I Am So Average!

[tealin]

From sydpad and tannhaeuser ...

These are the top one-hundred-six books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list. I have double-asterisked the ones I've heard in one audio format or another.

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 (this is a huge bestseller ... and it was a 'most unread?')
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 (I love this title but refuse to read the book because of it)
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 (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.)
The Canterbury Tales (in other words, I've read a couple of the tales in disconnected format)
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, or, The Modern Prometheus (How can such a cool idea be so boring?? And preposterous in presentation? The Swiss peasants just happened to have Paradise Lost in their woodshed? WTF?)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula** (tried listening to the BBC dramatization and had no idea what was going on half the time)
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons (How did Dan Brown get on this list?)
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 (listening to the soundtrack probably doesn't count...)
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince (Um ... this is Machiavelli, yes? Not The Little Prince, then?)
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a Memoir
The God of Small Things (Not Small Gods, alas)
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 (This is the second course-of-civilisation book on this list that is not A Short History of Progress)
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* (I am perplexed whenever this appears as 'literature' (though Dan Brown is on this list so I guess it's not so exclusive) as my dad read it to me when I was five, it has followed me throughout my life, is about rabbits, and is actually entertaining.)
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit* (kept trying to like it, at varying ages, hence the asterisk.)
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island**
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Wow, I am colossally unread!

Comments

[trashcanbaby.livejournal.com]

That's suprising! I thought you'd have read most of these over and over. I have Catch 22 if you want to borrow it.

[grafin-drachen.livejournal.com]

Iv'e read about 5 of them, But life of Pi the novel was BORING! If you ever need a sleeping pill, this is the book for you. I got it when my local library closed, (I use to do building matenence) I got first choice (along with the employees) when the place closed. So I got a tonne of books for free... In total I must have got a couple hundred dollars worth of books.. I'm not complaining.

[beckychan.livejournal.com]

I am woefully unread, as I have read even less of these than you... TT_TT

[karwei.livejournal.com]

You beat me by two.

[buttfacemakani.livejournal.com]

Does reading part of a book count? What about the Spark Notes?

[noodledaddy.livejournal.com]

I've eaten a Three Musketeers, does that count?

[fleur-de-liz.livejournal.com]

Does Muppet Treasure Island count? :D

[thearchduchess.livejournal.com]

Muppet Treasure Island always counts :D

[flamingbentley.livejournal.com]

wow, okay, i'm shocked-- not one, not two, but three neil gaiman books made the list? what the... ?

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but none of them is Good Omens. Go fig. (Maybe it's because people have either read it or don't know about it?)

[thefordmustang.livejournal.com]

Fun list!

I read 46 of 'em. I attribute that to required reading lists in college. I was sorry to see Watership Down and the Neil Gaiman books on the list and the Kite Runner. Wow. Those books have all been very popular in my perception.

[sp34k.livejournal.com]

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a great book. I've read it twice and usually I dislike books the second time around, but it remained rather good.

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

Wow... how DID Dan Brown get on the list? And THREE Gaiman books?!? Lol, I didn't know what you were talking about at first when you mentioned The Little Prince... I read it in French class, so I'm used to hearing it being called "Le Petit Prince." (Hah, imagine if Machiavelli HAD written it? :D)

The only reason I've read Kite Runner and Wuthering Heights is that they were part of the course load in grades 11 and 12 english, respectively. Wuthering Heights was kinda blah for me, but Kite Runner was surprisingly good. Depressing and cliché at times, but still quite good.

[lilac-elf.livejournal.com]

The only two that I have read and enjoyed tremendously are 'The Hobbit' and 'Watership Down'.

But my book preferences leans towards culinary mysteries, so....

[chainedwind.livejournal.com]

I've read twentysomething of them, but most of them were read quite a while ago, and only once.

[theangrywaffle.livejournal.com]

If it makes a difference, the title of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is one hundred percent self-deprecation on the author's part. His sense of humor is really neat.

(But if you won't read that one, try You Shall Know Our Velocity!)

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm sure the book is good, and I'm glad to know the title is tongue-in-cheek (I'd hoped so, but you never know with Literature), I just know I'll be disappointed because whatever it is will be less than the vague picture of what the book might possibly contain in my head. The mystery is so much of the fun!

I like that other title though.

[missuscarroll.livejournal.com]

I've read 11. Pooh.

[sopophorous.livejournal.com]

Does it count if I've seen the Wishbone version?

[anathelen.livejournal.com]

Aaaah, they were marked unused by LibraryThing's users. Does that mean they were books that LibraryThing users had marked as hadn't read in their profiles, or was this a poll, or what? Considering the type of people that would actually use LibraryThing this might explain the lack of unread bestsellers, or the classics that people always wanted to read but never got around to?

I was curious to see that you didn't Wicked. I never really got into it myself (the characterization... gah. Italiciz'd!), but I'm curious why you hated it since most people on the internet are usually like "HOW DARE U PROFANE ITS AWESOMENESS???".

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

You know, I've been meaning to re-read it in order to write up a proper rant on everything I dislike about it, but somehow I haven't gotten up the nerve ... I think I posted a half-rant sometime back in 2005 or so but it'll take a while to find.

Basically: Character development = 0, plot structure = 0, at every possible opportunity to make the narrative more interesting the author chose the wrong one, and I suspect the doctorate is leaking out Mr Maguire's ears.

[anathelen.livejournal.com]

At least the actual sentances were better than the writing in the Da Vinci code. I got about two pages into that book... I occasionally gripe about Rowling's prose, but Brown's was actual unbearable. Alas that Wicked's characters went nowhere and the plot meandered, since I did like the idea of Dorothy being completely clueless. She was rather annoying in the 1939 movie.

I listened to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell as read by Mr Simon Prebble while at work over the summer and it was British up the wazoo and an utterly wonderful book. I cannot imagine a better way to encounter that book than through Mr Prebble's delightful diction.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the reason Dan Brown is on there is because everyone reads The Da Vinci Code and forgets about Angels and Demons. But you're not missing anything, I promise.