Friday, June 27, 2008

a confederacy of dunces indeed

Not that I've read that book, but at least it's not sitting on my shelf! Taken from Lauren the linguist.

Modified slightly from: http://unbalanced-reaction.blogspot.com/ and
http://professingmama.blogspot.com/

Here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Books that sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded [or were Book Club choices that you never read that month]. Here's what to do: bold the ones you’ve read for fun, italicize the ones you read for school, and star the ones sitting on your shelf to be read!

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 Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
*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
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
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
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
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
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
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: 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
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm totally going to do this. I really liked The Kite Runner. Anna Karenina is one that I can definitely understand how it ends up just sitting on the shelf. The amount of times I've started it and been unable to get further than 20 pages is amazing. Russian authors really like using a lot of characters -- with a lot of nicknames. I have no explanation.

Unbalanced Reaction said...

Wow, I wish I was as well-read as you! :)

Unknown said...

Totally fun procrastination activity! Yay!!!

Rosiecat24 said...

Shawn Marie and I read Catcher in the Rye as our first Book Club read. After we both read it, I thought she was going to throttle me for picking that book--I've never seen her so angry about something! I didn't like the book either, but I could appreciate it for its finer points. And I could see why angsty teenagers love it!

This list is totally fascinating. I need to start putting more effort into my fun reading--I read too much trash! (Shhh...don't tell anyone about that last part please!)