Most Attempted, Least Read

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Jaq has a post on a meme that originated with LibraryThing. They had folks mark the books that they owned and meant to read but hadn’t gotten around to yet. Here’s the top list. Following Jaq’s lead, I’ve marked those I’ve read, those I’ve read for school, those I’ve started but not finished, and those I own and really expect to read some day. I found his typographical conventions a pain to read, so I’m going to use my own. Titles I’ve never read and don’t own will be printed as is. Those I’ve read all the way through will be bolded. And I’ll added annotations–in English–for everything else. Jaq also marked the ones he never expects to read; I decided to accentuate the positive and not do that. Here they are.

  • Anna Karenina
  • Crime and Punishment
  • Catch-22
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • Wuthering Heights
  • The Silmarillion. More than once.
  • Life of Pi: a novel
  • The Name of the Rose. More than once.
  • Don Quixote. Started a couple of times, but that was
    many, many years ago. Ought to try again.
  • Moby Dick. Started. Liked it until they got on board
    the Pequod.
  • Ulysses
  • Madame Bovary
  • The Odyssey. I’ve read parts of this; I’m not sure I’ve
    ever read the whole thing.
  • Pride and Prejudice. A personal favorite.
  • Jane Eyre
  • A Tale of Two Cities
  • The Brothers Karamazov
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human
    societies    . This one was interesting.
  • War and Peace
  • Vanity Fair
  • The Time Traveler’s Wife
  • The Iliad. I’ve read portions of this, in several
    translations, but I’ve never it made the whole way.
  • Emma
  • The Blind Assassin. ???
  • The Kite Runner. ???
  • Mrs. Dalloway. ???
  • Great Expectations. High school.
  • American Gods
  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. ???
  • Atlas Shrugged. Multiple times; I was in High
    School. I think some of her diagnosis is right, but her
    prescription is not.
  • 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    . Not badly written, and an amusing conceit, but on
    reflection I think it’s subverting something that didn’t need to be subverted.
  • The Canterbury Tales. Portions.
  • The Historian: a novel. ???
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  • Love in the Time of Cholera
  • Brave New World. OK, I’ve read this; no need to
    read it again.
  • The Fountainhead
  • Foucault’s Pendulum. Multiple times.
  • Middlemarch
  • Frankenstein
  • The Count of Monte Cristo. Multiple times.
  • Dracula
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • Anansi Boys
  • The Once and Future King. Multiple times, but not
    in over ten years.
  • The Grapes of Wrath. High school. Probably
    should try it again.
  • The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
  • 1984. Multiple times, including for school.
  • Angels & Demons. Not likely.
  • The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise). Read
    the Inferno for school; haven’t read the others.
  • The Satanic Verses
  • Sense and Sensibility. A favorite.
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray. Started.
  • Mansfield Park. Wanted to like it; didn’t, much.
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Multiple times.
  • To the Lighthouse. ???
  • Tess of the D’Urbervilles
  • Oliver Twist
  • Gulliver’s Travels. Started, never finished.
  • Les Misérables. Neat book.
  • The Corrections. ???
  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
  • Dune. Multiple times. Have never been able to
    get through the sequel.
  • 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. Sticks in my mind, but
    I’ve no real desire to re-read it.
  • 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. Another favorite. The retired
    captain reminds of Jack Aubrey.
  • Northanger Abbey.
  • The Catcher in the Rye. I am so not a boomer.
  • On the Road. Ditto.
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame
  • Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
    College class, originally, but I re-read it a number of times.
    Probably won’t ever again.
  • The Aeneid. College.
  • Watership Down. A favorite.
  • Gravity’s Rainbow
  • The Hobbit. A favorite
  • In Cold Blood
  • White Teeth. ???
  • Treasure Island. Read it aloud to the boys last
    year; was the first time.
  • David Copperfield
  • The Three Musketeers. Multiple times; fun book.

2 thoughts on “Most Attempted, Least Read”

  1. May I assume that “??” means you’ve never heard of it? “Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed” was written by the same author as “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” a Mr. Diamond if I remember correctly. I finished reading it a few months ago. Much food for thought; I highly recommend it. The chapters on the Vikings in Greenland was a real eye opener, as was the section on Rhwanda. The only flaw was that the author towed the party line on Global Warming. Michael Crichton completely scewers it in his book “State of Fear”.

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  2. If you ever listen to books on tape I suggest you try Confederacy of Dunces. You have said you didn’t think you would be interested in it again but listening to it is a pleasure the second time around.

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