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regyt, and others: These are apparently the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. I've bolded the ones I've actually read. Ones I remember totally loving (like "choked up at the fact that I had to put them down" loving) at the time I read them are in purple. What on this list have I missed that you think I should read? I am slowly becoming able to devour books again (this was possibly the most tragic thing I lost upon having N).
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The 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 : a novel
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
regyt, and others: These are apparently the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. I've bolded the ones I've actually read. Ones I remember totally loving (like "choked up at the fact that I had to put them down" loving) at the time I read them are in purple. What on this list have I missed that you think I should read? I am slowly becoming able to devour books again (this was possibly the most tragic thing I lost upon having N).Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The 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 : a novel
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
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 02:59 pm (UTC)Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
Atlas Shrugged
The Fountainhead
Don't get me wrong, I have a CRAPTON of books I own but haven't read yet, it's just that not many are on this list. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 02:56 pm (UTC)Yay books! We should have a reading-aloud club at BM. Sometime as people are waking up, maybe.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 03:02 pm (UTC)Reading-aloud club! Yes!
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Date: 2008-06-02 07:48 am (UTC)Through me you enter into eternal pain,
Through me you enter the population of loss.
Justice moved my high maker, in power divine,
In wisdom supreme, love primal. No things were
Before me not eternal; eternal I remain.
Abandon all hope, you who enter here. (canto III, 1-7)
Like licking chocolate off your fingers.
---
In roughly descending order of devourability:
Inferno. Here's the thing: this is actually an intensely political work, a commentary on contemporary power in Florence. It's set in his future, and he's been gifted with this trip to Hell, and is seeing (setting) all his political enemies in various torments in hell. It is *vicious*. The Pinsky translation is heavily footnoted, so you always know what's going on, and the structure of the work is episodic, making it good for an interruptable life.
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Some people argue these are really the same book. I've literally bought *multiple* copies of P&P because my books were packed and I really really wanted to read it. Again. (Hooray for Dover Press is all I can say.)
Memoirs of a Geisha
I don't think it's an important book, but the text is rich. You might consider Seidensticker's tr. of Tale of Genji if you're in a Japanese Novel mood.
The Count of Monte Cristo. It's very important to get the unabridged version -- elsewise you'll totally miss the lesbians.
Dracula
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed -- I liked this even more than GGS, but it's a huge damn work. It's really what drilled into me that fresh water is EVERYTHING.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 02:59 pm (UTC)The Brothers Karamazov is an excellent book, as is The Count of Monte Cristo. I was about to suggest Quicksilver, but if you didn't like Cryptonomicon, I'd hesitate.
I'm surprised that Dubliners made the list, but Finnegan's Wake didn't. I don't think anyone who owns a copy of FW has actually read it.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 03:00 pm (UTC)Basically, I like a lot of stuff. :)
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Date: 2008-04-30 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 04:52 pm (UTC)It's not. But it's a fine book when it's not suffering by comparison. Moominmolly, put GGS on the top of your stack right now. It's easy to read in sections for when you have an hour or so between bouts of parenting. If you're anything like any of the rest of our mutual friends, it'll suck you in. If you like it, read Collapse but be prepared to skim or skip sections that don't interest you.
GGS is Diamond exploring an idea he's kicked around for decades and being brilliant by accident. As with Freud, it may be that none of his ideas stand up to long-term scrutiny but also as with Freud, even if that happens he permanently changed the terms of the debate.
Collapse is Diamond trying to be brilliant and writing an interesting book. I think it would have been a better book had it been 20% smaller. The idea is very interesting, the historical studies worth reading, but the futurology a bit of a reach. But that idea!
My Quaker school just opened its renovated middle school. It's almost appallingly eco-friendly, with tons of reclaimed wood (from shipwrecks in old ports), graywater recycling through a fish pond, green rooves, slats to let winter sun in and keep summer sun out, ... the list goes on. During the dedication the Head of School made a big deal of Collapse. Why was it so important to him, as a Quaker, that the school was renovated eco-friendly? Not important to him as someone living on Earth, or as a parent, or a consumer, but as a Quaker?
Because reading Collapse, he realized that the end result of environmental degradation was war.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 03:31 pm (UTC)Excuse me while I go bang my head against the wall until all the crazy bleeds out.
