As if there were any doubt…106 Books of Pretension
So, I was reading Otrops blog and he has a bit on there about the “106 books of pretension,” compiled from the books most frequently marked unread by Library Thing users. He closes by tagging all readers to identify books they have read; books they have started and not finished; and those owned but unread.
Here are my stats: For the love of…I know it would be bad but…
I have read 68 (and really enjoyed most) and started and not finished 3 (I have read 3/4 of Don Quixote about ten times but never made it to the end).
And my list:
- Books I have read are in bold
- Books started and unfinished are in italics
And here’s the list:
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
- Anna Karenina
- Crime and Punishment (2 times)
- Catch-22
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Wuthering Heights
- The Silmarillion
- Life of Pi – This overrated and frankly silly book was part of the reason I gave up reading fiction for several years. Maybe if I had finished it…
- The Name of the Rose
- Don Quixote (This is the book I cannot finish. I have read it a dozen times but never gotten through it.)
- Moby Dick (2 times)
- Ulysses (at least 3 times)
- Madame Bovary
- The Odyssey
- Pride and Prejudice
- Jane Eyre
- The Tale of Two Cities
- The Brothers Karamazov (4 times – I reread whenever I need to be reminded of great lit…oh, how pretentious)
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
- War and Peace
- Vanity Fair
- The Time Traveler’s Wife
- The Iliad
- Emma
- The Blind Assassin
- The Kite Runner – read it but think it overrated and sentimental
- 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
- 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 – read by accident; forgot books on a trip and this was in apartment we were staying in; surprisingly good
- Anansi Boys
- The Once and Future King
- The Grapes of Wrath (at least 4 times)
- The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
- 1984 (3 times)
- Angels & Demons
- The Inferno (in 3 different translations) – Please withhold comments until the end of the list
- The Satanic Verses – Perhaps the only Rushdie I have never read
- 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
- Les Misérables
- 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 – Good God, Otrops!! Waste no more time and 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
- Northanger Abbey (3 times – love it – hilarious)
- 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
So, consider yourself tagged as well. And ‘fess up to your reading pretension.
29 April 08 at 8:24 am
I’m afraid that Life of Pi really wouldn’t have been any better if you had finished it, but I’ll take your advice (and Duck’s) and read A Confederacy of Dunces.
27 May 08 at 12:32 am
Hey…you gave my Life of Pi as a gift one year! What’s up with that???