hammerquill's Journal

Read and unread books
From cedarseed, from librarything. I'm a sucker for these things:

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, italicize the ones you read for school, underline the ones you started but didn't finish (or are on the shelf waiting for a free week).

I have read a lot of these by getting them unabridged (I never listen to abridgements) on tape or CD from the library. It works well as a means of getting to those books no one gets around to reading.

But to be fair, I've added *s where I have only listened to audiobook versions. I've also added x2 for things I've read twice, xN for things I've read many times; *xN means listened to numerous times. If I've read it on paper and listened to it, it's just noted as read, unless I mention something like Moby Dick x3 *xN.

If it's bold and italic, then I've read it for school and outside of school.

Read only for school, never since:
Treasure Island
Great Expectations

Read on paper:
The Name of the Rose x2
Guns, Germs, and Steel
The Iliad x3
The Odyssey x3
The Blind Assassin
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Hobbit xN
Frankenstein
Dracula x3
1984 xN
Inferno
Life of Pi : a novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Catch-22 x3 *xN
Moby Dick x3 *xN
Gulliver’s Travels
Watership Down x3
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Dune x3 + *xN
The Prince x3 in school, once since
Slaughterhouse-five x2+ *x2

Own the book, but have 'read' only in audiobook form:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell *
Crime and Punishment *xN
The Silmarillion *
Don Quixote *
Pride and Prejudice *x2
Jane Eyre *x3
A Tale of Two Cities *
The Brothers Karamazov *
War and Peace *
Mrs. Dalloway *
American Gods *
Atlas Shrugged *
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man *
Middlemarch *
The Grapes of Wrath *
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel *
To the Lighthouse *
The Sound and the Fury *xN
The God of Small Things *
A Confederacy of Dunces *
The Unbearable Lightness of Being *
Oryx and Crake *
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed *
Lolita *
Northanger Abbey *
The Catcher in the Rye *
White Teeth *

Have 'read' audiobook only, and do not own a copy of the book:
Wuthering Heights *
Madame Bovary *
David Copperfield *
Emma *
The Kite Runner *
Brave New World *
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books *
Memoirs of a Geisha *
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West *
The Count of Monte Cristo *
A Clockwork Orange *
Anansi Boys *
Sense and Sensibility *
Mansfield Park *
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest *xN (Mark Hammer's reading for Recorded Books is the best audiobook reading, of any book, ever, period.)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles *
Oliver Twist *
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time *
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir *
Dubliners *
Beloved *
The Scarlet Letter *
Anna Karenina *
On the Road *x2
The Hunchback of Notre Dame *
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything *
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences *

Own but have not read, or have not finished:
Les Misérables
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Ulysses * (began listening to the great Donal Donnelly reading this, but couldn't stand his failures with foreign phrases, so stopped early - have also started to read on paper several times)
Vanity Fair
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Quicksilver
The Canterbury Tales (never read them all, but read many for school, some since)
The Once and Future King (I never finish Arthurian epics, for some reason.)
The Mists of Avalon (ditto)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid (read parts in school, in Latin)
The Confusion

Don't own, but intend to own and read:
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Satanic Verses

Don't own:
The Historian : a novel
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Middlesex
Angels & Demons
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Cloud Atlas
Neverwhere
Persuasion

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