Unread books meme

It’s sometimes good to see you aren’t alone in the number of books in your house that you just haven’t gotten around to yet. This meme started this week as is based on the top 100 (105 counting ties) books carrying an “unread” tag by LibraryThing users who use such a tag. The list is as of October 8.

I’m not surprised by the number of so-called “classics” on the list. In fact, I would have anticipated more given the number of people who buy books just because they’re considered classics. I am also somewhat surprised that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time isn’t on the list.

Everybody does it different but in my iteration I’ve put in bold the books I’ve read, italicized those falling in the “one of these days” category and underlined those books I started and didn’t finish for whatever reason. I’ve also placed an asterisk by a couple works by Dickens because I know I read one or more in high school but just don’t recall which.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Hobbit
8. Life of Pi
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. A Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler’s Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assassin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations*
29. American Gods: A Novel
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
37. The Canterbury Tales
38. The Historian
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault’s Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible
53. 1984
54. Angels & Demons
55. The Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist*
64. Gulliver’s Travels
65. Les Misérables
66. The Corrections
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela’s Ashes
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People’s History of the United States
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved
82. Slaughterhouse-five
83. The Scarlet Letter
84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake
87. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity’s Rainbow
101. In Cold Blood
102. White Teeth
103. Treasure Island
104. David Copperfield*
105. The Three Musketeers

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Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity.

A. Edward Newton