Pretentious books.

[gridlore]

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, 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 (Should be required reading for anyone contemplating military service.)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (Just too much for me.)
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick (Will you kill the whale or die, please?)
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 (I love this book in ways that are disturbing.)
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 (I do want to get to this one at some point.)
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 (Being a conspiracy freak, how could I resist?)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo (Two translations. One tried to remain true to the language, the other to the story. I preffered the latter.)
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 (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
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 (Classic. The sequels fall of in quality in a way summed up by the image of a train plummeting off a cliff.)
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 (A good book, I just stopped caring about 2/3rds of the way through.)
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (As good as G,G,&S)
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye (Despite all claims to the contrary, Holden and I are very different.)
On the Road (I'm a Deadhead! We have to read this, it's in the contract)
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 (Didn't everyone read this when they were ten and dream of being Jim Hawkins?)
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Comments

[meglimir.livejournal.com]

um, whadabout the ones i read for school and actually *liked*?

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

I'd bold those. The "read for school" I see as "I read it under orders, finished it so I could pass the test, but the book didn't really impress me."

[deyo.livejournal.com]

I've read The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) -- lugging those three tomes around was what caused me to start reading books on my Visor, and later on my Treo. :)

[supersniffles.livejournal.com]

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (I love this book in ways that are disturbing.)
This sounds like a book firestrike would love (In ways that are disturbing.)

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Well, it led me to change the way I look at RPG elves (http://gridlore.livejournal.com/716804.html) and Collapse gave me insights to why the dwarfs don't run the world (http://gridlore.livejournal.com/939371.html). It is the tool for world and culture builders.

[valkyrwench.livejournal.com]

I think I must be the only person in the world that's read A Confederacy of Dunces. I actually found it amusing enough to read more than once.

[capplor.livejournal.com]

What if I don't >gasp!< own the book. I usually will read a book for a while, put it down for a while & then pick it up, perhaps as much as a year later. That doesn't work too well with library books.

& you don't have a suggestion for those books which we've read in a language other than English. (I mean if you want to discuss pretentiousness?) But then I don't see Hans Christian Andersen up there anyplace. (Read in the original)

I've read Anna Karenina, the Hobbit & Monte Christo in Esperanto.

[valomar.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, I was wondering if you would expand on your opinion of Dune's sequel/prequels. Personally, I feel that Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune carry along the corrupting element of mass government/emerging messiah storyline quite well.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

The first couple were decent enough, but by God Emperor I felt he was beginning to flog a dead horse.

The ones that really train-wreck are the never-ending books Herbert's son keeps churning out. Terrible.

[biomekanic.livejournal.com]

Many years ago, at a con, I spoke to someone who'd talked to Herbert about the books, he told her that the publisher would only publish a non-Dune book if he delivered a sequel. He intentionally wrote crappy books hoping that they'd just give up on the series and let him move on.