I have not read thee

[kerravonsen]

Everyone's doing it, I shall be a sheep.

This is a list of the books most often tagged "unread" on LibraryThing. The rules are: bold what you have read, italicize what you started but didn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The number after each title is the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

I'm also taking a leaf out of astrogirl2's book and putting * next to the ones I own but haven't read.

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)
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 (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 (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 (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)
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)

There's a lot there I haven't read. And quite a bit I've never heard of. And some I definitely don't intend to bother reading. Oh well.

Comments

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time since you have it - it's quite fascinating and wouldn't take very long. And there's a B7 reference!

[kerravonsen]

It's definitely on my to-read list, as are a number of things. I'll have to decide what books to take with me for airport reading, but I'll decide that closer to the time. I managed to get "The Inferno" read on one of my trips; it's a good time to read stuff one wouldn't otherwise read.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Was it the Dorothy L Sayers translation? I really enjoyed that.

[kerravonsen]

I can't remember, but I think it wasn't.

[feliciakw.livejournal.com]

I would do much better if the response options included some form of "indicate if you've seen the stage play or movie version." I've heard of many of these, but only 2 have I picked up, and neither of those did I finish (though I do intented to go back and give one of them another go).

[kerravonsen]

Yeah, if that option was allowed, I could add Emma, Great Expectations, Mansfield Park, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Gulliver's Travels and Northanger Abbey.

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness someone who has as few of these as I have, though for the most part they are a different few, the exception being The Mists of Avalon and I whole heartily agree with your opinion. I have a 'discarded from stock' copy at home in the hope that one day i might be desperate enough to read it but I doubt I ever will.

[kerravonsen]

I started "The Mists of Avalon" and simply couldn't stomach how completely and utterly wrongly she portrayed Christianity in it.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I didn't do this, as I came to a stop right at the top of the list trying to remember whether I had actually read Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment all the way through. It's not that I started and didn't finish; I have a very clear memory of picking up Anna Karenina and reading chunks of it. But whether I went back and read it right through I honestly can't remember. I think I did, because there are bits I remember that are definitely text not TV adaptations... and then I think I didn't... and it was all twenty-odd years ago, so my memory's quite blurred. Maybe I should just read them again to make sure.