Late to the party

[essentialsaltes]

A billion people have already done this. These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of Oct 15).

Bold what you have read, italicize those 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.



Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - didn't like it much.
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment - compelling trip inside the head of a murderer.
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion* - some of the odds and ends in here are great tales of Middle Earth
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose* - marvellous book about books
Don Quixote
Moby Dick - in high school, we each got to pick a book to read. For some reason I picked the fattest book in the pile. I really enjoyed it.
Ulysses
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice (although for the life of me I can't remember anything about the damned thing)
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov - not worth the long slog, I'm afraid
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies - Maybe his thesis stretches too far, but it's an interesting hypothesis and a great read.
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad*
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations - Ugh, the only book in high school that I just could not get through.
American Gods - Neil is overrated. Feel free to throw your brickbats.
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver - Neal is over indulgent.
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales* - one of my great loves, and it sings in Middle English.
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 - Just too complicated to be truly enjoyable.
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula* - Always interesting to read to see how different it is from the popular vision.
A Clockwork Orange* - A masterpiece.
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King* - Fantastic retelling of the Arthur legend.
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984 - eh
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray* - Wilde at his best
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels - satire from the master
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - I wasn't that impressed.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune - I really don't care for it that much - I was never interested in going on with the books.
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 - There's a couple good short stories in this mess.
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 - not as good as Guns, Germs and Steel, but still plenty of good brain food.
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey - her 'gothic parody' has some good moments.
The Catcher in the Rye - eh
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* - Certainly not for everyone, but I think Pynchon pulls off an improbable masterpiece.
The Hobbit* - The pale predecessor to the GREATEST WORK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers