melting noise

Have you read those books or are you just trying to appear smart?

greatwhiteshark:

missbrightside:jeralyndwile: noraleah:

Below is a list of 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing users. They sit on their shelf, perhaps to make their owner feel smart or well-rounded.

The meme comes with these instructions: Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. And I’ve added one more level: I’ve **starred the ones I highly recommend.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
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 Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
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
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 : A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons **
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
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 Corrections
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: A Novel **
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: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Every time I fill out one of these booklists, I realize how much more I still have left to read on my gigantic “Books to Read Before I Die” list. (I’m not kidding, I totally geeked it out and made a word doc list that grows longer each month.) My goal this summer is to read at least three books a month, but Atlas Shrugged is still kicking my ass. I’d quit out of sheer boredom except that I’m about 600+ pages in already and it’s too painful to give up now, considering how much of it I’ve slogged through. Ayn Rand’s philosophy is mildly interesting, but storywise, it’s a snoozefest. Way too dense.

Looking at this list, though, I’m glad I’ve gotten the opportunity to be exposed to a variety of books thanks to English courses. My English classes in both my sophomore and senior year of high school were probably the most memorable, both in terms of awesome teachers and an incredible course list. Senior year in particular, I’m grateful for, because that’s how I discovered Madame Bovary and my oh-so-clichéd English major love for Pride and Prejudice.

In more recent memory, my Writing London class last fall with Chiara Briganti was, in retrospect, brilliant (at the time, I pretty much detested the class—more or less because of the hell that was Dickens’ Bleak House that we started off with). I’ve tried to wade through Mrs. Dalloway before and to no success, but it was through Chiara’s class that I actually started appreciating Virginia Woolf’s style, and the book is now one of my favorites.

… okay, geeky English major moment is over. :)