Books Again

[liadnan]

Via Oursin, Legionseagle, and Nhw, one of they "things what I have read" posts. Curious one, in that it's the 106 books currently most tagged as unread on Librarything. I'm a bit sceptical about this, as it reflects the reading experience only of "librarything users who tag things as unread and (presumably) read, to the extent of that part of their libraries they have both entered and tagged". I suspect that adds up to a fairly small sample, possibly of people with similar reading habits, but that's just a guess. (My occasional fits of enthusiasm (plus a Cuecat) have resulted in about 1/8 of my books, chosen fairly randomly as they came off the unorganised bookshelves, being entered (same name as this account if anyone cares) and about ten books in total being tagged at all...)... Bold is read, italic is started but unfinished, struckthrough is couldn't stand and underlined is no intention of reading. I rarely fail to finish books, even if I loathe them, Lord alone knows why...

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)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84) (I read lots of Joyce at A-level: Ulysses wasn't on the syllabus of course but I caught the bug)
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)
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) (so far as I can remember I've only read an abridged version)
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) (not finished Purgatorio or Paradiso though)
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)
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)

ETA: Oops, just realised I misread Angels and Demons as Angels and Insects Wondered why people were being so harsh about an A.S. Byatt novel I quite like...

Comments

[coughingbear]

Hell is much more interesting.

[liadnan]

Than Dan Brown...?

I did actually take the whole of the Divine Comedy on holiday once, but felt I had served my bread and butter reading dues after Inferno...

[coughingbear]

Definitely than Dan Brown (I initially thought of AS Byatt when I saw Angels and Demons too, and had to look it up), though I was thinking of Dante.

[booklectica]

I've read about 70 of them:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91) (only abridged version though)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler’s wife
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73) (own but haven't read yet)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
American gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66) (own but haven't read yet)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66) (own but haven't read yet)
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)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
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)
1984(57)
The inferno (56) (read at college, I think)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver’s travels (53)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time(52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The god of small things (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49) (started, didn't get on with it)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
Watership Down (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)

Most of the rest are on my 'things I will read at some point' list.

Some of the above are some of my favourite books. I wonder why people aren't reading them.