firecat: damiel from wings of desire tasting blood on his fingers. text "i has a flavor!" (Default)
[personal profile] firecat
Lately seen in [livejournal.com profile] rivka's journal:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place.

[livejournal.com profile] firecat adds: There's a difference between "books I liked" and "books I would recommend." I mostly only "recommend" books to people "who like that sort of book." There are very few I recommend across the board; I'm not big on canons. I'll use * for "liked" and # for "recommend"

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell *
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment (Blech)
Catch-22 (Blech)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights (Blech)
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote *
Moby Dick *# (LOVE LOVE LOVE. Note that I 'read' it on tape with a superb narrator.)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey *
Pride and Prejudice *
Jane Eyre * (This is one of my favorite books of all time.)
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 (Don't remember if I liked it.)
American Gods *
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha (I liked it up until the very end. But really it's kind of gross.)
Middlesex *
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (only part was assigned)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man *
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World *
The Fountainhead (Ew)
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 * (Loved)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist (Don't remember if I liked or not)
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 *# (I really love this, just re-read it. Every time I get more and more annoyed at the sexism, but it's still worth reading.)
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 *############# (LOVE)
Dubliners *
The Unbearable Lightness of Being * (I really loved this when I read it. I disliked the movie. I doubt I would like it on re-reading it, so I'm just holding on to my memories. It has some great quotes.)
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five (I loved it as a teenager; it really really didn't stand up to being re-read—too sexist.)
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon * (I read it at just the right time, when I was first getting into paganism/women's spirituality, and loved it.)
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion * (LOVE)
Northanger Abbey (It's OK but not one of Austen's best.)
The Catcher in the Rye (Blech)
On the Road (It has its moments.)
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 (Somehow I've managed to avoid this all these years, not necessarily intentionally.)
The Aeneid * (I read portions in Latin. Whee! I am really looking forward to reading Le Guin's Lavinia which is based on Aeneas's wife.)
Watership Down (I've managed to avoid this unintentionally, too.)
Gravity’s Rainbow (I read all but the last 100 pages or so.)
The Hobbit *
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island (My dad read it to me. Don't remember it well enough to recommend or not.)
David Copperfield *
The Three Musketeers

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firecat: damiel from wings of desire tasting blood on his fingers. text "i has a flavor!" (Default)
firecat (attention machine in need of calibration)

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