Of things "unread"

BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION - OK, we are down to the finals of Ookami Snow's Favorite New Blog of 2008. It's me against Liz in a steel cage match. If you wanna be involved in the process, you gotta go here to do it - the rules for voting are included in the post. He put up an actual survey now, so if you left your vote in the comments sections before ya gotta go back and vote the proper way now. It doesn't matter who you vote for, as long as it is me. - Earl

Nicked this from Steph of Incurable Insomniac fame. I've also nicked the term "nicked" from Andrew of White Rabbit fame. That's how I roll.

Here goes:

"What we have here is 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. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish." I've added a little flourish, as I often do, with some wise-ass comments. Once again, that's how I roll.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - and it wasn't easy. Very long book.


2. Anna Karenina


3. Crime and Punishment - don't even know why I tried.


4. Catch-22 - not even a Vonneg..., oops, Heller fan (Thanks Downtown Guy!).


5. One Hundred Years of Solitude


6. Wuthering Heights - wound up really liking it.


7. The Silmarillion - but I tried. I really tried. Over. And over again.


8. Life of Pi: a novel


9. The Name of the Rose - after I saw the film.


10. Don Quixote - read it in college, but turns out I didn't have to.


11. Moby Dick - finally two years ago.


12. Ulysses - ugh!


13. Madame Bovary - I like saying "Gustave Flaubert". It's fun!


14. The Odyssey - read it first on my own and then later for school.


15. Pride and Prejudice


16. Jane Eyre


17. The Tale of Two Cities - my favorite Dickens work.


18. The Brothers Karamazov


19. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies


20. War and Peace - impossible!


21. Vanity Fair - don't remember much though.


22. The Time Traveler’s Wife


23. The Iliad - same with The Odyssey. First on my own...later for school.


24. Emma - This was made into the movie with Alicia Silverstone, right?


25. The Blind Assassin


26. The Kite Runner


27. Mrs. Dalloway


28. Great Expectations - my least favorite Dickens work.


29. American Gods - hard to believe this is on the list. Are there really a bunch of people out there buying Neil Gaiman novels and not reading them?


30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius


31. Atlas Shrugged - I tried reading Rand when researching Objectivism, but I found her to be fucking ponderous.


32. Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books


33. Memoirs of a Geisha - I stopped when I realized it wasn't Asian erotica. Very sad.


34. Middlesex


35. Quicksilver - I've wanted to read Stephenson, but haven't gotten around to it yet.


36. Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West - couldn't get through the sequel, though.


37. The Canterbury Tales - Love me some Chaucer.


38. The Historian: a novel


39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man


40. Love in the Time of Cholera - "It's about girls, right?" - Rob Gordon.


41. Brave New World


42. The Fountainhead - See Atlas Shrugged.


43. Foucault’s Pendulum - One Eco book is quite enough for me, thank you.


44. Middlemarch


45. Frankenstein


46. The Count of Monte Cristo - I think for school. Can't imagine reading it on my own.


47. Dracula - read a lot of Stoker in my teen years. Also attempted to read Feast of Blood (Varney the Vampire) in those days, but never made it all the way through.


48. A Clockwork Orange - once again, after I saw the film.


49. Anansi Boys - what's with all the Neil Gaiman?


50. The Once and Future King - I really wanted to like this series of books, but I found them boring as hell.


51. The Grapes of Wrath


52. The Poisonwood Bible : a novel - how could I have missed out on one of Oprah's book club selections?


53. 1984


54. Angels & Demons - why would someone own this and not read it?


55. The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) - I own a copy from the 1870's. My oldest book.


56. The Satanic Verses - wasn't Rushdie the guy from the sauna who called himself Sal Bass?


57. Sense and Sensibility


58. The Picture of Dorian Gray


59. Mansfield Park


60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey is a freak. This and Demon Box are his only novels I have made it through.


61. To the Lighthouse


62. Tess of the D'Urbervilles


63. Oliver Twist


64. Gulliver’s Travels


65. Les Misérables


66. The Corrections


67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - never heard of it.


68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - ditto.


69. Dune - Frank Herbert bores the shit out of me.


70. The Prince


71. The Sound and the Fury - managed to avoid Faulkner thus far.


72. Angela's Ashes: a memoir - ugh!


73. The God of Small Things


74. A People's History of the United States: 1492-present - I tried.


75. Cryptonomicon - more Stephenson, eh?


76. Neverwhere - even more Neil Gaiman??? I really don't understand this.


77. A Confederacy of Dunces - it's on my bookshelf...just waiting for me.


78. A Short History of Nearly Everything


79. Dubliners - I wanna know who out there has actually read Joyce.


80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - "It's about girls, right?" - Rob Gordon


81. Beloved - another Oprah selection.


82. Slaughterhouse-Five.


83. The Scarlet Letter


84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves - there is a joke about pandas or koalas in there someplace.


85. The Mists of Avalon


86. Oryx and Crake: a novel - never heard of it.


87. Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed


88. Cloud Atlas


89. The Confusion


90. Lolita - read this during my Kubrick phase. Not for the under-aged girl. Really.


91. Persuasion


92. Northanger Abbey


93. The Catcher in the Rye - I thought everyone but me had read this.


94. On the Road


95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame


96. Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything


97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values


98. The Aeneid


99. Watership Down


100. Gravity's Rainbow


101. The Hobbit


102. In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences


103. White Teeth - White Fang...yes. White Teeth...no.


104. Treasure Island


105. David Copperfield


106. The Three Musketeers

So I've read a lot more books for school back in the day then I thought I would have, apparently. I would never have remembered reading all of these had I not done this meme. Cool!

My totals out of the 106 books:
Read on my own - 27
Read for school - 24
Started but never finished - 15
Never read - 40

That translates into 62% of the books that I've either read or partially read. Not bad, but it should be higher. Gotta give me credit for trying on some of those. I've noticed that a lot of the books that I haven't read are more recent works, and I don't read nearly as much now as I did when I was younger.

How did you do?