Thought for Food

May 21, 2008

Have you read those books or are you just trying to appear smart?

Jan Adams did this on her blog, I had to take part. Maybe you would like to do so, too?

Below is a list of 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing users. They sit on their shelf, perhaps to make their owner feel smart or well-rounded.

The meme comes with these instructions: Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. And I’ve added one more level: I’ve **starred the ones I highly recommend.

This confirms what I’ve suspected about the books below, so ubiquitous on home shelves. I always silently judge people, thinking, I’ll bet you’ve never read that.

Now you can silently judge me! For example, I’ve never read 1984. I know, shocker.

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 (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
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

Funny thing: I have a Masters in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College Dublin and yet I’ve never finished Ulysses or even A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But I’ve written papers on both and gotten top marks. That’s what counts, right? (I still love me some Jimmy Joyce! His wife was named Nora Barnacle which is exactly twice as cool as my name.)

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