Most unread, redux.
Two years ago around this time we visited ‘The top 200 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.’ (I’ve personally added “strikethrough the ones you’ll never ever read in a million years.” via scrivenings)
What’s interesting is the *kinds* of books that fall in each list, and what they say about what you like to read vs. what you don’t like to read, or what you thought you should read but didn’t have the stamina to endure.
I have since finished a number of titles that were unread last time, including Gravity’s Rainbow, The Once and Future King, Dubliners and Brave New world. The numbers indicated the number of Librarything users who have tagged that title ‘unread.’
If you would, please recommend to me one book from the list of titles I *haven’t* read, the one book I should read first if I were so inclined.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (263)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (240)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (213) (Multiple times…)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (212)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (186)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (179)
The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien (177)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (172)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (170)
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (155)
The Odyssey by Homer (153)
Ulysses by James Joyce (151)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (150)
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (150)
The Iliad by Homer (148)
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (145)
Life of Pi by Yann Martel (144)
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville (144)
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (140)
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (139)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (139)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (138)
Dracula by Bram Stoker (137)
Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (135)
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (134)
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (134)
Emma by Jane Austen (133)
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (129)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (124)
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (124)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (121)
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (120)
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (120)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (119)
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (119)
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco (118)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (118)
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (118)
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (116)
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (115)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (114)
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (114)
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (113)
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (112)
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (112)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (110)
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (110)
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (109)
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (109)
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (109)
Inferno by Dante Alighieri (108)
Dune by Frank Herbert (108)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (108)
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson (107)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (105)
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (105)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (104)
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire (104)
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (103)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (103)
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (102)
Dubliners by James Joyce (101)
Persuasion by Jane Austen (101)
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (101)
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare (100)
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (100)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (100)
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (100)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (99)
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (98)
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (98)
The Once and Future King by T. H. White (98)
On the Road by Jack Kerouac (98)
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (98)
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (97)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (97)
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (96)
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (95)
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (94)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully… by Thomas Hardy (94)
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt (93)
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (92)
Watership Down by Richard Adams (92)
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (92)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence (92)
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (91)
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (91)
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (91)
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (91)
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder (91)
Collapse by Jared Diamond (91)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (91)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (91)
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (90)
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (90)
The Aeneid by Virgil (89)
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (89)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (88)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (88)
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (87)
Tender is the Night: A Romance by F. Scott Fitzgerald (86)
The Plague by Albert Camus (86)
Possession by A. S. Byatt (86)
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (85)
Angels & Demons by Dan Brown (85)
Underworld by Don DeLillo (85)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (85)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (85)
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (85)
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (84)
The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien (84)
The Confusion by Neal Stephenson (83)
Uncle Tom’s cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (83)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (83)
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (83)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (83)
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (83)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (83)
The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien (82)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (82)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (82)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (82)
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (81)
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (81)
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (81)
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (81)
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (81)
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (81)
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (80)
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (80)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (80)
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (80)
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt (79)
The Trial by Franz Kafka (79)
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (79)
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott (79)
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (79)
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (79)
White Teeth by Zadie Smith (78)
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes… by Neil Gaiman (78)
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (78)
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (78)
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 by James Fenimore Cooper (77)
The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien (77)
East of Eden by John Steinbeck (77)
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (77)
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (77)
Candide by Voltaire (76)
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (76)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (75)
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (75)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (75)
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (75)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (75)
Bleak House by Charles Dickens (75)
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (74)
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (74)
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (74)
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (74)
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (73)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss (73)
Baudolino by Umberto Eco (73)
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (73)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (73)
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (73)
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (73)
The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again by J. R. R. Tolkien (72)
Neuromancer by William Gibson (72)
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (72)
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (72)
The System of the World by Neal Stephenson (72)
The Republic by Plato (72)
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (71)
Silas Marner by George Eliot (71)
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (71)
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs (71)
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (71)
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (71)
The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan (70)
Eragon by Christopher Paolini (70)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (70)
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (70)
Running With Scissors: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs (70)
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (70)
A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin (69)
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster (69)
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (69)
The Hours by Michael Cunningham (69)
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (69)
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (68)
Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire (68)
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (68)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (68)
The Art of War by Sun Tzu (68)
Eldest by Christopher Paolini (68)
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (67)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (67)
Empire Falls by Richard Russo (67)
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First… by Thomas L. Friedman (67)
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (67)
Oh, man, I only get to recommend one? Damn.
I know I was just talking to you about Moby Dick, which is a novel I would not recommend to everyone to read, but I suspect it would resonate with you. It’s really quite a novel. But that’s not the one I pick.
I loved loved loved The English Patient by Michale Ondaatje when I first read it about 15 years ago–found it deeply poetic and beautiful and profound. The movie doesn’t come close to touching the novel, if you’ve seen it. I read it in one marathon session and as soon as I had finished, I turned back to the beginning and read it through again more slowly. But that’s not the one I recommend either, only because I went back it not long ago and for some reason, maybe just my mental state at the time, I just couldn’t find the same excitement about the book and I quit reading it.
So the one book I’ll recommend from your list is Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I’ve only read it once and I think I’ll need to read it at least another time through before I have anything terribly profound to say about it, but it’s really an impressive novel. It reminds me a bit of 100 Years of Solitude, but I enjoyed it more.
Scrivener. June 3rd. 2010. 6:02 am.
Since I read Moby Dick 2 years ago, I pretty much haven’t been able to stop thinking about it (and ships and whales). I sort of feel like every book I’ve read since then has been a concession to not re-reading Moby Dick.
There are lots of others one there I read and enjoyed, but none that won’t be just as good whenever you get around to them. Connecticut Yankee is a lot of fun, though.
Ian. June 9th. 2010. 9:23 am.