A meme from Gentle Reader Matt Hulan. Somebody looked in LibraryThing for the tag “unread” and took the top 106 books (there was an eight-way tie for 99th place. Then they started the apparently standard meme business of bolding names of books that the memer has read, italicizing those that the memer has begun but not finished, and striking through names of books particularly hated.
Herewith, the list, with parenthetically added quantities of LTers so tagging:
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)
I myself have tagged a couple of these unread.
What I find curious is the habit so many of us seem to have of purchasing or otherwise collecting books that we don’t then soon read. I am fairly good about this; my personal list of unread books tops out at 35. That doesn’t actually mean that I have read every one of the other books in the house; some of the books belong to the other members of the household. I only marked unread in LT those books that I intend to read. I have a shelf for these books, and every now and then I really do take one off the shelf. Not very often, though.
I visit the local public library every week, and while I’m there, I tend to cast an eye over the New Books shelf. Most of the New Books circulate for only seven days, so I have to read fairly hard to keep up with them. Then, I have access to a local academic library, from which I can take books for an extended period, but generally the books I take from them are books that I read slowly, slowly. So if I am in the mood to read a new book, I usually have at least one and often half-a-dozen books on loan, on deadline, so I go to those first. Add to that my puerile penchant for re-reading old favorite (or even old moderately well likeds), and the books on that shelf stay on that shelf for some little time.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
No strikethroughs? Quite a contrast with the other place I’ve seen one of these lists crop up (although now that I know Matt did one, I should go look at his, too).
What particularly interests me is not so much which books on the list one has or hasn’t read, but which books one owns and yet hasn’t read.
(But as an aside, I’ve read 30 of them, aided by a couple of high school assignments and by liking Jane Austen. I’m sad to see how many people own Pride and Prejudice yet haven’t read it.)
But I’m guessing that not many people use the unread tag, if the top spot on the list was marked that way by only 150 people.
Re “the habit so many of us seem to have of purchasing or otherwise collecting books that we don’t then soon read”: I have an entire bookcase full of books I haven’t read. Some of them are giant omnibus complete-works editions that I bought for compactness and completeness; some are classic works that I feel I ought to read (which I suspect accounts for most of why various works are on the LT Unread list); most are books that I bought with the full intention of reading, and still plan to at some point, but haven’t got around to it yet because I buy books faster than I read them (or just because I’ve never quite gotten past the activation threshold). A couple dozen more in that last category, mostly recent purchases, are sitting on the floor of my room in the vain hope that I’ll be more likely to read them there.
No strike-throughs, because there really aren’t very many books I dislike enough to strike through. Oryx and Crake remains unfinished because I didn’t enjoy the beginning at all; that’s probably the closest. I got most of the way through the first half of Don Quixote, before getting bored enough to quit, but I couldn’t say I hated it. Most of the other half-read books didn’t rise to the level of strike-through, either, some of them just returned to a library half-read, with the intention of someday perhaps finishing them. And the ones I finished range from excellent to moderately enjoyable, I suppose down to some-redeeming-qualities. Or, I’m just a big softie.
To the best of my recollection, not looking it up, the books on the list that I own and have not read include:
I have actually read a few of the Canterbury Tales, but not enough to justify italicizing it.
Thanks,
-V.