how pretentious am I? thiiiiiis pretentious!

[topaz]

This is the "unread books" meme that's been going around. The list is the 106 books most often listed as "unread" by LibraryThing users.

Titles in bold: I've read.
Titles in italics: I started but never finished.
Titles underlined: School assignments.

Following moominmolly's lead, the ones that I couldn't put down, did not want to be over, or otherwise filled me with unspeakable glory are in purple.  Some comments about selected books at the end.

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
The 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

Commentary:

Wuthering Heights was one of the only books I was assigned in school that I could not bring myself to finish.  Could not.  Absolutely could not bear to read another page.  It was the dreariest, dullest, most boring thing I could possibly imagine reading.

I still really want to read The Name of the Rose and try some other Eco.  I find it very hard to get through the first few pages and am not quite sure why -- he writes very very well in English.

The Canterbury Tales is listed as "didn't finish" because, while I read everything that we were assigned in high school and enjoyed it a lot, I'm pretty sure we only read excerpts in the first place.  I should go back and read the whole thing one of these days.

The Once and Future King: I read Part I and absolutely adored it.  For some reason I had trouble getting into Part II, set the book down and failed to get back to it.  This happens to me a lot.

I enjoyed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time a lot but not nearly as much as the other "unreliable narrator" book I read around the same time, Motherless Brooklyn.  That one left me speechless with delight and would absolutely be purpled if it were on this list.

When I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I was seventeen, about the age at which I am told most young men read it and discover that, for the first time in their lives, someone really and truly understands what they are going through.  I have not read it since and suspect that if I were to do so, I would not find it quite as much a revelation.  Nevertheless, honesty compels me to note that in 1987 I thought this was surely the most profoundest book EVAR written.

I started reading Treasure Island to the kids a couple of years ago but Morgan found the language  quite a barrier.  He begged me to stop about halfway through.  I'm reading him Tom Sawyer now and he's delighted with it, so maybe I'll try to sell him on Stevenson again.

Comments

[harimad.livejournal.com]

Do we need to tell you to read Guns, Germs & Steel or is reading the recommendations and reasons in Moominmolly's LJ sufficient?

Freshman year college Lit class focused on travel books - In Patagonia, excerpts from de Tocqueville, Zen and the Art. I didn't find anything in Zen and the Art that spoke to me. Wonder if it's a gender thing.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Do we need to tell you to read Guns, Germs & Steel or is reading the recommendations and reasons in Moominmolly's LJ sufficient?

Neither.

I didn't find anything in Zen and the Art that spoke to me. Wonder if it's a gender thing.

That's sort of what I've heard! That's the only thing that makes me curious enough to want to go reread it. On the other hand, redjo also said this book resonated very strongly with her when she read it.

[keyne.livejournal.com]

Do we need to tell you to read Guns, Germs & Steel...

You don't need to tell him, no. It's on our shelves and it's one of my all-time favorite books, so he'll assimilate eventually :)

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

I found Zen to be jarring/troubling gender-wise when I read it in college; there were certainly awesome parts, but the troubling parts were too troubling. Also, I loathe Feynman. Same issue.

Eco! Little hearts explode over my head! I swear his stuff picks up eventually, but it does require an investment.

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

When I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I was a junior in high school and absolutely refused to finish it. I was bored and irritated with the main characters, and took a poor grade (yes, even with my straight A average) rather than have to finish that damn book. I wonder if I should pick it up now, and figure out more of why I hated it so?