Meme of unread books

[vaznetti]

As seen everywhere, the list of books other people say they haven't read. The best part about this is learning that many, many people share my loathing of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.


These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi: a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86) But I fully intend to finish this, because it was excellent.
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78) This is a really good book, by the way.
Vanity Fair (74)
The time traveler's wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (70) Or did I have to read this for school? If it was for school I might have finished it.
American gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64)
The historian : a novel (63) If this is the one about Dracula, then I've read it.
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55) Has anyone ever finished this book?
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53)
Les misérables (53) I think I thought it would be more like the musical.
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51) I think? I might have read it, and just not remembered much about it.
The god of small things (51)
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50) Granted, I started it when I was 12 or something, so I lost interest pretty quick.
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47) I feel that "novel" is pushing it; there were no characters in it.
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44) My sadistic junior high school teacher made me read this, after I complained about disliking A catcher in the rye. I loathed every word.
The three musketeers (44)

Comments

[nestra.livejournal.com]

Oh, you should read Jane Eyre. Much, much better than Wuthering Heights. In fact, I should have put Wuthering Heights on my "hated it" list.

[vaznetti]

I read Wuthering Heights over a couple very hot days immediately after finishing my Cambridge exams -- it was the perfect thing to read then because it was all misty and overwrought. So I remember it fondly for the reading experience, even though I recall that the characters were mostly crazy and unlikable and came to bad ends. But I will read Jane Eyre someday.

[nestra.livejournal.com]

My dislike was the result of years of being told that Heathcliff was the ideal romantic hero. Around the time he started hanging puppies, I began to doubt that.

[cofax7]

::seconds Nestra's Heathcliff-dislike::

Hated that book and nearly everyone in it.

[cleverthylacine]

I was traumatised for ages when someone compared something I'd written to that book.

I looked back at it a year or two later and yes, the characters I wrote there start out crazy, but they do get better and they WANT to do good.

[vaznetti]

I was traumatised for ages when someone compared something I'd written to that book.

Ack! That would be scary.

[fourteenlines.livejournal.com]

*clings*

Other people who hated Wuthering Heights! For the same reason I did!

[vaznetti]

My dislike was the result of years of being told that Heathcliff was the ideal romantic hero. Around the time he started hanging puppies, I began to doubt that.

Although when you think about it, that explains a lot about fandom, doesn't it?

I remember not quite getting what all the fuss was about -- but then, I don't know if you've read those Thursday Next books by Jaster Fforde, but there's a hysterical scene where all the other characters (except Cathy) gang up on Heathcliff during an anger management session.

[se-parsons.livejournal.com]

That book is so completely sick. It's great at being sick, but that's not the way most people are told to view it.

Obsessive love to the exclusion and abuse of others is NOT COOL, people.

I have no idea how that book ever got to be thought of the way it is. The crazy is all there on the page.

I still like it despite its hype, though. It's really a good book if you read it in the same way you'd read, say, "Notes from the Underground." Totally delusional narration.

[cofax7]

People couldn't finish Watership Down? Really? Sheesh. I should do this meme, but not until I'm home and can use Semagic: I have no patience for hand-coding the whole thing.

[vaznetti]

I find that hard to imagine, as well, but it is a long book, I guess.

I really ought to start using a client -- I was thinking as I did this that hand-coding a list of this kind is such a pain. But I tried to use Semagic when I first started posting to LJ and it kept eating my entries, so I gave up.

[cofax7]

Wow, I've never had any problems with Semagic. Maybe the updated version has corrected that? I really love the edit last entry function, and the flist-management stuff, both of which operate MUCH better than LJ's interface does.

[vaznetti]

It would open Word and then crash, IIRC. But I haven't tried using it since then, and that was 2002 or something, so I'm sure it's much better now. I just got used to hand-coding on the LJ interface, or copy-pasting from wordpad, which I find straightforward.

[cofax7]

Word? Why would it open Word? ::is baffled::

I type directly into Semagic, or paste in from a word-processor, and use the keyboard commands for formatting.

Ah, well, whatever works best for you.

[k2daisy.livejournal.com]

I remember that! It doesn't do that anymore. It saves the drafts as Semagic drafts, not Word docs, and the spellcheck is also right within the client as well. It never interacts with Word at all anymore.

I'd give it another shot, if you're open to the idea. I've been using it forever, and it's much better than it used to be.

