books you should read

These are the top 106 (106? Why the hell 106?) books often noted as unread by Library Thing users.

Key: ( Read | given up | unreadable )

The classifications are entirely personal.

Classic

• Dracula
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• The Hobbit
• Treasure Island
• Watership Down
• 1984
• Atlas shrugged
• David Copperfield
• Emma
• Great Expectations
• Jane Eyre
• Lolita
• Mansfield Park
• Middlemarch
• Oliver Twist
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Vanity Fair
• Wuthering Heights
• A Tale of Two Cities (When I was 12)
• Frankenstein (Does Spike Milligan’s count?)
• Pride and Prejudice (And yet I still passed the exam)
• The Three Musketeers

Avoidance Fantasy

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Angels & Demons
• The Confusion (When I finish Quicksliver)
• Quicksilver (I own this, I will finish it one day)
• The Time Traveler’s Wife (I put it down, and never really picked it up again)

Endurance

• The Silmarillion
• Crime and Punishment
• Don Quixote
• Les Misérables
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Moby Dick
• The Canterbury tales (I should read this)
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Iliad
• The Inferno
• The Odyssey
• The Once and Future king
• Ulysses
• War and Peace

Peppermint

• American Gods (I do not believe people stop reading this)
• Anansi Boys
• Catch-22
• Cryptonomicon (Many, Many times)
• Neverwhere (This also)
• The picture of Dorian Gray
• Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values
• The name of the Rose (Currently reading)

Spearmint

• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Life of Pi : a novel
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• The Prince
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (Cannot read until I finish The Novel)

Wintergreen

• Dune
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (She annoys me)
• A Clockwork Orange
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Brave New World
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• The Catcher in the Rye
• The Satanic Verses
• White Teeth
• The Blind Assassin (I own this, I will finish it one day)

Beyond

• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
• Anna Karenina
• Beloved
• Cloud Atlas
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Dubliners
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• Madame Bovary
• Middlesex
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Northanger abbey
• On the Road
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Persuasion
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• The Aeneid
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Brothers Karamazov
• The Corrections
• The Fountainhead
• The God of Small Things
• The Historian : a novel
• The Kite Runner
• The Mists of Avalon
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• The Scarlet Letter
• The Sound and the Fury
• To the Lighthouse

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