Thursday 4 October 2007

Bookismo
Lazy Cow got me started on this - it's a list of the top 100 or so books on LibraryThing that are most often tagged as 'unread'.
LibraryThing is a website that catalogs people's libraries, their lists of books to read, books they've read, reviews, and so on - it's a fascinating place to explore (and a little confusing, I have to add).
Anyway, the point here is to copy this list and then mark the titles:
  • bold for ones you've read
  • italics for ones you've started but haven't finished
  • strike through those you couldn't stand
  • an asterisk for those you've read more than once
  • underscore for those you intend to read
I also put in my two bobs' worth: I put in red all those titles I'd never even heard of!
It is an odd list - by its very nature it's totally random, instead of being a show-off list of books we all ought to have read. I think it's also US-oriented. But what the hey - it's fun!

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre
A 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 novel
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
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: A Novel
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The 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
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes
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
The Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved: A Novel
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
Cloud Atlas: A Novel
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Cold Mountain

2 comments:

Jennifer said...

We're read a lot of the same books (perhaps not so surprising, given the number of classics on the list).... It is an interesting selection. I'm with you about NOT being able to (nor interested in) reading about violence, esp. regarding children.

One book I'd suggest you consider reading is Life of Pi. It's difficult in some ways, and is NOT a book I would ever have picked up myself (a friend pressed it upon me). It took a little while for the story to get going and pull me in, but once I was in I couldn't put it down. It is incredibly thought-provoking. Even though it challenged me in key ways, I was very glad to have read it. Anyway, if it crosses your path I'd recommend giving it a go.

Lesley said...

Okay - I'm happy to put Life of Pi on my to-be-read list!
Thanks for the suggestion.
I went to B&N yesterday and became acquainted with a couple of the books on this list that I'd never heard of. And then a little later I found 'The Historian' in my local supermarket while I was picking up something for dinner, and cheap, too, so I had to stick that in the basket with the chicken breasts and broccoli.