[nestra.livejournal.com]

This isn't a list of books people couldn't finish, but books they own and have tagged "unread". That says to me, especially in the case of something long like Watership Down, that they plan to read it. It's just a question of finding the time.

I was surprised to see Neil Gaiman on the list at least twice, too.

[elishavah.livejournal.com]

I think Nestra's right about this list, but oh yeah, there's at least one person out there who couldn't finish Watership Down. I sometimes wonder if I just read it at the wrong age or something, but it's one of those "milestones" of my life: the first book I couldn't force myself to get more than halfway through.

[vaznetti]

Yes I can see that; it's happened to me with other books, some of which I later came back to and others which I left unread.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I dislike Adams' political agenda so much I had real problems from the start with Watership Down and they are so not real rabbits...

[lesbiassparrow.livejournal.com]

I am strangely cheered by how many people never read Crime and Punishment. I hate that novel with a fiery passion.

[vaznetti]

I like having long serious books to read on beach holidays, because I run through anything else too quickly. But I may strike that one from the list.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

I have 125 books listed as 'unread' on LT (a fifth or so of the total - I'm so ashamed) and yet, interestingly, only Quicksilver is on both that list and mine.

Oh, Oryx and Crake, too, but after hearing so many bad comments about it I decided not to tackle it.

And do read Crime and Punishment! So powerful. It completely sucks you in - you can feel the miasma of guilt choking Raskolnikov. In a rather masochistic way, my brain used to always demand to reread C&P shortly before exams, because my guilt at reading rather than studying put me in exactly the right mood for it.

I confess I'm a Tess-lover, but different parts of my brain are responsible for those different loves.

[vaznetti]

I didn't really hate Oryx and Crake, but it was rather a waste of time. I have very little tolerance for novels of ideas, especially when the ideas are foregrounded so much that there are no characters at all.

Hm. Perhaps I will take C&P next time I go to the beach or something. That's where I do best with the classics.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Given the size of that bloody tome, I don't feel inclined to give it a go on that description. Also, I'm annoyed with Margaret Atwood's claim that SF sucks, and she doesn't write SF - just hypothetical novels about possible futures. AHEM.

[se-parsons.livejournal.com]

Next time you feel really overwhelmed and sorry for yourself, read "Jane Eyre". It totally feeds the virtuous pity party need in your soul. "Villette" does it even better.

And I loathe almost all Hardy, so I share your Tess hate. I wrote a portion of my Master's Thesis on "Jude the Obscure" because it fit the theme. It is a very painful read as well. You just want to give everyone a good kicking for utter stupidity. When infinitemonkeys and I drove by his house on our way to Maiden Castle, we flipped it off to great glee.

[vaznetti]

I used to read Phineas Finn or Phineas Redux for the pity party, although things tend to turn out ok for Phineas in the end -- but I think that's what you want in these moments. I will keep Jane Eyre in mind -- I think I may have started it once and then put it down, and that was that.

[cassandre.livejournal.com]

I am with you on David Copperfield. That and Oliver Twist are my least favorite Dickens.

You read the Silmarillion! Wow!

[vaznetti]

People keep telling me that not all Dickens is as bad as David Copperfield, and I keep looking dubious.

Is reading the Silmarillion really an accomplishment? I really like Tolkein, and it's not like I don't read ancient epic for fun anyway.

[octavia-b.livejournal.com]

Oh I loathed Catcher in the Rye too. The only Dickens novel I haven't hated was A Tale of Two Cities but that's because I read it when I was 12. I tried re-reading it as adult and thought it was rubbish. But DO read Jane Eyre and Crime and Punishment. They're worth it, although the second half of JE is a little Victorian and the ending a bit pat.

I should do this. I've read a frightening number of the books on this list, although I don't know what that says about me.

[vaznetti]

I've never gone back to Catcher in the Rye, but my teacher was really mean about my not liking it. My attitude was, "This is a book about some dumb boy I don't care about, who needs to get over himself."

I think it just means that you read the books you buy, rather than leaving them lying around unread.

[subtly-modded.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love it when I have time to do one of these. MMMMM books!

[holli.livejournal.com]

I had to read Tess my senior year of high school, but I had wonderful teacher who encouraged me to write an essay about why it sucked. Very cathartic, that.

[vaznetti]

That's really cool! If only the teacher who had assigned me David Copperfield had let me do something similar!

[holli.livejournal.com]

Well, the assignment was to write an essay. Nobody said it had to be a *nice* essay, and writing about what you really think of the book is a great way to make up for the fact that you had to read the thing.