Booksbooksbooks

(I got some more free ones, by the way. Oh yes. In fact just today I picked up free audiobooks of Johnny and the Bomb and a few others (Beloved will like those)... and much more excitingly, last week I got the shiny new edition of the Dark is Rising. Yay free books! But I was forced to turnik down the chance to go to not one, but two Leicester Square premieres this week. One of which was Stardust. Gnnnnah.)

Right, em, so what I meant to say was: this is apparently a Librarything list of the most common unread books. Which is a distinctly iffy premise; I'm sure there are squillyuns of unreadable books that remain, thankfully, obscure. But I can't resist posting it because unlike the other such memes I've seen - 100 best scifi novels and the like; you will note that you've never seen such a list on this blog, and now you know why - in this list, I think there'll be a fair bit of bold type.

Bold = read, italics = started but not finished, strikethrough = couldn't stand.

# Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
# Anna Karenina
# Crime and punishment
# Catch-22
# One hundred years of solitude
# Wuthering Heights
# 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 [currently sort of halfheartedly reading]
# The brothers Karamazov
# Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
# War and peace
# Vanity fair [unless you mean the magazine...?]
# The time traveler’s wife
# The Iliad
# Emma
# The Blind Assassin
# The kite runner
# Mrs. Dalloway
# Great expectations
# American gods : a novel
# 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 [bits of, English class]
# 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 : a novel
# The once and future king [don't ask me why I didn't finish it, I really don't know]
# The grapes of wrath
# The poisonwood Bible : a novel
# 1984
# Angels & demons [and PROUD]
# 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’Urbervilles
# Oliver Twist
# Gulliver’s travels
# Les misérables
# The corrections
# The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel
# 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 [but it's on my shelf, awaiting its turn]
# Neverwhere
# A confederacy of dunces
# A short history of nearly everything
# Dubliners
# The unbearable lightness of being
# Beloved : a novel
# Slaughterhouse-five
# The scarlet letter
# Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
# The mists of Avalon
# Oryx and Crake : a novel
# Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
# Cloud atlas : a novel
# 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…
# Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into …
# The Aeneid
# Watership Down
# Gravity’s rainbow
# In cold blood [but I don't remember it At All]
# White teeth
# Treasure Island
# David Copperfield
# The three musketeers
# Cold mountain
# Robinson Crusoe
# The bell jar
# The secret life of bees
# Beowulf : a new verse translation
# The plague
# The Master and Margarita
# Atonement
# The handmaid’s tale
# Lady Chatterley’s lover
# Underworld
# Little Women
# A brief history of time : from the big bang to black holes
# Stardust
# Jude the obscure
# The chronicles of Narnia
# Possession : a romance
# Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal
# Never let me go
# The trial
# Kafka on the shore
# Bleak House
# Sons and lovers
# Alias Grace
# The Arabian nights [um, the kids version or the Victorian translation or, like, which one?]
# Baudolino
# Confessions
# The great Gatsby
# To kill a mockingbird
# Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass [I think we all knew that one...]
# The alchemist
# Candide, or, Optimism
# Snow falling on cedars
# Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story
# Midnight’s children
# White Oleander
# A passage to India
# The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and …
# The house of the seven gables
# The lovely bones : a novel
# Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
# The amber spyglass
# The histories
# Swann’s way
# The shadow of the wind
# Fahrenheit 451
# Good omens
# Running with scissors : a memoir
# Everything is illuminated : a novel
# The divine comedy
# Paradise lost
# The English patient
# Uncle Tom’s cabin
# The Origin of Species