The Top 106 Books Most Often Marked As “Unread” By LibraryThing’s Users.
Strikethrough for books I’ve read before.
Italics for books I’ve read before but haven’t finished.
Copy and paste on your blog to see how “pretentious” you are.
And, remember, it’s all in good fun.
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
- Anna Karenina
- Crime and Punishment
- Catch-22
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Wuthering Heights
- The Silmarillion
- Life of Pi : a novel
- The Aeneid
- The Name of the Rose
- Don Quixote
- Moby Dick
- Ulysses
- Madame Bovary
- The Odyssey
- Pride and Prejudice
- Jane Eyre
- The 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 : a memoir in books
- Memoirs of a Geisha
- Middlesex
- Quicksilver
- Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
- The Canterbury Tales
- The Historian : a novel
- 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 : a novel
- 1984
- Angels & Demons (I will never read this. EVER. Dan Brown is a turd.)
- 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 : 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
- Dubliners
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- Beloved
- Slaughterhouse-five
- The Scarlet Letter
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves
- The Mists of Avalon
- Oryx and Crake : a novel
- 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 : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values (Isn’t this required reading for any pensive high-school student?)
- Watership Down
- Gravity’s Rainbow
- The Hobbit
- In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
- White Teeth (One of my favorite books ever. I guess I am pretentious. Haha.)
- Treasure Island
- David Copperfield
- The Three Musketeers
Hmm… Well, the meme doesn’t really say how you’re supposed to calculate your pretentiousness based on the list. Bah. A lot of these books aren’t even on my LibraryThing, so I don’t really feel pretentious as much as I do underread. :-/
8 Comments
Apr 29, 2008 | Tuesday at 5:42 pm
I decided to try this and realized that I am not very well read at all. Here is my list:
http://beastmomma.squarespace.com/from-shelf-to-hand/2008/4/30/pretentious-scale.html
Apr 29, 2008 | Tuesday at 8:58 pm
I tried this too and I also like the two of you have work to do to be pretentious and well-read.
Here’s my list: http://justareadingfool.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/how-pretentious-are-youu
Apr 29, 2008 | Tuesday at 8:59 pm
oops, late, linked wrong:
http://justareadingfool.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/how-pretentious-are-you/
Apr 30, 2008 | Wednesday at 9:01 am
I’ve wandered over from the Weekly Geek and I really like this meme. Maybe I should do this to prove (disprove) my pretentiousness
Looking forward to your thoughts on The Book of Lost Things as well as She’s Come Undone. I’ve read the latter eons ago I can’t remember exactly how I felt about it. I loved the former to bits.
Apr 30, 2008 | Wednesday at 9:57 am
Hello, all.
I’m only 38% pretentious, I think. (I’m bad at math, sorry.) It says a lot about me that I actually expected to score higher. How sad is that? Haha.
May 03, 2008 | Saturday at 7:14 pm
[...] 3, 2008 at 7:02 pm (“Real life”, Books) (Credit for the idea to unfinished and The Ax for the Frozen Sea, but I don’t know where this thing started. Ride the wave, do not question the [...]
May 09, 2008 | Friday at 9:40 am
I thought this was really cute, so I put it on my blog as well. http://ramblingsbytammy.blogspot.com/2008/05/how-pretentious-are-you.html
Love your blog!
May 10, 2008 | Saturday at 8:16 am
Wow, and you’ve read quite a few of them. I’m very impressed. I’ve thought about reading most of them, but just never have gotten to them. So are they worth it?