I could probably use a "books" icon, couldn't I?

[roadrunnertwice]

Of course I'm not going to resist the book meme. (Taken from w4lf. I'm sure someone somewhere has a clean version of this without my comments.)

These are the top 200 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise 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.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
• Anna Karenina (132)
• Crime and punishment (121)
• Catch-22 (117)
• One hundred years of solitude (115)
• Wuthering Heights (110)
• 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) (--mind you, this was in high school, and as a freshman at that. I reckon that it would peg in at "amiable dislike" nowadays, rather than its previous "seething hatred" position.)
• 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 : a novel (68)
• A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67) (SORRY POLLY, HONEST)
• Atlas shrugged (67)
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
• Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
• Middlesex (66)
• Quicksilver (66) (this is the Neal Stephenson book, right?)
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West … (65) (It's on my list.)
• 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 : a novel (58) (What's with the Neil Gaiman stuff being so prominent, anyways?)
• 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) (He absolutely lost me with all the Bollywood stuff, and he sprung it on me when I still didn't have any good reason to keep hanging on through it. Totally not worth the fatwa.)
• 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 : a novel (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 : a novel (49)
• Slaughterhouse-five (49)
• The scarlet letter (48)
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu… (48) [Pu?]
• The mists of Avalon (47)
• Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
• Cloud atlas : a novel (47)
• The confusion (46)
• Lolita (46)
• Persuasion (46) (Only because I absolutely had to. I owe Austen another chance, but god damn did I hate this book.)
• Northanger abbey (46)
• The catcher in the rye (46)
• On the road (46) (The rule on this one is that I can only read it on trains when leaving a town for months at a stretch.)
• The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of… (45)
• Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into … (45)
• The Aeneid (45)
• Watership Down (44) (My god, how could you not finish this one?)
• Gravity's rainbow (44)
• In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its … (44)
• White teeth (44)
• Treasure Island (44)
• David Copperfield (44)
• The three musketeers (44)
• Cold mountain (43)
• Robinson Crusoe (43)
• The bell jar (43)
• The secret life of bees (43)
• Beowulf : a new verse translation (43)
• The plague (43)
• The Master and Margarita (43)
• Atonement : a novel (42)
• The handmaid's tale (42)
• Lady Chatterley's lover (41)
• Underworld (41)
• Little Women (41)
• A brief history of time : from the big bang to black holes (41)
• Stardust (41) (AGAIN with the Gaiman.)
• Jude the obscure (41) (Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn't have. But I'm glad I did. Devastatingly depressing, but too real to brush away.)
• The chronicles of Narnia (40) (Don't think I ever got around to finishing them. Perhaps I never will; see the upcoming didread post.)
• Possession : a romance (40)
• Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal (40) (I think I read a chapter of it in a bookstore; does that count?)
• Never let me go (40)
• The trial (40)
• Kafka on the shore (40)
• Bleak House (40)
• Sons and lovers (40)
• Alias Grace (39)
• The Arabian nights (39)
• Baudolino (39)
• Confessions (39)
• The great Gatsby (39)
• To kill a mockingbird (39)
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Gla… (39)
• The alchemist (39)
• Candide, or, Optimism (39)
• Snow falling on cedars (39)
• Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story (39)
• Midnight's children (39)
• White Oleander (39)
• A passage to India (39)
• The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and … (39)
• The house of the seven gables (39)
• The lovely bones : a novel (38)
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (38) (Why in the hell would THAT be the point where you gave up on the series?)
• The amber spyglass (38)
• The histories (38)
• Swann's way (38)
• The shadow of the wind (38)
• Fahrenheit 451 (38)
• Good omens (38) (AGAIN!)
• Running with scissors : a memoir (38)
• Everything is illuminated : a novel (38)
• The divine comedy (38)
• Paradise lost (38)
• The English patient (38)
• Uncle Tom's cabin (38)
• The Origin of Species (37)
• The plot against America (37)
• The history of Tom Jones, a foundling (37)
• Silas Marner (37) (I actually quite liked it, and I've been told that her other stuff is even better.)
• The hours (37)
• Prodigal summer : a novel (37)
• The bonesetter's daughter (37)
• Doctor Zhivago (37)
• The shipping mews (36)
• The phantom of the Opera (36)
• The portrait of a lady (36)
• Blink : the power of thinking without thinking (36)
• Heart of darkness (36)
• The Robber Bride (36)
• The last of the Mohicans (36)
• The age of innocence (36)
• The system of the world (35)
• Tropic of cancer (35)
• The mayor of Casterbridge (35)
• The Gormenghast novels (35)
• The gunslinger (35)
• The golden compass (35) (Haha... I find it telling that book 3 is higher up on the list.)
• The Republic of Plato (35)
• The remains of the day (35)
• Cat's eye (35)
• Eragon (35)
• A game of thrones (35)
• Sophie's world : a novel about the history of philosophy (34) (Not actually a very good book, but the educational payload kept me on board. Hey, I was 13.)
• The island of the day before (34)
• The good earth (34)
• A prayer for Owen Meany : a novel (34)
• The devil in the white city : murder, magic, and madness at … (34)
• A farewell to arms (34)
• East of Eden (34)
• The book thief (34)
• Animal farm : a fairy story (34)

