I found this meme over at (Un)RelaxedDad’s who found it via Penguin Unearthed. It’s a list of the 106 most unread books on shelves (how this was determined, I don’t know!). The rules are to bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Unfortunately, I didn’t read the rules before I bolded all the ones I’ve read (Yogamum often fails to follow directions) and I’m not going back to underline the ones I’ve read for school, but you can sort of guess — all of the Greek stuff, most of the 19th century British novels, some of the Woolf, Moby Dick, etc.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (just couldn’t get through it)
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 [A] Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair ( I started this one at an inopportune time, just before my dad died but I’d like to finish it)
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway (I went through a HUGE Woolf phase during my jr. year in college and read everything of hers I could get my hands on, including her diaries and letters)
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha (Actually I think I listened to this on audiobook, does that count?)
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (Yes, I have three degrees in English and never finished reading this one!)
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
1984
Angels & Demons
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 (This has been on my shelf for YEARS but maybe one day if I’m completely bedridden with no other books in reach?)
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 (Didn’t everyone read this in the 80’s after the movie came out?)
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita (Possibly my favorite novel of all time and I have inflicted it upon many friends who do not tend to love it as I do)
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
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
You know the sad thing? It isn’t how many books I have or haven’t read, it’s how little I remember about the ones I HAVE read. Can I tell you one character’s name from Northanger Abbey? No. Do I remember the plot of The Sound and the Fury? I do not. Perhaps one day I’ll be a bit less voracious, and slow down and pay attention!
May 17, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I have only actually read about half a dozen of these, I gave up on a couple others. English lit lessons here revolve around Shakespeare!
May 17, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Don’t tell anyone but the Unbearable Lightness of Being movie was the first film supermum and I sat down to watch together. Let’s just say we didn’t know where to look. Didn’t do any harm, though.
May 17, 2008 at 3:02 pm
yogammum could I ask you a favour if you dont think people would mind sending an email round the woyopracmo group about project ashtangini
May 17, 2008 at 6:36 pm
You find the best memes! Interesting to realize that I can’t remember a lot of what I read in school and that I started many but never finished them. Love this meme.
May 18, 2008 at 2:04 am
sadly like you I don’t recall all of the content of the ones I have read either but that at least makes it possible to enjoy them again.
Cheers
Iain
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 [A] Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair ( I started this one at an inopportune time, just before my dad died but I’d like to finish it)
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
1984
Angels & Demons
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 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
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
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
May 18, 2008 at 11:07 am
Ha! I couldn’t finish War and Peace either — the names just confused the heck out of me. But that was in high school so perhaps I’ll try again one day.
Oh, and you were very right about the review for Frey’s new novel.
May 19, 2008 at 2:01 am
That’s very impressive – you’ve read so many of them! The list makes me sigh, however, as it seems to say that lots of people buy classics but never actually get around to reading them. I’d like to see one of these lists that details the top 100 books that people have loved and read several times. Although part of me wonders whether you wouldn’t end up with the same titles over again…
May 19, 2008 at 9:39 am
I ended up posting the books I read, too, though I don’t know if anyone cares to look at it. I’m procrastinating and appreciate seeing which books you’ve read. I love books.
May 19, 2008 at 12:32 pm
thanks for the reading list…i’ll be busy for awhile!
May 19, 2008 at 9:48 pm
No one knows the plot of The Sound and the Fury, so don’t feel badly about that one. (I have a little thing against Faulkner.)
I’m going to steal this meme.