I got this meme from Elizabeth over at Lonely Wombat. Apparently, these are the books most frequently marked as "unread" by Library Thing's users. One wonders why people keep them around, I suppose. I mean, certainly, I've read every book on my bookshelves! (cough...sputter...nose growing!) Here's the game. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend to other people.
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes: a Memoir
Angels & Demons
*Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
*The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
*Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
*Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : a novel
*The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
*The Iliad
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
The Inferno
*Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : a novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
*Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Mrs. Dalloway
*The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
Neverwhere
1984
Northanger Abbey
*The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
*The Once and Future King
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oryx and Crake : a novel
*A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
*Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
*The Poisonwood Bible
*A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
*Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
*Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
*A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
*War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
*Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
*Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
So, there are benefits to going to a Great Books college -and most of them show up in these all-important-to-living-a-full-life memes ;) But I haven't even heard of some of these books. Apparently their authors aren't dead enough, so we didn't study them!
3 comments:
If I had to recommend just one book on this list it would be The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I think you would love it.
I second lonelywombat's recommendation. I've read that book twice.
It always scares me when I realize how many of the books on those lists I've read. I actually the version of that I did about a year ago, and including the couple of books I've been able to check off since then, have read something like 55% of them. Given the eclectic nature of the list, I think it just means I will read anything that is put in front of me (including the same cereal box, days in a row).
There needs to be a special character to add to the list for books you've translated from Latin, unfortunately.
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