Book Meme lizarded from strange_selkie

[debka_notion]

Book Meme on a Friday
Can I say I am baffled at the number of Neil Gaiman titles on this list that have never been read, and are intended to make their owners look smart? He's such a great storyteller, but I'd never think of him as edifying.

These are the top 106 books (why 106??) most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users (not that I'm precisely sure what LibraryThing is, but I get the general idea). 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 (I don't recommend reading this one after taking Sudafed.)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary (summer reading, but I think I chose it by raiding my mother's bookshelf)
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
Zatoichi
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Quicksilver Exposition
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World (first on my own, then for class)
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange (summer reading, but chosen from a list I think)
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 ( really do want to finish it)
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 (only the kid's version)
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (I'm in the process of reading it, in chunks, because it's finals, now)
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States
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 (People buy this to look impressive?  I mean, I loved it and read it repetitively in elementary school, as with several books in this list, but I don't know that it's impressive...  Maybe it's more significant than I thought as a feminist retelling of a classic story?)
Oryx and Crake
Collapse
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye (And oh Lord, did I hate Holden by the end)
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

Comments

[wilperegrine.livejournal.com]

....Not to mention this list also contains everything ever written by Jane Austen.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

Gaiman is enough of a current fad that it seems like his books might feature in an unusually high percentage of gifts to generally bookish people who don't actually like his work all that much.

[carnilius.livejournal.com]

Wow, I'm impressed with how many of those I've started and meant to finish but haven't.

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

Outside of academic books particular to my field, like The Tale of Genji for example, or something by Donald Keene or Seidensticker, I can't imagine buying anything to look impressive. I buy the books I want to read, or which I think will be valuable in my academic efforts, and if they look impressive on my shelf, it's a pleasant side effect.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

I think it may not be so much books sitting on the shelf to make the person look smart as books that came highly recommended, and people therefore bought but never got around to reading. Certainly that's true of a number of books for me, some of which are even on that list (War and Peace and The Catcher in the Rye spring to mind). I think the problem is that in that situation, it's common to know that one ought to read something, but not to know why one ought to read it, other than it being famous, so one is much less likely to actually pick it up when selecting something to read.

If I'm showing off books, I only show off the ones that I actually read and liked (though occasionally things that I haven't read yet get put on the display bookcase (i.e., the one that's in the living room) because they're by an author that I like, and it seems silly to split up the author).

[gimmelgirl.livejournal.com]

I had a crush on Holden Caufield by the end of the book. ;o)

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

I only wish I had that positive a response. I loved the beginning of the book, was ok with the middle, and by the end, was just so fed up with the whole thing I was grateful when it ended- and that's very unlike me. Dunno- I wanted to like it, really I did.

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

I disliked the book, and hated the character, from beginning to end.

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

"The Aeneid
Watership Down"

Isn't Watership Down based on the Aeneid?

(I loved the Aeneid. I read all 10,797 lines of in Latin when I was seventeen.)

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

Catch-22 (I don't recommend reading this one after taking Sudafed.)

When I saw this, I thought the author of the post was limnrix (http://limnrix.livejournal.com). (I read LJs through my friendspage.) I'm not sure what it means, but it sounds more like the kind of thing that she would say than you.