Comments

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

I am a little stunned that you've never read the Alice books. I guess they're not really canon, are they?

[froborr.livejournal.com]

I was rather startled by that myself.

[roadrunnertwice]

I haven't read a lot of stuff. The thing with Alice, though, is that it's become so ingrained into the culture that you can absorb 80% of it through passive osmosis.

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I always loved it for the specific turns of phrase the stories contained. Nonsense vocabulary builders.

This list made me feel shameful and unread (I'll post mine later), and I promptly added the Illiad and Odessy to my reader.

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

Odyssey. Man, another point for terrible spelling.

[roadrunnertwice]

I do expect I'll love 'em when I finally get around to it... it's just that there's a lot of other stuff ahead of 'em in the queue. Also, I feel extremely unread, too. Mostly what I learned here is that I am apparently stubborn enough to power through those damn Neal Stephenson cinderblocks when everyone else was sane enough to stop. (They were decent, mind... just not necessarily worth all THAT.)

Dylan is going to forcibly insist that you read the Fagles translation, and I will back her up on it.

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

Blast and damn, I grabbed the Alexander Pope ones. I have a faint fondness for him and his ogreishness, his affinity for Gothic gardens.

If you can point me to .pdb versions of Fagles, that would be grand.

[roadrunnertwice]

This looks like it? It might be cheaper to try and find a used copy at Powell's, though. Or you could borrow one.

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

I've been Project Gutenberg-ing it up lately, I forgot you had to pay for these things. Hmm.

[roadrunnertwice]

Yeah, his translation is regrettably still in copyright.

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

Bastard.

Why is the Fagles translation preferred?

[roadrunnertwice]

Mostly just because it's a joy to read -- I can't really speak to anything regarding accuracy, but it feels right.

I think Dylan's had more contact with different versions than me, but I'm looking at the Pope one right now, and the rhymes are really distracting.

Compare--Pope:

"When lo! the mighty Theban I behold,
To guide his steps he bore a staff of gold;
Awful he trod; majestic was his look!
And from his holy lips these accents broke:

"'Why, mortal, wanderest thou from cheerful day,
To tread the downward, melancholy way?
What angry gods to these dark regions led
Thee, yet alive, companion of the deed?
But sheathe thy poniard, while my tongue relates
Heaven's steadfast purpose, and thy future fates.'

...and Fagles:

At last he came. The shade of the famous Theban prophet,
holding a golden scepter, knew me at once and hailed me:
'Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, master of exploits,
man of pain, what now, what brings you here,
forsaking the light of day
to see this joyless kingdom of the dead?
Stand back from the trench—put up your sharp sword
so I can drink the blood and tell you all the truth.'

It's still very poetic, but I find it much more readable qua story.

[b-zedan.livejournal.com]

Man, I wonder if that's why I didn't finish them (it was either that, or library fines). Give me rhymless any day. I'll have to buy them and lug them about.

[benabik.livejournal.com]

(I originally left this as a comment on froborr's post, but he apparently just copied some of your comments by accident. So here ya go, slightly edited.)

Quicksilveris the Stephenson one, yes. It's part of one of his trilogies... I haven't read it because the one book stories are so long, I don't want to pick up a trilogy by him. I'd guess that the same applies to people on LibraryThing.

I think Neil Gaiman is on here a lot because people tend to talk about him a lot. So other pick up the books or get them as gifts. But he's a bit of a weird one, so I can see people not starting it.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. The title is a bad joke. A panda walks into a restaurant and eats some food. When he's done he pulls out a gun, shoots several people, and starts to walk out. When someone just says "Why?", he pulls out a book that says that pandas "eats, shoots and leaves".