"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. (How the heck can you make a list like that? Line up all the phony intellectual douchebags and ask?) Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. I'm putting a star next to the ones I actually own."
I am NOT underlining the ones I read for school, because there are no books on this list that I read for school that I am not incredibly glad I did so, and I love them, and they occupy a space in my life much like sex. Except for Ayn Rand, having to read her in school was like having to go to chemistry class. Stoned. See, I went to a really beautiful school, with great big windows in all the classrooms, and especially the science labs. So if I had chemistry class after after break, then I'd be sitting in there, and it would be beautiful outside, and my teacher would start talking. And you'd think it would be crazy fun to listen to chemistry stuff, but then he would start talking about his coco cola collection or something like that, something else I didn't care about. Reading you, Ayn Rand, is like being stuck in a classroom with all the lacrosse field spread outside like groundhogs heaven, and the shadow of clouds moving across it, and the sunny leaves of old trees waving in the distance...and somebody forcing you to listen to their story of collecting the really mini coke cans that they don't make in the U.S.
On the other hand, reading Watership Down is like being given a really cool bike over and over and over again.
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 (I hate you Ayn Rand, I hate you like I hate people who laugh at the commercials where the polar bear is stuck on the ice all alone)
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 (I hate you Ayn Rand, I hate you like I hate when my cat knocks over her litter box, you knock over my litter box Ayn Rand)
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
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
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Monday, May 5, 2008
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