Wednesday, May 14, 2008

How many of these books have you read?

As some may or may not know, I was not much of a student in high school. If we had a reading assignment, I usually had someone summarize the book for me instead of reading it or the clif notes. I don't know if I had to read some of these books for school (Catch-22, maybe), but most of them I didn't bother reading until I was an adult. I was on a kick in the late 90s, before law school, where I would browse thru the summer reading table at B&N and buy the books I hadn't read, but should have, when I was younger. I tackled stuff that most found were a chore to read. I guess b/c I was older and outside of the school context that I actually enjoyed reading some of them (well, except for Catch-22, maybe).

So, when several of my friends posted this bookshelf assessment on their blogs, I had to jump in. This place called LibraryThing (an online catalog of your bookshelf) has a list of the top 106 books that are listed as unread by LibraryThing's users. Basically, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 (this is one of the books I probably had to read in school, but didn't bother)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick (I tried to do this one on my own and just couldn't)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice

Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities (attempted to read this for book club - what were we thinking?)
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 (amazing book. currently reading thousand splendid suns)
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
(i was on a huge ayn rand kick right out of college and read all of her books)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (i tried, i really did - it's just too dry)
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
(amazing book!)
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
(i hated this book. i had to somehow compare this book to A Room With A View and the only parallels I could find were thru the flowers. I still cringe when I think of it)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Miserables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince (poli sci major - of course i read it)
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 (I don't know if I have finally finished this book. I pick it up off and on)
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 (I technically read this book, but sort of skipped thru the philosophical crap and focused on the actual road trip)
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (read this after seeing and reading the lord of the rings trilogy)
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Looks like I've managed to read and complete 38 of the books on the list. All in all, not bad for someone who didn't really start reading until her 20s.

1 comment:

Lisa said...

Another one sucked into the list! Wasn't this fun?