05 January 2008

Well read?

Melbourne is having a very hot spell. Today is one of those days that gets lost - it's too hot to even think, let alone use productively. So, while I should be making childcare arrangements for the next two weeks, what I'm doing instead is catching up on some of my favourite blogs, while I drink iced coffee.

I've stumbled upon this list - the top 106 books most often marked as ‘unread’ by LibraryThing’s users. The idea is that you bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn’t/didn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

Given that I've decided that 2008 should be about lots of reading, this makes a pleasant diversion on a day such as this. I've added notes to some of my entries, and given that it's too hot for me to work out how to underline things or strike them through, I've put the books I'm intending to read in blue.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina - started at university, but not finished
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights - with a big strikethrough I'm afraid
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel - a friend told me last week that this is a must read
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary - see Anna Karenina
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice *
Jane Eyre *
A Tale of Two Cities

The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
- Becky makes me cross
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma*
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
- purchased this week
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations*
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
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
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel - couldn't get into it
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility *
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park*

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
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
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mMists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion * - where the name of this blog comes from
Northanger Abbey*
The Catcher in the Rye

On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

The Three Musketeers

Now I've completed this, I should find a cool dark place and read some more of my current book - Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette (which is very good indeed).

1 comment:

Beth said...

Can I recommend both of Gabriel Garcia Marquez novels on this list - Love in the Time of Cholera and 100 Years of Solitude. He is a splendid writer, evoking pictures from words. I admit that I had a false start with each novel, both being such huge tomes, but was rewarded when I eventually immersed myself in them.