by Neal Stephenson
  86. One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey
  87. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  88. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
  89. The system of the world by Neal Stephenson
  90. The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene
  91. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
  92. The known world by Edward P. Jones
  93. The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger
  94. The mill on the Floss by George Eliot
  95. The English patient by Michael Ondaatje
  96. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
  97. Dubliners by James Joyce
  98. Les misérables by Victor Hugo
  99. The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan
 100. Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace
 101. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
 102. Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison
 103. Persuasion by Jane Austen
 104. A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
 105. The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
 106. Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller
 107. The Mabinogion by Anonymous
 108. Anansi boys : a novel by Neil Gaiman
 109. The island of the day before by Umberto Eco
 110. The age of innocence by Edith Wharton
 111. Baudolino by Umberto Eco
 112. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
 113. Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
 114. Possession : a romance by A.S. Byatt
 115. In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its… by Truman Capote
 116. Of human bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
 117. Uncle Tom's cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
 118. The phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
 119. A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson
 120. As I lay dying by William Faulkner ??
 121. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
 122. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West… by Gregory Maguire
 123. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
 124. The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
 125. Women in love by D.H. Lawrence
 126. The last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
 127. The Aeneid by Virgil
 128. A farewell to arms by Ernest Hemingway
 129. Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan
 130. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
 131. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
 132. Angela's ashes : a memoir by Frank McCourt (but I did read his other 2)
 133. Son of a witch : a novel by Gregory Maguire
 134. Dune by Frank Herbert
 135. The mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
 136. Cloud atlas : a novel by David Mitchell
 137. Far from the madding crowd by Thomas Hardy
 138. Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie
 139. Pattern recognition by William Gibson
 140. Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro
 141. A people's history of the United States : 1492-present by Howard Zinn
 142. Cold mountain by Charles Frazier
 143. American gods : a novel by Neil Gaiman
 144. The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
 145. Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne
 146. Cat's eye by Margaret Atwood
 147. The good earth by Pearl S. Buck
 148. Vellum by Hal Duncan
 149. Villette by Charlotte Bronte
 150. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into… by Robert M. Pirsig
 151. Paradise lost a poem in twelve books by John Milton
 152. The plot against America by Philip Roth
 153. The ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories by Susanna Clarke
 154. A confederacy of dunces by John Kennedy Toole
 155. The woman in white by Wilkie Collins
 156. The plague by Albert Camus
 157. Snow falling on cedars by David Guterson
 158. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
 159. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
 160. The idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
 161. Northanger abbey by Jane Austen
 162. Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story by John Berendt
 163. The road by Cormac McCarthy
164. Light in August by William Faulkner
165. Notes from the underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
 166. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
 167. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
 168. Watership Down by Richard Adams
 169. The histories by Herodotus
 170. The return of the native by Thomas Hardy
 171. A passage to India by E.M. Forster
 172. White Teeth: A Novel by Zadie Smith
 173. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956; an experiment in literary… by Aleksander Solzenitsyn
 174. Utopia by Thomas More
 175. Freedom & necessity by Steven Brust
 176. Beowulf : a new verse translation by Anonymous
 177. The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
 178. Everything is illuminated : a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
 179. The moonstone by Wilkie Collins
 180. Naked lunch by William S. Burroughs
 181. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
 182. The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman by Laurence Sterne
 183. The tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
 184. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
 185. Candide, or, Optimism by Voltaire
 186. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
 187. Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen
 188. That hideous strength : a modern fairy-tale for grown-ups by C. S. Lewis
 189. The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman
 190. For whom the bell tolls by Ernest Hemingway
 191. The mysterious flame of Queen Loana : an illustrated novel by Umberto Eco
 192. The thirteenth tale : a novel by Diane Setterfield
 193. The sketch book of Geoffrey Crayon, gent by Washington Irving
194. Invisible man by Ralph Ellison
 195. The Bhagavad Gita by Anonymous
 196. The ground beneath her feet : a novel by Salman Rushdie
 197. Unfinished tales of Numenor and Middle-earth by J.R.R. Tolkien
 198. The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
 199. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
 200. The glass bead game (Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse

So I've read 82 of the 200, although I don't remember much of some of them.

Comments

[josephine14.livejournal.com]

I guess I don't understand what you mean by "unread"--a lot of these works are really popular, even canonical. How did they determine what is read and what isn't?

[slyvermont.livejournal.com]

The original meme said: "Here are 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."

If you go to the link, what this appears to mean is that there are people who use this website (which actually looks kinda cool) and then they must indicate whether or not they've read books. I didn't explore the website enough to figure it out. The list of books is definitely odd, and was even stranger when someone pared it down to 106 books.

I did have to read a lot of these for school -- books which you guys didn't have to read for school.

Hope that helps!

[knitress.livejournal.com]

Librarything is used by people to catalog the books they own. So if everyone just lists what they actually own, then it's stuff that people have sitting around but haven't read. That's why you see, for example, several of Neal Stephenson's.

[sylvei.livejournal.com]

I just don't understand how you didn't like The Poisonwood Bible. What was it about it?

[slyvermont.livejournal.com]

I absolutely adored "The Bean Trees" and "Pigs in Heaven." So part of it was that I was expecting a similar-type narrative, and PB is totally different than those 2.

I hated it so much that I put it out of my head, but what I recall is that it dragged, I couldn't care what happened to the characters, it was a downer. I read it on the road, and ditched it -- and that's very unusual for me, because I save almost every book I've ever read. From what I can tell, it's one of those books that people either really love or really hate.

Sorry I can't be more specific, but it was long enough ago that I've forgotten why I hated it so much.

Silas Marner was worse (and The Way of All Flesh even worse) -- although E. Annie Proux beats them all when it comes to bad books.

[knitress.livejournal.com]

I know why I hated it! I love Kingsolver, but this one had none of the humor or tenderness that I enjoy in her books. It felt like she was working out lots of personal issues and Making A Statement. Way too dark for what I wanted to read given what else was happening in my life.