Below are “106 books of pretension,” compiled from the books most frequently marked unread by Library Thing users.
Books I’ve read are in bold; books I’ve started but haven’t finished are in italics; books I own but haven’t read are marked with a *.
Total books I've read: 38
1. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6.
7. The Silmarillion
8. The Life of Pi
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs and Steel: the fates of human societies
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler's Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assassin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
37. The
38. The Historian: a novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault's Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
53. 1984
54. Angels & Demons
55. The Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59.
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
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
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela’s Ashes : a memoir (I think so)
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People’s History of the
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved
82. Slaughterhouse-Five
83. The Scarlet Letter
84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves (I have been wanting to read this one for a while)
85. The Mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake : a novel
87. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the
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
104.
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers
I thought this was an interesting list, there's a lot of stuff on here that I remember having to read in junior high or high school (Frankenstein, Catcher in the Rye) and there are a couple on here that I adore so much I can't believe people haven't read them (the Count of Monte Cristo, American Gods, the Hobbit). And it was also a good reminder for some books I'll have to pick up as I have heard good things about them, I just haven't gotten to 'em (Persuasion, Poisonwood Bible).
4 comments:
Catch-22 surprised me - it's a very funny, readable book.
Eats Shoots and Leaves is fantastic, but then again I'm a writer with a grammar/punctuation fetish.
I have to admit, I started 100 Years of Solitude but didn't finish it. It was good, but not enough to hook me. Same with War and Peace.
I always find it funny that Catcher in the Rye is on this list - how can you graduate from high school in this country without reading that book? (Or, at least, pretending that you did...) Hate that book - Holden's a phony. ;-)
I second Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and Life of Pi was fun. I tried to read The Kite Runner at a time when I was in totally the wrong head space for anything that depressing, so I've never been able to finish it. The Scarlet Letter is one of my top favorites - but then, so is Moby Dick, so most people don't want to take recommendations from me.
I'm just catching up after my holiday and have worked out I have read 56 of these.
Of the ones I've read and you haven't I would particularly recommend Life of Pi, Jane Eyre, The Time Traveler's Wife, Tess of the d'Urbs, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Lolita. I also really enjoyed Don Quixote but it can be a bit hard going.
Hmm, I have to take a batch of books to the bookstore this afternoon to see if I can trade them in, now I have a whole new batch of books to look for. Thanks for the suggestions, ladies!
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