Book meme!

[icarus]

Meme borrowed from enname:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

(Let me short-cut the asterisk list: if it's sci-fi or fantasy, I've read it more than once. Am I the only person who reads the same books over and over and over again, like I'm stuck on continuous loop? Wait. I'm asking a group of fanfiction readers. Of course you do.)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment (why read C&P when you can read The Brother's Karamazov?)
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion* (Yes, I'm such a Lord of the Rings fan my copy is dog eared.)
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A 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 (Does it count if I've read a lot of them out of context, but not all?)
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (The only Joyce I liked.)
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* (I've read this ten billion times.)
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray (But I was very young – 11? – and I barely remember it.)
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (Dad insists I read this.)
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 (Beautiful but disturbing. I highly recommend it.)
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 (wildernessguru raves about this book and insists that I read it – he especially loved the history of Easter Island. Yes. WG reads Noam Chomsky, military hardware books, and apocalyptic histories of ancient civilizations' collapse.)
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road (I've always wondered why Kerouac has lured in so many Buddhists.)
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 (The movie made me want to read the book, and it also frightened me away. But I'm tempted, so tempted.)
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Comments

[an-kayoh.livejournal.com]

1. Powers That Be, may I have the two weeks I spent reading A Hundred Years of Solitude back? kthx

2. You should read Guns, Germs and Steel. It = excellent.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I was so depressed once I finished A Hundred Years Of Solitude. But from a safe distance, I like it. Just don't make me read it again.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is by the same author as Guns, Germs and Steel. And rec is duly noted. *scribble, scribble*

[an-kayoh.livejournal.com]

I know. They live together on my shelf, staring at the back of my head. I accidentally started skimming Collapse one day, and henceforth have been unable to force myself to go back and read it through. Another book that goes with these two is 1491, by Charles C. Mann.

I liked A Tale of Two Cities after about a distance of five years. Maybe Solitude will grow on me.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Solitude is an impressive accomplishment, if nothing else.

[ccharlotte.livejournal.com]

Oh, The Three Musketeers is so good.

But I was obsessed with d'Artagnan as a child, so I may be biased.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Ha. Maybe I should put that on my own to-read list. *g*

[feanna.livejournal.com]

I recognize more of these than I thought I would. (Being German, my reading list is a little different.) I own Brave New World, I have to get around to reading it one of these days.
I wonder why A time travellers wife is on the list everybody seemed to be reading it some time ago. It's a sweet (though not really a happy one) book and I enjoyed it, but it isn't terribly deep. Middlesex I didn't read but got an audio verson from the library and listned to it while cleaning my room. (Also War and Peace is one the list, hy John...)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Well, David Hewlett read and recommended it a few months back, so I'm gambling my SGA friends ran out and bought it right away.

Icarus

[enname.livejournal.com]

I can't read Collapse, I just know I will have some sort of heart attack somewhere in the middle and have to put it down for awhile. In part it is the sort of history that distresses me because of many and sundry things, mostly the implied values and judgements inherent. May flick through it in the bookstore instead.

Hm, I'll read books over again to just re enter that world once more. Well that and I have a marvellously bad memory for these things. Glad you had Watership Down asterisked, the number of people who had it marked as not read at all was beginning to scare me.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

That's true. I can't read Chomsky because of the way he uses language -- my Logic 101 rears up like a giant cobra and strikes, dismantling his arguments. Since he's one of the greatest living linguists I know he knows exactly what he's doing, using reactionary, vague and manipulative language.

Watership Down was one of wildernessguru's favorite books. Actually, that asterix on my part was a mistake. I've only read it once. But it's a must-read for all.

Icarus

[lebannen.livejournal.com]

I read Aku-Aku for Easter Island (and it creeped me out badly in places, silly men in very small tunnels, ick ick ick do not want), and when I started reading Collapse, Diamond pissed me off by persistently equating Heyerdahl with von Daniken. I think that was probably one of the main reasons why I never got round to finishing it.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Aku-Aku... who's that by?

[lebannen.livejournal.com]

Oops, sorry! Thor Heyerdahl. It's an account of his expedition in the ... fifties? sixties? Diamond disagrees with Heyerdahl's theories about Pacific migrations, and seems to be going out of his way to discount them by association in the text with Crazy Aliens Guy. There are lots of other people out there who disagree with Heyerdahl too, but I suspect at least some of them attempt to use actual evidence to support their claims (I admit to being biased in that I've read multiple books by Heyerdahl and not a lot of that kind of subjects by other people; I'd quite like to read more but don't know where to start!).

[lilyrowan.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I own a not insignificant number of titles on the list and have never read them. Of the ones I have read, I either really loved or really hated. The Historian: a novel and Foucault's Pendulum are 2 of my favorites. I slogged through Cloud Atlas and never even finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Ha! I'm that way about the Buddhist books on my shelf.

Foucault is probably one I'll never read unless it's required for class. It's embarrassing how many of these books I've read because it was required for school. *sheepish wide grin*

Icarus