Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
The Library Thing Meme
Yeah, thanks, Darla, thanks a BUNCH. Does anyone really read these list-meme posts? I mean, what could possibly be interesting about this. And how did this post end up in a different font? And what are the numbers in parentheses?
The instructions: “These are the top 106 books most often marked as ‘unread’ by LibraryThing’s users. The rules: bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, strike through what you couldn’t stand and underline those you have no intention of reading.”
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and Punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117) Oy. The same joke, on and on and on . . .
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)
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 (74)
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)
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) Boring. Nuff said.
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (59)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
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)
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) I liked it when I read it. In retrospect, the man whines nonstop.
The God of Small Things (51)
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50) Parts I liked. Parts I couldn’t stand.
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50) Yeah, I ought to give this one a second chance.
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)
Great. Now I feel unwashed, unread, and uneducated. Well, I felt unwashed before I started this, but you get the idea.
Consider all the plain text ones to be underlined. Will I ever read any of these? Maybe, maybe not, but life is short, and I can think of lots of books I would read before I would ever get to those.
I won’t tag anyone. If you decide to play, let me know, and I’ll give you some linky lurve. How’s that? Anyone else hard up for a blog idea on a chilly Monday eve?
Here’s that lurve . . .
D.
Okay, I’ll do it… But, what are the numbers in parentheses for?
Geez, that was quick with the link lurve!
Wouldn’t it be nice to slip in the names and books of our friends? I mean this is just a big advertisement after all. *cough* I’m just saying. It’s what friends do?
LOL–geez, you’re easy, Doug. You could’ve just said no. 😉 The numbers, I presume, are the number of people marking the book as “unread” on Library Thing.
I did the meme yesterday. I felt very poorly read. And like I started a lot of books and left them unfinished.
It may be an advertisement, but it’s not working. I’m NOT buying any more books. And not even guilt and public shame (you mean you’ve never read X?) is going to make me try to get all the way through Crime and Punishment. Not not not.
JMC –
I haven’t read most of these, but Crime and Punishment is a damn fine book.