RSS
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax
Someone recently told me that clever, bookish girls are awesome. She was referring to me when she said that, and whether I can bring myself to believe the compliment or not (and that changes based upon mood), I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. As I am bookish (if not always clever), I found myself unable to resist the “Unread Books Meme” going around with LibraryThing bloggers. The premise is to take the list of 106 that folks have pulled off of LibraryThing (this varies from person to person as they post them on their blogs, I’ve found), and do the following:
Bold the books you have read, italicize books you’ve started buy not finished, strike the books you read but hated, add an asterisk* to books you’ve read more than once, and underline those you own but still haven’t read yourself.
The books on the list are the top books that have been tagged “unread” or something similar on LibraryThing. It’s a long list of books, but a simple task, so I undertook it. I was ashamed to find out how many of these books that I haven’t even heard of, let alone put on my To-Be-Read pile (which, incidentally, is slowly but surely decreasing). Here’s how I came out with this list of 106:
001. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
002. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
003. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
004. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
005. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
006. Catch-22: A Novel by Joseph Heller
007. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
008. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
009. The Odyssey by Homer
010. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
011. Ulysses by James Joyce
012. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
013. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
014. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
015. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens *
016. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
017. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
018. The Iliad by Homer
019. Emma by Jane Austen
020. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
021. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
022. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
023. The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
024. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen *
025. The Historian: A Novel by Elizabeth Kostova
026. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
027. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
028. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
029. Life of Pi: A Novel by Yann Martel
030. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
031. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
032. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
033. Dracula by Bram Stoker
034. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
035. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
036. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
037. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
038. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
039. Middlemarch by George Eliot
040. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
041. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
042. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
043. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
044. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
045. Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson
046. American Gods: A Novel by Neil Gaiman
047. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
048. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
049. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire *
050. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
051. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
052. Dune by Frank Herbert
053. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
054. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
055. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
056. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
057. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
058. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
059. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
060. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
061. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
062. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
063. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
064. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon
065. Persuasion by Jane Austen *
066. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
067. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
068. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
069. Anansi Boys: A Novel by Neil Gaiman
070. The Once and Future King by T. H. White
071. Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan
072. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
073. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
074. Oryx and Crake: A Novel by Margaret Atwood
075. Dubliners by James Joyce
076. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
077. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt
078. Beloved: a novel by Toni Morrison
079. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
080. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
081. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its… by Truman 0Capote
082. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
083. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
084. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
085. Watership Down by Richard Adams
086. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
087. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
088. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Anonymous
089. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
090. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into… by Robert M. 0Pirsig
091. The Aeneid by Virgil
092. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
093. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
094. The Personal History of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
095. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
096. Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt
097. The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding
098. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
099. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
100. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
101. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
102. Candide, or, Optimism by Voltaire
103. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
104. The Plague by Albert Camus
105. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
106. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
This is a fairly respectable list, as far as I can figure from the number of “classics” that fill it, but all the same it means that while they’re classics and people have them, they aren’t reading them. Judging by the ones that I’ve forced myself through and not enjoyed, I think the classics are overrated. Oh well! I’m not inspired to add many of these to my reading list at this juncture; I’ve enough to read already!
Speaking of books and reading: I’m now 42% of the way done with my 50 Book Challenge! I have a feeling that I’ll hit 50 books before January 1, 2009 rolls around. I’m very pleased with my progress. If I do meet the challenge, I will have knocked approximately 40 books off of my to-be-read list. More, if I’m ambitious enough to keep going through the end of the year on unread books. If I don’t make 50 by the end of the year, however, I have committed myself to refraining from purchasing any new books until I have read every book on our bookshelves that I haven’t yet read. It should be interesting to see if I’m able to make it! For my own sanity, I sure hope that I can!
I’m keeping track of my progress for my 50 Book Challenge on livejournal and on LibraryThing. Feel free to friend me if you like!
Share
