106 books of pretension meme

A list of books read entirely or in part by me (hattip: the silverback). A comment to his post puts us on the track of Live Granades on 106 books and gives the source motivation for the list:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.

On to my version of the list…

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell [hmm, never heard of this one. bad on me]
2. Anna Karenina [Definitely started this one but suspect I never finished it]
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22 [First big surprise for me, who in the heck is even a casual reader and hasn’t read this?]
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude [in the translation naturally. similar can be assumed for most of the rest nonEnglish ones]
6. Wuthering Heights [or “Quivering Thighs” in high school English class parlance. I somehow missed ever being assigned this one, good on me]
7. The Silmarillion [a huge clue to the list. the “other” works of an author of a really GoodBook. this reminds me, I have the newest resurrected Tolkien buried on the bookpile at the moment!]
8. Life of Pi : a novel [too much hype, then there was the plagiarism thing. just never got interested]
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote [the only one i have read in the original language, not well mind you. went through the original after reading it in English so that helped]
11. Moby Dick [I’m thinking the only possible way US schooled people haven’t read this is because they skipped the assignment.]
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey [i think i free e-booked this once when trying to decide if that tech was going to work for me on the PDA. it didn’t]
15. Pride and Prejudice [had to have been an assignment. 10th grade?]
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities [definitely opened it but just don’t remember getting really ‘started’]
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
20. War and Peace [oh, big shocker there.]
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler’s Wife [ok, #2 that I don’t recognize]
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assassin
26. The Kite Runner [according to the spouse though the followup is beyond ‘angela’s ashes’ depressing so i’m holding off]
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods [#3 I’m not recalling ever coming across.]
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged [dang. which Rand was it that focused on architecture?]
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books [#4]
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West [really thought I was going to hate it, picked it up on remote vacation and it turned out to be great. I didn’t learn my lesson though because I pick up his other ones in the bookstore and just put them down again because I figure I’ll hate ’em.]
37. The Canterbury tales [This is the one I am most likely to have actually completed but I don’t remember doing so]
38. The Historian : a novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera [the magical realism thing was way too overdone and way too hyped but you might as well get through this and One hundred years…]
41. Brave New world
42. The Fountainhead [UPDATE: thanks to reader comment, figured out which Rand I’ve actually read]
43. Foucault’s Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein [ha, no coincidence these next three come together, that’s the way I read them too]
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
    
47. Dracula
    
48. A Clockwork Orange [movie first for me. as with most, I’d think]
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King [No Arthurian period in your reading history is complete without this, Mists of Avalon (below) and the Mary Stewart ones]
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
53. 1984
    
54. Angels & Demons
55. The Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver’s Travels
65. Les Misérables
66. The Corrections [#5 I think we’re up to]
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay [uh-oh, #6 I’ve never heard of]
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
    
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon [#7]
76. Neverwhere [#8]
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being [the unbelievable overhyping…]
81. Beloved [grim]
82. Slaughterhouse-five [c’mon but Cat’s Cradle has way more memorable stuff in it!]
83. The Scarlet Letter
84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon
    
86. Oryx and Crake : a novel [her best one despite the alex-the-wonder-bird woo]
87. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed [#9]
88. Cloud Atlas [#10]
89. The Confusion [#11, dang, I have to get Googling on these]
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity’s Rainbow [#12]
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
103. White Teeth [#13]
     
104. Treasure Island [what? who hasn’t read treasure island for chrissakes?]
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers [i think this must be my most-attempted never completed read]

well, that was fun for me anyway. probably you’ll have more fun doing your own list than reading mine…

Oh, and don’t worry. Apparently this is a meme without the chain-letter thing. I like this way better.