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:

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment (2 times)
   
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. 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…
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote (This is the book I cannot finish. I have read it a dozen times but never gotten through it.)
11. Moby Dick (2 times)
    
12. Ulysses (at least 3 times)
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov (4 times – I reread whenever I need to be reminded of great lit…oh, how pretentious)
    
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
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 – read it but think it overrated and sentimental
    
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
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 : a novel
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 – read by accident; forgot books on a trip and this was in apartment we were staying in; surprisingly good
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath (at least 4 times)
52. The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
53. 1984 (3 times)
54. Angels & Demons
55. The Inferno (in 3 different translations) – Please withhold comments until the end of the list
56. The Satanic Verses – Perhaps the only Rushdie I have never read
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 : a memoir
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces – Good God, Otrops!! Waste no more time and read it!
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 : a novel
87. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey (3 times – love it – hilarious)
    
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity’s Rainbow
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
103. White Teeth
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers

So, consider yourself tagged as well. And ‘fess up to your reading pretension.