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posted by [personal profile] laramie at 10:06am on 11/10/2007
These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today_Dave's posting). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize 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. (Tag #'s kept intact from BaronDave's LJ post.)

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)
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)
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)
The Aeneid (45) (Parts in the original Latin)
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)
There are 11 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 
posted by [identity profile] castleclear.livejournal.com at 07:31pm on 11/10/2007
One way in which this list might be more fun (or useful) might be by noting books we read that we liked; for instance, I read MOBY DICK (*yawn*) only because it was required reading in High School; ditto, for PRIDE & PREJUDICE, but I happen to love the latter and have reread it many times, along with everything else by Jane Austin that I could find.

JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL I'd never heard of before this list, but after having Googled it, it looks at least moderately interesting. Is it?
 
posted by [identity profile] skylarker.livejournal.com at 07:44pm on 11/10/2007
I loved "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" and highly recommend it. Especially the author's sensibility about magic. It helped me through a period when my lower back went out on me and I was stuck in bed and under a lot of stress.
 
posted by [identity profile] castleclear.livejournal.com at 08:39pm on 11/10/2007
Thanks! I'll add it to my TO READ list--and then hope I get around to it soon. :-)
 
posted by [identity profile] mjlayman.livejournal.com at 09:32pm on 11/10/2007
I couldn't read it. It felt like Little, Big which I also couldn't read. I'm a lot better at SF than fantasy.
 
posted by [identity profile] castleclear.livejournal.com at 09:48pm on 14/10/2007
Hmm, I never read Little/Big; however, I did read Little Big Man (since I loved the movie--and of course the book was even better), but think I'm safe in assuming that Little/Big and Little Big Man are two completely unrelated novels.

I read a lot of fantasy and enjoyed it quite as much as science fiction when I was younger (teens-20's). I still enjoy a good fantasy novel from time to time, but like everything I read now, including S-F, it has to be REALLY GOOD. Of late, however, I'm not sure where the "good" S-F has gotten to. Most of it now seems to be fantasy dressed up as S-F. S-F I really liked from the 90's includes Michael Swanwick's VACUUM FLOWERS, and I still love Isaac Asimov's short stories, and will likely always have a nostalgic place in my heart for Robert Heinlein's Juvenal SF novels.
 
posted by [identity profile] mjlayman.livejournal.com at 09:59pm on 14/10/2007
Yes, definitely unrelated. A lot of people really like Little, Big -- it has a non-magical person marrying into a family with magical things. But I like things to happen and this is almost all description.

There are a lot of SF authors I like, but the one I read immediately when I get a new book is Jack McDevitt.
 
posted by [identity profile] castleclear.livejournal.com at 10:46pm on 14/10/2007
Thanks, I'll look for his work.

Additionally, I still enjoy the occasional, brilliantly written children's fantasy novel, such as Edgar Eager's HALF MAGIC.
 
posted by [identity profile] mjlayman.livejournal.com at 11:09pm on 14/10/2007
I just finished that set, let's see... my review (http://mjlayman.livejournal.com/118848.html) and many comments.

I like a lot of good kid's fantasy -- Diane Wynne Jones, Diane Duane, Terry Pratchett, etc. I was reading the Eager, though, because I only read kids books for a couple years when I was a kid, and now people talk about them.
 
posted by [identity profile] castleclear.livejournal.com at 09:52pm on 25/10/2007
Marylee, I enjoyed reading your review. HALF MAGIC was the only Edgar Eager story I read and it definitely sounds like one of the better ones. Like many of your friends commenting on your review, I also read a large number of the traditional children's books, such as Ivanhoe, Horatio Hornblower (yawn), etc. My first S-F book was in grade school in 4th or 5th grade (circa 1970); I've wished for years that I could remember the title of it, because I remember it being pretty good. In Junior High I came across Sylvia Louise Engdahl's ENCHANTRESS FROM THE STARS, Isaac Asimov (both novels and short stories), and other "real" science fiction.
 
posted by [identity profile] skylarker.livejournal.com at 11:08pm on 14/10/2007
For Really Good SF I'd recommend Charles Stross. Accelerando and Glass House for starters.
 
posted by [identity profile] castleclear.livejournal.com at 09:43pm on 25/10/2007
Thanks! I'll look for this too. :-)

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