Have you read those books, or are you just trying to appear smart?
Jan Adams did this on her blog, I had to take part. Maybe you would like to do so, too?
Below is a list of 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing users. They sit on their shelf, perhaps to make their owner feel smart or well-rounded.
The meme comes with these instructions: Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. And I’ve added one more level: I’ve **starred the ones I highly recommend.
This confirms what I’ve suspected about the books below, so ubiquitous on home shelves. I always silently judge people, thinking, I’ll bet you’ve never read that.
Now you can silently judge me! For example, I’ve never read 1984. I know, shocker.
Not reading 1984 is unforgivable! The rest of you, prepare to be positively assaulted by italics, since I start many a book and then just drift away…
I’ve truncated the list so it doesn’t look as long and obnoxious. The full one’s available at the top link.
This IS rather embarrassing. I need to finish a goddamn book more often. There are plenty on my shelf that I haven’t even started yet. I’m looking at you, Rabelais.
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
The Iliad
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
The Once and Future King
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
Dubliners
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Lolita
The Catcher in the Rye
The Aeneid
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
Treasure Island
