Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Book List

After seeing this list in my friend's blog, I thought I'd give it a try.

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.

Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place. (I'm putting a # next to the ones I own-- or the ones that I *think* we own-- but that I have not read.)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell #

Anna Karenina (reading in November for book club)

Crime and Punishment #

Catch-22

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wuthering Heights

The Silmarillion

Life of Pi : a novel

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Ulysses

Madame Bovary#

The Odyssey *

Pride and Prejudice #

Jane Eyre *#

The Tale of Two Cities *#

The Brothers Karamazov

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

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 Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books

Memoirs of a Geisha #

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West #

The 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

The Once and Future King #

The Grapes of Wrath#

The Poisonwood Bible : a novel #

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 : a memoir

The God of Small Things

A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present

Cryptonomicon (I own Snow Crash…does that count?)

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

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion (I guess I bought the wrong book...)

Lolita

Persuasion #

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye (I even taught it)

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

The Hobbit

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

White Teeth

Treasure Island #

David Copperfield #

The Three Musketeers

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's your favorite book on this list that you've read?

Gretchen Schneider said...

Hard choice. It's changed over the years. Today, I think Dune. Tomorrow, who knows...

These are the other ones I like in order (today) of how much I like them.

Jane Eyre
Frankenstein
Tale of Two Cities
Mists of Avalon
Scarlet Letter
Inferno

Anonymous said...

Nifty. I like Jane Eyre too. I just can't read Charles Dickens. I dislike his style too much. I tried a Tale of Two Cities and couldn't get into it.

Gretchen Schneider said...

See, I loved how he had all these seemingly random plots going on, yet he was able to tie them all together so artfully by the end.