Nerd meme

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19342815.post-46785924965770691142008-05-23T13:24:00.004-04:002008-05-23T13:50:14.974-04:00Nerd memeI swiped this meme from <a href="http://raisingweg.typepad.com/raising_weg/2008/05/unread-books-at-librarything.html">Jody</a>--basically, it's a list of the top 100 books marked "unread" by <a href="http://www.librarything.com/">LibraryThing</a> users. You're supposed to bold ones you've read, underline ones you've read for school, and italicize ones you started but didn't finish. But since I have so much overlap between books I've read for pleasure and ones I read for school (English major with a focus on the 19th century novel, anyone?), I'm going to bold everything I've read, italicize ones I started but didn't finish, and underline ones I'm pretty sure I've read at least part of but can't really remember. Other notes as warranted. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell [sitting on my shelf uncracked] Anna Karenina One Hundred Years of Solitude Crime and Punishment Wuthering Heights Catch-22 The Silmarillion Don Quixote The Odyssey The Brothers Karamazov Ulysses [but did I enjoy it or remember anything about it? NO] War and Peace Madame Bovary A Tale of Two Cities Jane Eyre The Name of the Rose Moby Dick Emma The Iliad Vanity Fair Love in the Time of Cholera The Blind Assassin Pride and Prejudice The Historian: A Novel [sitting on my bookshelf untouched] The Canterbury Tales The Kite Runner [Amazon.com keeps trying to get me to buy this] Great Expectations Life of Pi [another one Amazon recommendations keeps pushing] The Time Traveler's Wife Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Atlas Shrugged Foucault's Pendulum Dracula The Grapes of Wrath Frankenstein A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Mrs. Dalloway Sense and Sensibility Middlemarch Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books The Count of Monte Cristo The Sound and The Fury Memoirs of a Geisha Brave New World Quicksilver American Gods Middlesex The Poisonwood Bible Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West The Picture of Dorian Gray Dune A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man The Satanic Verses Mansfield Park Gulliver's Travels The Three Musketeers The Inferno The Corrections The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay The Fountainhead Tess of the D'Urbervilles Oliver Twist To the Lighthouse A Clockwork Orange Robinson Crusoe Persuasion The Scarlet Letter One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest The Once and Future King Anansi Boys Atonement The God of Small Things [I think I finished this one...] A Short History of Nearly Everything Cryptonomicon Dubliners Oryx and Crake Angela's Ashes Beloved Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed The Hunchback of Notre Dame In Cold Blood Lady Chatterley's Lover A Confederacy of Dunces Les Misérables The Amber Spyglass The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli Watership Down Beowulf: A New Verse Translation The Aeneid A Farewell to Arms Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Treasure Island David Copperfield Sons and Lovers Possession The Book Thief The History of Tom Jones The Road Tender is the Night The War of the Worlds I was surprised at first by how many Jane Austen books were on here, but I guess it makes sense, really, that this list has so much overlap with any list of the Best Books or Most Important Classics or what have you--these are books that people think they ought to read, or at least to own. And so the more people there are who love a book, the more people there are who pick it up because everyone else loved it, even if they might not love it themselves. I was also surprised by how few books I marked unfinished--or, well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given that until fairly recently I had a complex about leaving books unfinished and would FORCE myself to slog through books I hated just to finish. I guess I thought it was a test of character or something. I'm a much happier reader now that I've realized life is too short to waste on books you don't enjoy. By the way, should I read The Kite Runner or Life of Pi as Amazon keeps trying to convince me to do? At this point I am almost resistant to doing so because of being told so many times how great they are.electricladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13336802326230963572noreply@blogger.com