Thursday, October 16, 2008

A Meme for Me on My 30th Birthday

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list (I don't know how to underline, so I am going to put two dashes before the titles on my to-read list).

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
Don Quixote
--Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
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
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
--Middlesex (but only because I had to return it to the library)
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
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
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, and Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northhanger Abbey
The Catcher In the Rye*
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence: 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 (wasn't on to-read list until I read this list... sounds like my kinda thing)
White Teeth (I have this one. I don't know what to do with that information.)
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Thank goodness for lots of literature classes in school, or this list would be a lot sadder. The funny thing is that there are so many books NOT on this list that I am proud of having read... I'm sad not to see some of them on there. I don't know what this LibraryThing thing is, but I guess a lot of the books that I'm proud to have read, others are proud to have read, and that's why they aren't on this list. Hmmm...

(I haven't even heard of some of these books. Is that bad?)

So. Today I am 30. Haven't I been 30 for a while? Seems like it. I feel good today, and I feel good about being 30, and I feel comfortable being the birthday girl. Celebrate me, and I shall happily join you. Most years I feel a bit self-conscious about my birthday. Not today. Let's party!

Here's my best present this year (so far):

The photo's not much to look at, but we saw so many precious little things. Topping the list: The bottom of the baby's feet. Heaven. Wish we had a picture of THAT!!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I saw the list on NaiveHelga's blog first, so I responded there. And I think there are some strange things on the list too while many wonderful things are missing. The quandry is: do I read or knit? Sigh.

Happy Birthday!

Andrew said...

I ... am a bad friend ... in that I did not contact you today to wish you a happy birthday. I shall make it up to you. Oh yes. I shall.

Happy Birthday!!

That wasn't me making it up to you. For the record.

As for the reading list, I'm going to make this easy and simply list the ones I have read:

The Canterbury Tales
Frankenstein (wonderful book)
1984

Now on to the ones I did not read, but did see the movie based on the book:

Pride and Prejudice
Memoirs of a Geisha
The Count of Monte Cristo
Sense and Sensibility
Dune
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Treasure Island
Watership Down
The Hobbit
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Hopefully that counts.

Anne-Marie said...

Happy Birthday!!

Aww look at the baby!!!

Free Range Chick said...

I hope that your birthday was a ton of fun, you know, after the never ending day at work. Have fun at your party tomorrow!!

Erin said...

I tried to comment on Amanda's blog, but it erased all my formatting so I gave up. I DID, however, have the same thought - is it sad that I've never even heard of some of these??

Happy belated birthday! My grandmother would have turned 80 that day, so I'm glad to know somebody is still celebrating it.