’Twas Brillig*

The library thing blog mentions this meme:

The meme of unread books

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 (that is, last time that the algorithm was done - when I checked, I found most of them had a few more added to the total).

Later versions of the meme use an asterisk to indicate books read multiple times and underline books you want to read.

• 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) - I used to joke about Ulysees with a guy from work, since we’d both bought copies and neither one of us had been able to finish it
• 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) - I absolutely hate this book, although I’ve read it twice, I revisited it a few years ago to see if my opinion had changed.
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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) - This is perhaps my favourite book ever although it was borrowed a year or so back and not yet returned.
• The Aeneid (45)
• Watership Down (44)
• Gravity’s rainbow (44)
• 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)

It’s very nice to see a publisher subverting copyright law, particularly when it is a book I’d like to read.

A very strange thing has occurred - Ruth persuaded me to read the Da Vinci Code which as it goes was an okay read, but honestly I don’t get the fuss. The result is I’m actually reading books again so hopefully the pile will start to shrink now, anyhow first up is Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (author’s preferred text edition) and it is an absolute joy to read.

I’m currently watching a BBC4 documentary on John Wyndham and I’m getting the urge to read some of his books again. I read all[1] his books in my mid teens and haven’t read any since. I once did a book review of The Chrysalids for school and the teacher, after I had read my review out to the class, told me that the part where one of the characters reveals her extra toe to the protagonist was not important to the plot; I wanted to kill.

[1] except the Kraken Awakes for some reason.

The What Should I Read Next? site seems like a good idea, but it needs some works on the execution. In particular it needs a way to remove recommendations. Currently I seem to be stuck with the following

And I know I have absolutely no interest in reading several of the listed books.