Reading the Great Unread Novels - meme thing

[brixtonbrood]

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand, and underline those you have no intention of reading (oursin's addition). The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book (that is, last time that the algorithm was done).

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) (and wishes he hadn't)
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
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) (specifically I've read the bit I did for A Level)
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
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)(how could anyone not finish Dorian Gray - it's no length at all?)
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)

And if you wonder how I can both finish and not finish a book - it's because I'm counting both of us (which has the added advantage of being able to pretend it wasn't me who read Angels and Demons...oooh what a give away). I'm a bit disappointed by our score, given that He is the champion of Great Unread books.
[ETA a few that I'd forgotten he'd read]

Comments

[sparkymark.livejournal.com]

I've read Moby Dick, Pride & Prejudice, Persuasion, Catch-22 and Dune. I've seen some films of them, but didn't make it to the end of In Cold Blood. I started reading Catcher In the Rye backwards for a laugh, but decided I would enjoy reading other books forward more.

becos we are to meny

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

.. only those you haven't read which I have and liked (except the last):

One hundred years of solitude
Mrs Dalloway
Love in the time of cholera
The Count of Monte Cristo
A clockwork orange
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
To the lighthouse
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The sound and the fury
A confederacy of dunces
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five (for goodness sake!)
Lolita
On the road
Gravity's rainbow
The three musketeers (v. v. g.)

Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

[zengineer.livejournal.com]

This is a very suspect poll. Far too much Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson. Those you haven't read and I have and would recommend;
Life of Pi
Quicksilver/Confusion/System of the World but it's a long trilogy.
I liked quite a few of the others (e.g. Mists of Avalon) but wouldn't recommend on the grounds that you would probably know what to expect.

Not sure whether it's a good or bad thing...

[pureofthought.livejournal.com]

It's a consequence of having a partner who spends most of her life resting, during which time reading is about the only thing I can do (no computers, as I spend enough time working with them; nothing noisy) and being an indiscriminate reader, but I've read almost all of these. These are the ones you haven't read that I'd recommend:

All the Dickens, but not all in one go (and skip the sentimental bits)
American Gods (how can you not have read this?) and once you've read it you'll want to read Anansi Boys
Atlas Shrugged (if only to be astounded at the naivety of the philosophy)
Quicksilver (once you get into this series it's even better then the Cryptonomicon)
The Historian
A Portrait of an Artist / The Dubliners (I love Joyce, but I know it's not everyone's cup of tea), and if you can cope with that, The Sound and the Fury is in a similar vein
The God of Small Things (only if you're in the mood for something gently depressing)
Slaugherhouse-five
Cloud Atlas
Lolita
Gravity's Rainbow (at least for the joke about the derivation of the German for helicopter)
Watership Down, Treasure Island and The Three Musketeers (aren't these part of everyone's childhood?)

Keep away from Oryx and Crake - although other Atwood SF is pretty good, this one reads as though she hasn't ever read any SF before; as usual, the reviewers who weren't SF fans praised all the SF cliches as imaginative touches.

Re: Not sure whether it's a good or bad thing...

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

We have actually read a fair amount of Dickens between us - Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and Barnaby Rudge, and with the exception of bits of Little Dorrit and The Magic Fishbone, we hated all of it.

Re: Not sure whether it's a good or bad thing...

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

Gravity's Rainbow he has actually read, and neither loved nor hated. Treasure Island we know well in a Ladybird abridgement - Watership Down I know through the book of the film, and feel no need to know further.
American Gods is on a vague mental list of things to read along with Quicksilver and Cloud Atlas.

Re: Not sure whether it's a good or bad thing...

[pureofthought.livejournal.com]

The film bears little relation to the original book, as far as I remember. It's like saying that you saw the seventies animated LOTR (which shares John Hurt as a voice), and didn't read Tolkien as a result, except that LOTR isn't as good as Watership Down. I was just about old enough to read the book before seeing the film, and to hate the addition of cuteness. At least, I think that was my reaction, but I may be projecting back into my 9-year old self.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Really, rather than the raw unread number, you want it as a proportion of total holding. Clearly some of these books are much more popular than others, so it might be that in some cases it’s a tiny proportion of owners who don’t read them, in others a majority.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

Yes, position on this poll is a function both of "popularity/prominence" and "difficulty/rubbishness", so you can't really use it for either and stuff that would otherwise be a shoo in for unfinishability such as Milton and Proust (both of which we have collectively read) is visibly absent.

Actually I'm not quite sure what "unread" means in this context - does it mean I've got it and haven't read it, or started it and couldn't finish it I wonder.

[asajeffrey.livejournal.com]

Of that list, the ones I couldn't be bothered finishing were:

The Silmarillion (104)
The satanic verses (55)
A confederacy of dunces (50)

I suspect that among the right crowd, The Silmarillion is the least-finished book of all time.

You must must must read:

One hundred years of solitude (115)
The time traveler's wife
Slaughterhouse-five (49)

How can you be a Moffat fan and not have read TTTW?