(no subject)

[minervasolo]

List of the 106 books most likely to be unread on a bookshelf to make the bookshelf owner feel clever, apparently. Italicise the ones you own and haven't read, bold the ones you have read.

As I recall, this meme actually started a LibraryThing's books most commonly tagged as 'to read', which explains why there's several books that are unlikely to be there just to make the owner look clever (and why people like Dickens and Gaiman turn up repeatedly). A lot of these I've read and don't own, and I'm bolding the ones I've started but not finished, since there aren't any that I don't intend to finish (unike some books).



Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights - and I hated it
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey - well, I've read half of it, anyway
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre - does Vilette count?
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad - at least, I hope I have it somewhere, since I'm apparently reading the classic epic backwards
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West - disappointing
The Canterbury Tales - All of it, not just the sections we had to
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 - but got bored half way through Purgatory
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 - Ugh, so dull
Oliver Twist - and this is the reason I've not read any of the other Dickens books on this list (and nor have many other people, I suspect)
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 - read half of, and I can remember exactly where I left off
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
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
Cloud Atlas
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
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers



26, not bad. And only two italicised (one of which I suspect I may not actually own).

Also, BBC's year of reading ad (and the behind-the-scenes ad)/ I recognised Bill Bailey, Sean Lock, Jo Brand, Lenny Henry, Ronnie Corbett, Meera Syal, Jon Culshaw, the ubiquitous Omid Djalili, Jenny Eclair, Robert somebody, She came to my work place and I’ve forgotten her name! and Geri Halliwell. Anyone wanna tell me who I missed?

And the Discovery Channel thinks the world is awesome, and prove their case admirably (Stephen Hawking sings!).