Book meme and book review
Oct. 3rd, 2007 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragojustineThe Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins
The Ancestor’s Tale combines a unique and catching premise with mini-lessons in everything from carbon dating to ribosome function. Dawkins is an absolutely incredible popularizer of Evolution and biological science. He can write accessibly and engagingly about complex subjects and make you think even about things you understand pretty well in radically new ways. It sure is a pity that Dawkins seems to feel that this qualifies him to say a damn thing about religion or politics, isn’t it?
So I've seen this "unread books" meme floating around everywhere, most recently from
musesfool, and it's just the sort of listy booky thing I love. These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. (I've also underlined those I really really want to read but haven't got around to yet.) The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who tagged the book unread.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (104) - I tend to put on my Silmarillion audio book whenever I need to be soothed and relaxed. This might make me weird.
Life of Pi: a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91) – An Armageddon allegory masquerading as a historical fiction novel pretending to be a murder mystery overlaying a semiotics treatise. Dude!
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83) - no duh.
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80) – This is the only school book I was ever assigned that I just read the Cliff’s notes for. Because, seriously. Was a whinier and more pathetic protagonist ever invented?
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79) - I have Issues with Jared Diamond, but he has done a wonderful job as a popularizer of the field.
War and peace (78)
Vanity Fair (74)
The time traveler's wife (73) – Everybody is talking about this now, and I REALLY want to read it.
The Iliad (73) – No Duh part 2.
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) – just… kill me now, okay?
Reading Lolita in
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66) - somewhere along the line, Neil Stephenson became so famous that his editors started being afraid to bitchslap him properly. His novels are the worse for it.
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63) - The number of times I have started this is embarrassing.
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61) – I desperately, someday, want to be smart enough to read this book. It’s like my bookshelf equivalent of the skinny pants in the closet.
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) – Best King Arthur novel ever.
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56) - See, I was stranded in this airport bookstore… I put it down after five pages and read Danielle Steel instead.
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55) - so much love for this.
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) - My love for Faulkner knows no bounds.
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people's history of the
Cryptonomicon (50) - Neil Stephenson’s last novel that was any good. And man, was it fun.
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50) - The Dubliners conclusively proves that Joyce was a genius. As opposed to all the other stuff, which just proves that he was obscure. I’m working up to it, I promise.
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) - Oh look, pretentious-feminist fake-wiccan pseudo-history! Yes, yes, I have very fond memories of it anyway.
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) – no duh part 3
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44) - this is next to Foucalt’s Pendulum in the “I really want to be smart enough to read this” section.
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)
Themes: I hate the Brontes and am very light on Austen, Dickens, and the Russians. This is by choice, dammit. Life is too short to read War and Peace. My Sci-Fi cred is pretty impeccable. Go me.