Unread books meme

[sam_t]

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, and underline those you have no intention of reading (oursin's addition). The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book (that is, last time that the algorithm was done).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115) (Not so much 'couldn't finish', as 'discovered that it wasn't what I wanted to read just then', and never quite got round to going back to it)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
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) (assuming in translation counts!)
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
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
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)
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) (in translation)
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) (assuming this means Dante's - again, in translation)
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 (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 (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)
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) (in translation)
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) (I'm not absolutely certain I didn't read an abridged version)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)

Strange mixture of classic novels, recent 'intellectual' bestsellers, and the odd sff novel, here. I'm surprised by the amount of Neil Gaiman - I wouldn't have thought of him as someone people buy without really meaning to read.

There are several on here I mean to read - some of which I own, even.

Odd how it felt like I'd read lots of these when I was marking up the list: when I looked at the preview I was surprised at the lack of bold.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

"In translation" had better count. I make it at least 18 novels originally published in languages other than English (I'm not sure about a couple of them, and then you've got Chaucer and Joyce, who are borderline cases...)

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

I make it 18 too, after a quick scan through, not counting books I'm unfamiliar with, and without looking them up to check.