blahg, blahg, blahg…

A friend tried to explain the concept of memes to me the other day. My reply was “Meme… I’m not sure I get it. Well, maybe I do, but then in the doing, I don’t.” Ah, but when did not understanding the purpose of something ever stop one from engaging in it anyway?

I came across a meme related to one of my favorite web toys, LibraryThing, and decided I’d play along (at least to some degree, because I’m not into the “tag, you’re it!” bit of the game). So the rules are that from the list of books tagged by LibraryThing users as “unread”, those bolded represent books I’ve read, italicized books are ones I’ve started but not (or never) finished, those with a strikethrough are ones I read but hated, an *asterisk means I’ve read it more than once, and a #dollar sign means it’s on my shelf and also unread. The meme began as Top 106 unread books on LibraryThing. While there are more than 106 on the list now, I’ll stick with this number. Here goes:

Most often tagged unread

1. The ultimate hitchhiker’s guide by Douglas Adams
2. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
3. The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5. Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
6. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
10. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
11. Ulysses by James Joyce
12. War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
13. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
14. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15. Catch-22: A Novel by Joseph Heller
16. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
17. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
18. Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson
19. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
20. The Satanic verses by Salman Rushdie
21. Middlemarch by George Eliot
22. #Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
23. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
24. The Kor’an by Anonymous
25. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
26. The Odyssey by Homer
27. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
28. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
29. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
30. The Historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
31. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
32. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
33. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding
34. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
35. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
36. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
37. The Iliad by Homer
38. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
39. Emma by Jane Austen
40. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
41. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
42. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
43. The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
44. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
45. Dracula by Bram Stoker
46. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
47. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
48. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
49. The Once and Future King by T. H. White
50. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
51. To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
52. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
53. Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood
54. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
55. Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
56. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
57. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
58. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
59. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
60. Underworld by Don DeLillo
61. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
62. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
63. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
64. The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
65. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
66. #Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
67. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
68. Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
69. A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
70. #A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
71. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
72. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
73. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
74. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
75. Swann’s way by Marcel Proust
76. The Poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
77. #The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon
78. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
79. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
80. Silas Marner by George Eliot
81. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
82. The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
83. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
84. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
85. The Confusion by Neal Stephenson
86. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
87. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
88. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
89. The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
90. The Elegant Universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene
91. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
92. The known world by Edward P. Jones
93. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
94. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
95. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
96. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
97. Dubliners by James Joyce
98. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
99. The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan
100. Infinite Jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace
101. #Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
102. Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison
103. Persuasion by Jane Austen
104. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
105. The Personal History of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
106. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Well, it seems my “unread” list is a bit different from my fellow LibraryThingers. I’ve got plenty of my own books that fall into this category, but by comparison they’re different. The majority of these books listed are ones I don’t own and haven’t read (though that hardly means I don’t know of them. I am a literate librarian, after all.) More to add, I guess. So many books…

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 7:40 PM and is filed under daily muse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.