What better way to start blogging again than with a list? From Hedgehog Librarian, via Jennie Law, a Library Thing books meme. This list shows what a quitter I am when it comes to the really huge classics, and my lack of knowledge of Dickens novels. The annotation is below, from hedgehog Librarian’s original post- one quibble with that is that with lots of the books I didn’t finish it wasn’t so much that I “couldn’t”, more that I could no longer be bothered or just started reading something else. If anyone else fancies doing this, leave a comment below so we can compare notes!
“Below are the top 106 books tagged “unread” in LibraryThing.
The rules:
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your To Be Read list.”
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
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’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
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
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
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’Urbevilles
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
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
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Library etc. 
May 15, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Interesting list.
May 15, 2008 at 5:28 pm
[…] via Neil A very American internet list of books; the top 106 books tagged “unread” in library thing Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your To Be Read list […]
May 16, 2008 at 1:03 pm
It’s also missing the category: “Books I haven’t the slightest interest in ever reading, regardless of how ‘important’ they are”.
Which for me is all the girly-girly ones! 🙂
May 16, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Yeah a fair few of those I was all **shrugs shoulders**!
May 16, 2008 at 11:55 pm
[…] did a book list and I couldn’t […]
May 20, 2011 at 4:10 pm
[…] and I especially love lists of books. Point me toward any list of books you can think of–the books most often marked unread on LibraryThing, recommended reading lists for the college bound, even dubious face book memes–and I will […]