I found this list over at The Bitter Scroll, so naturally I wanted to see how many of those most unread books I’ve read. (I’ve read 53 of them, so exactly half) The list is provided by LibraryThing. Books I’ve read are in bold. Not sure how accurate the LibraryThing list is as there’s a lot of recognizable titles and my intuition says that there should be a lot more obscure titles in that list but here goes:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose -C’mon it’s Umberto Eco.
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
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
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
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco again.
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
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
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
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 Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
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
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit - Most unread? Hard to believe.
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
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Word Of The Day- germane: Dictionary.com Word of the Day November 21, 2009germane: appropriate or fitting; relevant.
- germane: Dictionary.com Word of the Day November 21, 2009
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December 28, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Actually I’m not surprised to see that the Hobbit appears on that list.
I read Lord of the Rings many years ago, well before I read The Hobbit and when I did pick up the Hobbit several people warned me that I’d find it heavy-going compared to Lord of the Rings.
I wonder how many people still give their friends that warning.
December 28, 2007 at 3:40 pm
I just found the Hobbit to be for a much younger audience than LOTR. I enjoyed it, but like you, I picked it up after reading the trilogy because I wanted to know more history about Bilbo, Gollum and the ring.
December 30, 2007 at 11:08 pm
You can do without Life of Pi.
But Dune is a must.
December 31, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Heard a lot of good things about Dune Yoav, but I’m not a real big fan of science fiction.
Have a happy New Year!
April 2, 2008 at 10:29 am
thanks for the list. I did this meme before but didn’t tag it, so though it would be easier to just google search it, and yours is the third result.
Yesterday I *just* finished One Flew Over. It took me about two months (it was a bath room book, so I only read 1 or two page per ‘visit’.) and then yesterday I got to a point where I just couldn’t put it down.
My new years goal was to read more. I have two memes as my ‘reading list’ this one and the “top 100 by BBC” list a few years ago.
“On the Road” will probably be my next book and will have been the third time I checked it out. I’m about thee quarter in it when I had to return it last time.
October 17, 2009 at 7:54 pm
THE MOST UNREAD BOOK IS THE MOST BOUGHT BOOK. IT IS THE BIBLE. FOR YEARS, IT SAT ON COFFEE TABLES WORLDWIDE AND RARELY READ. IT HARDLY EVER WAS READ FROM COVER TO COVER. THEREFORE, IT COULD BE CLASSIFIED AS THE MOST BOUGHT BOOK UNREAD FROM START TO FINISH.
THE INTERNET HAS CHANGED THE AMOUNT OF THE BIBLE THAT IS BEING READ TODAY. BIBLE GATEWAY.COM IN THREE MONTHS RECEIVED 25 MILLION HITS FOR SCRIPTURE. MULTIPLY THAT FOR ONE YEAR AND IT IS 100 MILLION HITS–IN A DECADE, ONE BILLION.