BOOKS I’VE NEVER READ: THE MEME

[defrog]

By order of dinopollard, an interesting book meme for those of you who still read (hopefully, that’s all of you).

LibraryThing lists the top 200 books most often tagged as “unread” by LT users. For the purposes of this meme, "unread" = "It’s on my shelf but I haven’t read it, but I keep it there cos it makes me look edumacated”. For reasons I'm unclear on, the meme list cuts off at 106.

MISSION: Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

To make things a little easier, I’ve ignored the instructions and just organized my results into separate lists.

PRETENTIOUS BOOKS I’VE READ

1. Crime and Punishment
2. Catch-22
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude
4. Moby Dick
5. American Gods
6. Frankenstein
7. The Count of Monte Cristo
8. Dracula
9. A Clockwork Orange
10. Anansi Boys
11. The Picture of Dorian Gray
12. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
13. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
14. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
15. Cryptonomicon
16. Neverwhere
17. A Confederacy of Dunces
18. Slaughterhouse-Five
19. The Catcher in the Rye
20. On the Road
21. Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
22. Watership Down
23. The Hobbit

PRETENTIOUS BOOKS I’VE READ BECAUSE TEACHER SAID SO

1. The Odyssey
2. A Tale of Two Cities
3. The Iliad
4. Brave New World
5. 1984

PRETENTIOUS BOOKS I’VE STARTED BUT NEVER FINISHED

1. Dune
2. Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed

SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES

1. Although I read BNW and 1984 in high school for lit classes, I loved both of them.

2. Of all the books on the first list, I liked all of them except Moby Dick (which didn’t do much for me) and Dracula (the first 75 pages are great, but it goes south for me after that).

3. Neither Dune nor Collapse are sitting on my shelves. I already sold them off.

4. What’s with all the Neil Gaiman books on this list?

For those of you who believe in audience participation, here’s the full meme list of "unread" books.

TOP 106 PRETENTIOUS BOOKS

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A 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
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
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
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
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

PRODUCTION NOTE: This official list on LibraryThing has changed since this one began circulating, but it's more or less the same – except near the end when you start encountering Cormac McCarthy and Philip Pullman.

Middle class intellectual,

This is dF

Comments

[thelastaerie.livejournal.com]

I am surprise that "Anansi Boys" and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" are on the list... and they didn't put "American Psycho" or "Generation X" on it...

[dinopollard.livejournal.com]

The Gaiman books on the list are just fine with me. He's a great writer and there are a lot of pretentious people who make up his fanbase. I'm more concerned by the inclusion of Dan Brown. I've taken shits that were more interesting than The Da Vinci Code.

Agree completely on Dracula. While I absolutely loved Frankenstein, Dracula was just crap. However, I gave up at around page 50. Although it's interesting how Dracula's future incarnations have turned out to be far better than the original book.

[def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com]

I thought the first section of Dracula was well done, but after that it lapses into corny Victorian melodrama. The core story buried underneath is pretty good, though. But then, so is Lord Of The Rings and I couldn't get past the first 40 pages of Tolkien's super-dense prose.

[dinopollard.livejournal.com]

I just finished Fellowship actually and I loved it. Didn't find it too dense at all.