Going with the current…

[elanor_x]

Love book memes and this one seemed quite interesting. These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of 30 September 2007).

1. Bold what you have read
2. Italicise what you started but couldn't finish
3. Strike through what you couldn't stand
4. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once
4. Underline those on your to-read list

Read many books in my childhood (now Internet takes quite a lot from book reading time), so after finding lj, I was surprised that I didn't hear about so many famous English authors as Austen, Orwell, etc. I am really glad about doing this meme, for with its help I've discovered a couple of great books, which are in my library and I can't wait to read them. (The books are Dubliners and Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Anna Karenina*

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wuthering Heights

The Silmarillion

Life of Pi: a novel

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: the Fates of Human Societies [a 1997 book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at UCLA]

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 by Jeffrey Eugenides

Quicksilver

Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian: a novel by Elizabeth Kostova

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 by T.H. White

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible: a novel

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 by Virginia Woolf

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 [a collection of 15 short stories] by James Joyce

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved

Slaughterhouse-five

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss

The Mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake : a novel

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion by Neal Stephenson

[The Baroque Cycle: 1. Quicksilver, Vol. I of the Baroque Cycle 2. The Confusion 3. The System of the World]

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

The Aeneid

Watership Down

Gravity's Rainbow

The Hobbit

In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences by Truman Capote

White Teeth

Treasure Island

David Copperfield

The Three Musketeers*

Can't believe "The Three Musketeers" and "Treasure Island" are among the top 106 books most often marked as "unread". I thought practically every child, who read, read them.

My school English teacher, a very interesting & intelligent person, recommended "One Hundred Years of Solitude", so I think this book is certainly worth reading. (Didn't take it from the library myself, but it doesn't show anything.)

"Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books" was quite interesting. I enjoyed how she put some analysis of the books in it and even copied the passage, in which she answers the question of one of her students "Why did Lolita or Madame Bovary fill us with so much joy? Was there something wrong with these novels, or with us? - were Flaubert and Nabokov unfeeling brutes?" into my notebook.

"Angela's Ashes : a memoir" - Read 3 of McCourt's memoirs [all of them for now] and bought the first two on a discount. His language is humorous, introspective and, not the least, very honest with himself & the readers. His life had been pretty hard, but the books didn't make me depressed due to his style, the ability to see the comedy sides of life, etc. My favorite was the last one "Teacher Man", in which he describes his experiences teaching for 30 years as at public high school in New York City. In short, give it a try!

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I always feel a bit sad for 3 Musketeers, because it seems like it was something that used to be read by kids but now sort of falls through the cracks because kids are reading YA stuff and then they move on to adult stuff and don't read it. I loved all 3 of them! (I mean all 3 of the books--loved all 4 of the Musketeers, though my favorite was probably Aramis.)

[elanor-x.livejournal.com]

May be I am mistaken, but I've got the impression that almost all YA stuff, kids are reading nowadays, is not good literature. It is associated in my head with books like Forever by Judy Blume, not with Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer [is it YA?], Anne of Green Gables and its sequels (are they for YA or children? The latter books feature her as a wife and a mother, after all. She even has a sort of a marital conflict with Gilbert in the last one), Little Women, etc.

Admittedly, I haven't read many YA books in English. In my childhood in Ukraine I remember reading fairy-tales, Dumas, Conan Doyle, adventures by foreign and Soviet/Russian authors, books for adults, some books for YA of Russian writers, etc. When I came to Israel in the library in YA English section I saw mainly books like those of Blume and they were much worse than those YA books I remember reading in Russian. The best one was The Wave. They were simply boring for me.

I don't want to sound snobbish! Probably I was just much luckier in finding good YA books in Russian. Besides, most books for all ages aren't very good.

Re: 3 Musketeers falling through the cracks.
I think some books like 3 Musketeers and its sequels are good for reading at any age. Isn't 20 Years Later dealing with political situation in France? (I dislike it for that, even though Mordaunt improves the situation :) ). But I am the same person, who read Anna Karenina in Ukraine, and in Israel with great pleasure discovered Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and The Secret Garen, so... May be other people won't enjoy it after a certain age.

For what age was 3 Musketeers intended? Didn't Dumas write it for adults?

What do you think in general about YA stuff? Are the classics in the first paragraph YA or for children? Am I misguided?

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I think the whole YA thing is kind of complicated. As a kid I really skipped it all--I had little interest in teenaged stuff like Forever. But now a lot of things that are really just classics are classified as YA, I guess just because kids read them. So while 3 Musketeers was for adults, it's the type of book a kid might get assigned in school so it gets put in YA. I remember working at the kids' bookstore and sort of laughing at that--you get stuff like Jane Eyre or Animal Farm in YA when it's really for adults, just because if a teenager was looking for books those would be appropriate.

I always think of real YA books to be specifically written for young people. Not that all those books are bad; there are some good ones. I just never had much interest in the subject matter that usually made it up--teen problems etc. I found them boring too, but that winds up being what I think of when I think of YA. Though that's not to throw out the whole genre--YA fantasy seems to be having interesting stuff written for it now. (At least I assume mistful's trilogy that she just sold will be interesting, for instance.)

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

Reading Lolita in Tehran is my favourite book.