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

[(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.