Book Meme on a Friday [The Stars and the Cookie Jar]

Can I say I am baffled at the number of Neil Gaiman titles on this list that have never been read, and are intended to make their owners look smart? He's such a great storyteller, but I'd never think of him as edifying.

These are 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."

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
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
Zatoichi
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Quicksilver Exposition
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales (or, chunks of)
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
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
Collapse
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

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I think I read too much.

Don't worry; it's impossible.

[link] [reply]

I gotta say, "they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded" is a big judgment call on the part of whoever wrote the survey. Steve and I own tons of books one or the other or neither of us have read, some a result of library merging, some books we bought with the full intention of eventually reading them, and we just haven't gotten there yet. We don't have books that we keep around just to look smart, and I would venture most librarything users aren't the sorts to do that, either.

Just my two cents.

I also could not finish Zen and the art... or Gravity's Rainbow.

Er, people? The Silmarillion just makes you look like a huge geek. Also, probaby owning everything Isaac Aasimov ever wrote. And the Aasimov would be the books we own that I haven't read. Otherwise, we've moved so much I don't have any books I haven't read at least thrice (except textbooks). And my mom borrowed a bunch and hasn't returned them.

(I own Brave New World and Cien Anos de Soledad in 2 languages. That probably goes for the trying to look smart, but eh. Sometimes you're in Costa Rica and bored.)

I don't think of Neil Gaiman as edifying either; I think of him as sort of showing off. You can see through his plots before you're a third of the way into them, and the clever/funny bits kind of have this overlay of "This is me being clever/funny" about them.

re: list-- My score is roughly equivalent to yours in number, but with quite a lot of variation in choices. I'm surprised you haven't read "Confederacy of Dunces"-- I do like it in spite of myself.

I thought it was just the list of the top unread books on Library Thing? Not the top unread books that are there to make you look smart?

I don't know anyone who would have a Neil Gaiman book on their shelf to look smart, either. Cool, maybe, but not smart.

'"they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded" is a big judgment call on the part of whoever wrote the survey. '

Ah, I see, now. I didn't actually see it on Library Thing- just saw the meme going around and never saw anyone else mention about the books being there to make you look smart. I agree that whoever made that judgment is wrong. I get certain books because I like an author- so it being there unread usually means that I'm saving it.

As for the 'classics' that sit there unread- those aren't there to make me look smart, either. Those are there because academics and well-read people who loved them make me feel guilty and stupid for not loving them, too. If they are there and I haven't read them, it's because I thought they sucked and/or were a huge chore to read and I have since twigged onto the fact that reading should be enjoyable and not a chore. If it's a chore, it's either just not to your taste, or the author didn't do his or her job.

The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Book Meme on a Friday

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February