Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Because updating the book log feels like work today...

A meme! One that combines easy blog content with my love of LibraryThing, which is wild and passionate and knows no bounds.

What follows is a list of the top 150 titles marked "Unread" on LibraryThing, with the number of books so marked in parentheses. I have made bold things I've read, italicized the ones I've started but didn't finish, and colored red the ones I couldn't stand and green the ones I loved. Feel free to play, too!

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
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)
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)
American gods : a novel (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)
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 : a novel (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)
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)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel (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)
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)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved : a novel (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu… (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas : a novel (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… (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into … (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its … (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)
Cold mountain (43)
Robinson Crusoe (43)
The bell jar (43)
The secret life of bees (43)
Beowulf : a new verse translation (43)
The plague (43)
The Master and Margarita (43)
Atonement : a novel (42)
The handmaid's tale (42)
Lady Chatterley's lover (41)
Underworld (41)
Little Women (41)
A brief history of time : from the big bang to black holes (41)
Stardust (41)
Jude the obscure (41)
The chronicles of Narnia (40)
Possession : a romance (40)
Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal (40)
Never let me go (40)
The trial (40)
Kafka on the shore (40)
Bleak House (40)
Sons and lovers (40)
Alias Grace (39)
The Arabian nights (39)
Baudolino (39)
Confessions (39)
The great Gatsby (39)
To kill a mockingbird (39)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Gla… (39)
The alchemist (39)
Candide, or, Optimism (39)
Snow falling on cedars (39)
Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story (39)
Midnight's children (39)
White Oleander (39)
A passage to India (39)
The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and … (39)
The house of the seven gables (39)
The lovely bones : a novel (38)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (38)

I've missed a number of classics, apparently. And also a lot of Austen, which is unsurprising, I suppose, because I don't particularly like Austen, but now I'm wondering on what, exactly, I based that opinion, because Jane Eyre wasn't so bad. I think it may have been Pride and Prejudice, although it was so long ago I don't even really remember why I disliked it. Hmm. I'm surprised at how few books are on this list that I couldn't stand, but I had forgot how vehemently I despised The Catcher in the Rye. I wonder if I'd appreciate it more on re-read - I think I was just too close to Holden's age (and, in attitude and life-view, Holden's polar opposite) to connect to the book at all when I read it. I think his angst would annoy me less now. It would certainly feel less... threatening, I think. There are a number of books on this list which I love and I hope the LibraryThingers who haven't read them intend to do so.

(By the way, my username on LibraryThing is my first initial and last name - for those of you who know it - in case you'd like to book-stalk me. I will say that I haven't gotten around to entering all my non-fiction yet, so my catalogue is skewed towards the fiction side of things. Someday.)

No comments: