Further Memage.

[swestrup]

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, italicise 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.

Ya know, its funny. There are very few books in my life that I've started reading and not finished, but this list contains most of them.


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) -- Took several tries.
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) -- on my to-read list.
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 (68) -- Yay Neil Gaiman!
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)  -- on my to-read list.
The Canterbury Tales (64) -- I've been meaning to finish this.
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) -- I guess the movie doesn't count...
Anansi Boys (58) -- planning to read this.
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (57)
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel (57)
1984 (57) -- Not my thing.
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55) -- everyone I know loves it, so I guess I should check it out.
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) -- Not sure why I didn't finish it.
Les Misérables (53)
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) -- Loved it. I have a copy somewhere around here.
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) -- I had issues with it, but it wasn't bad.
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
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)
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46) -- No interest.
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (46) -- read it in high school, hated it.
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45) -- I REALLY wanna read this.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (45) -- One of only two narratives that have ever affected me to my core. But when I read it a second time, I found no new insights.
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)
The Three Musketeers (44) -- ... actually, I may have read this many, many years ago. I'm not sure.


Not a lot of bold there. Some are books I just haven't gotten to yet, but many are books that I have no interest at all in.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

What a strange list. What's not to like, for example, about Eco?

[swestrup]

I've got nothing against Eco. I've just never gotten around to reading anything by him yet. I may like him, or I may not. Time will tell.

It was things like Wuthering Heights and Ulysses for which I have no interest.

[avenray.livejournal.com]

Wuthering Heights is awful. I am one of those people who has to slog through a book once they've started it, but I physically whipped Wuthering across the room in frustration and never touched it again. Dry, boring, and the most unlikable characters you'll ever have the misfortune to read.

No loss.