book meme that's been around

[cimorene]

My reading history of Library Thing's users' 106 books most marked "Unread". So presumably this corresponds roughly to the selection, out of books most often recommended to other people, which least inspire people to want to read them once they have picked them up. It's an odd mixture of like, best sellers from the past ten years, Russian literature, Nobel Prize-winners, Neil Gaiman, and Jane Austen, for serious. Also some non-fiction. I wonder if it's really a good idea to peruse these lists for our friends? Not if you're the kind of person who makes character judgements based on people's unread or unfinished books.

Also, I'm pissed off that Finnegan's Wake wasn't there, because even more than Anna Karenina, that is the piece of literature I've ever encountered that I wish to spread ranting, raving, frothing hate for far and wide. Jesus. At least it's cleverer and more ironic than Anna Karenina, so the fact that it's 10 billion times as pretentions (no mean feat) is sort of ameliorated because it's like, not pretentious so much as ~*Pretentious!!*~LOL.

Anyway, bolded titles are read, italicised titles are unfinished, struck through titles are hated with the heat of a thousand suns. There should be a way to mark them with love too, though. Maybe I'll go through and add hearts! I think I will.


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
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
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
The Canterbury tales♥
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
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula♥
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys♥
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & demons
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
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The Prince
The sound and the fury
Angela's ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
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
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
Gravity's rainbow
The Hobbit
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The three musketeers

Comments

[darksylvia.livejournal.com]

I approve of your marking system.

Also, I hated Mists of Avalon so much I start twitching at the mere mention.

What I want to know is how all these Neil Gaiman books got on this 'unread' list, you know?

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

I LOVE THAT BOOK.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I've tried it 3 times before I finally buckled down and finished it. My mom loved it and picked my name out of it. o_O UGH. So lowering.

I presume Neil Gaiman was recommended by people with taste to people who were like "Ew fantasy" or "But... I don't get it :(" and then they went back to reading Playboy or Cosmo.

Or Tolstoy.

[perhael.livejournal.com]

Out of this list, I've read-but-not-finished about a handful, and actually finished one. Yes, one (namely, Catch-22, which I love and have re-read many times).

Um. I've, eh, seen the movies of quite a few of these?

Okay, I'll understand if you want to defriend me now.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Not really. It's not your literary tradition. And you didn't start as a child, which most of us did. If you don't like Neil Gaiman, that's another symptom of crazy, but probably not on a par with social anxiety.

[perhael.livejournal.com]

Oh, wait! Neil Gaiman! I totally have read, and loved, American Gods. So that makes it two books already.

And yeah, you're right about it not being my literary tradition-- I've read a fair amount of Dutch classics. Mind you, I do wish I'd read more books off that list. A few of them are actually in my bookcase, unread. Another few I read nearly all the way through to the end before reading anxiety set in (Lolita, The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, The hobbit, as well as a few others). Lol I know, who on earth has reading anxiety... well, me. *headdesk*

[perhael.livejournal.com]

Also, I've tried to read 1984 on at least three different occasions, and found it impossible to get into every single time. What a dreadful bore!

[kegom.livejournal.com]

I'm rather surprised that I've read more than a third of those books and own even more... usually I know far less of the books on memes like these, unless they're about fantasy novels. ^__^


This is an interesting mixture of things I'd have expected on a list "marked as unread" and things I wouldn't have expected there at all.

I can understand why a book like "Reading Lolita in Teheran" would be on that list, since, while it's an extremely good book, it's probably only of interest for people who're generally interested in topics like women's liberation/emancipation through books, but I'm surprised at books like "Treasure Island" or the Jane Austen books, which I'd always taken to be classics in English literature.
Also, I'd have thought that all students would have to read one of the three classic negative utopias (or do you say "utopiae"?) "1984", "Brave New World" or "Lord of the flies" at one point during their school career...

But thanks for doing that meme, there are a couple of books on that list I hadn't heard of, but which have very interesting titles, so I think I'll check them out someday! ^___^

[cimness.livejournal.com]

That was what interested me about it, too. Obviously it's a number of different factors competing with equal strength to put things on people's To-Read lists.

As for dystopias, we read Fahrenheit 451 and The Giver in high school literature and philosophy respectively. I'd certainly class F451 with 1984.

[kegom.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, I forgot "Fahrenheit 451"! (Probably because I never got to read it. How did you like it?)

[kmazzy.livejournal.com]

oh oh i LOVED love in the time of cholera, but not as much as 100 years of solitude.
i am not looking forward to anna karenina but as i managed war & peace i should also manage it. jane austen is DULL. i quite liked the mists of avalon... maybe cos i just wanted to be morgaine...

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd never willingly subject myself to any Russian literature again, pretty much, but I was one of the few people in my class who finished AK. On the other hand, I'd say Jane Austen was the most lively and subtly witty writer of human behaviour I've ever encountered, second only to PG Wodehouse in fictional hilarity. Whereas The Mists of Avalon might've been okay if I were a child at the time, but I can't stand MZB's self-indulgent teenie-bopper-pandering sordid incestuous fake-historical drippy writing.

[kmazzy.livejournal.com]

i guess i liked it (mists of avalon) because i was 9 or 10 when reading it and it seemed cool.
i think i am too tactless to enjoy austen as all her characters just annoy me. but maybe it's more the period that annoys me. i am not much enjoying a tale of two cities at the moment and it seems like one of dickens's perkier novels.

[nicocoer.livejournal.com]

I um. loved The Scarlet Letter, and was upset when my Honors Teacher didn't have the class read it. Then again, considering how daft the honors class was. . . they prolly wouldn't have understood enough to hate or like it. *ducks*

Most of these I'd rec if I've read them, or want to read in the near future. Exceptions being anything by Dickens. I lothe his writing style. Also, HATED Fountainhead, which I'm sure a million lit folks will stone me for. ;_;

On the other hand, bring on the Jane Austen!!!

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I don't know - I think most of the people at regular old advanced level I can think of could have comprehended it with a bit of explanation about history, at least as far as most uninterested people usually comprehend literature (which is kind of basically, admittedly, but enough to get something out of it). There's not a lot to get in it.

[nicocoer.livejournal.com]

At my school, they didn't get the social structure for the Crucible- I can't imagine them looking at Scarlet Letter. I don't know, it's like they keep viewing from their modern perspective? A modern, sheltered (and in honors, generally mid- to upper-middle class) perspective, to boot. The Valedictorian? Um. Junior year we had to explain incest to him when we were reading Song of Solomon by Morrison. I ♥ small towns. *rolls eyes*

[elfiepike.livejournal.com]

i had assumed this was a list of the books that people had in their collections but had never finished? like, "these are the books people are most likely to have around to impress you, because they have never read them."

[cimness.livejournal.com]

That is essentially the same thing as my guess, yes.

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

...I'm so glad I'm not the only one who truly hated Mists of Avalon.