Monday, October 01, 2007

Speaking of spam

Here's some more, specifically, on what this blog is purportedly about: books.

I read most of David Sedaris's Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim over the weekend, which is very good but definitely not my favorite book of his. As a whole, I'm not very interested in stories from or about his childhood. I feel a little squeamish reading dysfunctional accounts of someone else's childhood (the same reason that I've never read any Augusten Burroughs).

And now, a book meme.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and Punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : A Novel (94)
The Name of the Rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (79)
War and Peace (78)
Vanity Fair (74)
The Time Traveler’s Wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (70)
American Gods (68)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
Atlas Shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury Tales (64)
The Historian : A Novel (63)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault’s Pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (59)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (57)
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (54)
To the Lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver’s travels (53)
Les Misérables (53)
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52)
Dune (51)
The Prince (51) [I think that reading parts of it very closely in a political theory class counts, don't you?]
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49) [Not sure if this deserved to be italicized. I mean to finish it one day!]
The Scarlet Letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : A Novel (47)
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46) [Optimistically bolded. I think I'll finish it this semester.]
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity’s Rainbow (44) [There should be a style for books that intimidate the hell out of you. I think that The Satanic Verses would qualify, too.]
The Hobbit (44)
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The Three Musketeers (44)

Man, that was so embarrassing. Not the number of books of I haven't read but the number of them that I've picked up and couldn't bring myself to finish. I'm not so much a devourer of books as a page-nibbler.

3 comments:

G Elliott said...

I did major in reading large Russian books while at Berkeley, so hitting those on this list is no surprise, and I generally don’t read anything new, which knocks out a lot. Some of what I've read I can’t stand now, of course (bold/italics a pain for blogger comments, thus just listed as below)

READ:
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and Punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (79)
War and Peace (78)
Emma (73)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
Atlas Shrugged (67)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Frankenstein (59)
1984 (57)
The Inferno (56)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49)
The Scarlet Letter (48)
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
The Hobbit (44)


STARTED but didn’t finish:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
Middlemarch (61)
To the Lighthouse (54)
Gulliver’s travels (53)
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45) [I think I pass out of this book]
Gravity’s Rainbow (44) [waiting for that free year where I can just get stoned and read stuff]
The Three Musketeers (44)

COULDN’T STAND:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (45)

nicole busse said...

du bist züruck!

TheresaL said...

Where did you get this list? It is really interesting to get back in the groove of reading, if time ever permits. Don't worry. This summer I counted that I bought 14 books... and to my knowledge I finished 1. AHHH all were nonfiction. I can't bring myself to do fiction (What a freak).