Stolen from everyone's Livejournal..
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. Put an asterisk * next to the ones you'd read again or recommend to someone, even if you originally read them for school.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina -- I started reading this out of curiosity back when I did lighting for a play called "Sweet Sue" which mentioned it a lot, but it didn't hold my interest.
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion -- It was probably around 5th or 6th grade. I don't remember whether I liked it at all or not before I put it down.
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
*Don Quixote -- In English and in Spanish. Brilliant both ways.
*Moby Dick
*Ulysses
Madame Bovary
*The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities -- It was all because the rabble had very small eyes. (First one to place that ref gets a cookie.)
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 -- Staggeringly brilliant.
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 -- More brilliant than most would expect.
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 -- I hate this book with a passion. I can only barely tolerate the film, and I spend that listening to Wendy Carlos' score and ignoring the crap on the screen.
Anansi Boys -- Need to find time for this one.
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
*1984 -- Read this now if you haven't.
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses -- I read it in the 1980s while the author was pissing the Ayatollah off with it. I was underwhelmed.
Sense and Sensibility
*The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
*One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest -- Great book, sadly overshadowed by the Jack Nicholson film.
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
*Oliver Twist
*Gulliver’s Travels -- I liked this a lot. Avoid the Ted Danson TV movie by any means necessary.
*Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune -- I have the same problem with Frank Herbert as I do with Arthur C. Clarke; while I'm sure there's a great story to be found in there somewhere, the writing style is so dry and bland that every page is like eating a bowl of hot sand.
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 -- one of my all-time favorite books of any genre. I have to keep re-buying it because every time I re-read it, I either give it away or leave it on a bus or something for someone else to find and enjoy.
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
Lolita -- Meh. Another one not worth either the controversy or a reread.
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye -- I wouldn't have banned it, but I wouldn't reread 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
