Wednesday, May 21, 2008

An "Unread Book" meme snitched from Earthbound Spirit

The bolded titles are books I have read. As I clicked my way down the list and thought about how some of these books changed or didn't change my thinking, I realized that it depends on what kind of openness we have to new ideas at the time we read the book.

I was fortunate to do much of my youthful reading in a very open environment (college) where I had been given permission to think about things I wasn't supposed to think about in my conservative, though loving, home. I was hungry for new perspectives and my reading gave me the opportunity to consider new ideas without feeling guilty that I would betray my parents.

I am surprised by the combination of books on this list. I'll have to go to the site where it came from and see if I can find out why these books appear on the list. I didn't mark any book I wasn't sure about, so I may have missed some. If I didn't remember it, it probably didn't do much to change my thinking, I guess!


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
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
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
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
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
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
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
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

UPDATE: This meme came from LibraryThing and is a list of books most often clicked as "unread". Okay.

6 comments:

Stephanie said...

I keep intending to read all of them. :) Especially Freakonomics.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the tip on this interesting meme. For my embarrassing results see my blog.

Mile High Pixie said...

I loved Freakonomics, Ms. T, and if you just sit and read it, you can do it in about 8-12 hours.

And Watership Down is my all-time favorite book. Favoritest ever.

Lilylou said...

I've heard interesting things about Freakonomics too, so I may have to give it a read.

And I loved Watership Down!

Miss Kitty said...

Funny how you and I have read quite a few of the same books! :-) Have you read Willa Cather's _My Antonia_ or _O Pioneers!_, by chance? Can't remember seeing them on your list. Incredible novels.

Lilylou said...

For sure, My Antonia, and I think O Pioneers. I went through quite a pioneer woman phase at one point and read others as well, though I hated Old Jules.