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Date: 2008-04-30 03:34 pm (UTC)Almost all of these books fell into the "choked up at the fact that I had to put them down" category for me.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 03:38 pm (UTC)Also, Oryx and Crake was hugely disappointing.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 03:41 pm (UTC)Middlesex
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
especially Memoirs and Wicked. i own all of these.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 04:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-04-30 03:52 pm (UTC)But I've read more of these than I would have guessed. Granted some are from high school (Catcher in the Rye, The Scarlet Letter, etc), but many others are ones I've actually read end to end (hobbit, treasure island, cryptonomicon, neverwhere, eats, shoots and leaves, one flew over, grapes of wrath, once and future king, etc etc.
And I still can't see how anyone can read Umberto Eco's work. It is (deliberately so, i understand) so dense, i get thundering headaches after 3 pages.
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Date: 2008-04-30 04:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-04-30 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 04:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-04-30 04:16 pm (UTC)Yes, do read The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I loved it. I also highly recommend The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (read them in that order, pleeze!). I loved The Historian. And Wicked. The Count of Monte Cristo and A Clockwork Orange are entertaining reads. The Inferno is very worthy. Mists of Avalon was OK, but I've read so much Arthurian legend that it didn't do much for me. Tess of the D'Snorevilles? Nah. And Angels and Demons was not very good, IMNSHO.
And add Virgil's Aeneid to your list, if you haven't read it already. I can't think of the name of my favorite translator for it, but it's one of my favorites.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 04:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-04-30 04:36 pm (UTC)If you like that kind of thing, you will also love Mrs. Dalloway.
It's worth reading some Jane Austen; I liked the much-decried Northanger Abbey better than the more popular ones (Emma and Pride and Prejudice), but I'm contrary like that.
An anti-recommendation: do not read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. It will make every anti-prescriptivist linguist cell of your body want to throw the book across the room.
The Portrait of Dorian Gray is reasonably entertaining and a one-hour read. Wicked is also a super-easy read and was much better than I expected from the retold-fairy-tale genre; it's a fun page-turner and I went out and bought the sequel but was disappointed by it. (Also, funnier if you read something about Frank L. Baum and his crazy populist politics first.)
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Date: 2008-04-30 04:42 pm (UTC)I basically only want to read it so that I can scream a lot. Yet people tell me I should read it all the time! I believe they are all wrong, even the nice ones.
I loved Portrait of the Artist in high school, and actually totally want to read Wicked (maybe I can borrow it from
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 05:04 pm (UTC)I'm surprised that Memoirs of a Geisha, Watership Down, and Wicked are so often unread - they're such quick reads. I can see that The Hobbit might not be everyone's cup of tea.
I've read a James Joyce, I think it was Portrait. I read the whole thing and I remember NOTHING, not even which book it was. That book, you see, was the only reading material available to me on a month-long hiking trip where I was the odd man out. The word "desperate" hardly covers the situation.
I like Stephenson's ideas but enjoy most of his books more if I remember to skip his 20 page info-dumps. The Diamond Age is the notable exception - I like the whole thing.
I can't finish any version of Arthur. Watching people deliberately throw away a good thing is just too damn painful for me. I didn't like The Fabulous Baker Boys (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097322/) for the same reason.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 05:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-04-30 06:56 pm (UTC)But I second the recommendation for Anansi Boys, especially if you like folklore and Americana. I thought it was a better book than American Gods.
Also, skip Sound and the Fury unless you're in the mood for seriously depressingness.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-30 08:40 pm (UTC)Pride and Prejudice!
Date: 2008-05-01 12:18 am (UTC)Witty witty witty witty witty.
Guns Germs and Steel I add my voice to the chorus of praise. It is one of those books where the author goes, "Here! I thought hard for twenty years so you don't have to do all that work." Reminded me of Godel Escher Bach that way.
I anti-recommend Quicksilver; American Gods did not thrill me; Angels and Demons was dumb.
I would be proud of myself for reading 20 of those, except the quality of the list varies so enormously that it approaches a random sample of all literature.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-01 04:29 am (UTC)For the record, I'm shocked at how much it costs, and wonder if the price went up for some reason, since I know at one point I owned two.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-01 04:33 am (UTC)Of the ones you haven't read, I *loved*
The Sounds and the Fury
Kavalier and Clay
Clockwork Orange (far superior to the movie, IMO)
Mists of Avalon
The Corrections
and of course Ulysses
no subject
Date: 2008-05-03 07:22 am (UTC)If the fact that there are no Austen novels in bold in this list is indicative that you feel you are already quite familiar enough with the twee-ness that is representative of many Austen interpretations, then I would say buck convention and go with Northanger Abbey, especially if you are familiar at all with gothic literature.
Also, Jane Eyre.