106 Books of Pretension? April 29, 2008
Posted by Evil Bender in Uncategorized.trackback
Via Stranger Fruit, I learn about an interesting book meme: “106 Books of Pretension,” which is really “the top 106 books most often marked as ‘unread’ by LibraryThing’s users.” I don’t think these books, as a group, are particularly pretentious. There is a surprisingly wide range represented, though I’m disappointed at the lack of poetry. Anyway, I’m not as well read in fiction as I should be, and I’m particularly poorly read in non-fiction, but here goes. Books I’ve read are in italics, books I began and never finished are struck through:
* 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 Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote
* Moby Dick (the shame!)
* 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
* 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
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down
* Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit
* In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
* White Teeth
* Treasure Island
* David Copperfield
* The Three Musketeers
Now I feel like my English Major card is going to be revoked.
I’ve finished 46 of those books. You are hereby on probation until you finish Moby Dick.
Holy Crap…I’ve read most of those. But…..as an art school grad our electives were, well…English/American Lit. I also read a lot with a daily two hour commute. Mostly non fiction, but sometimes I drift back into the classics, my fav being “The age of innocence” Ahhh Good Ole Edith Wharton.
Well sir, I am going to have to post this one on my blog. There are a lot on here I haven’t read too, so don’t worry about your English major card being revoked :)
[...] I’m not a meme type, I did see one on Evil Bender that I can actually get into. “106 Books of Pretension,” which is really “the top 106 books [...]
52. Not bad for someone who has been compelled to read the literary selections of others for the past 7 years. But seriously… are these supposed to be books I WANT to read? Because Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are both on there, and I have a soul.
[...] in Books, Literature, Memes at 5:38 pm by The Lizard Queen Snagged this from Evil Bender: Via Stranger Fruit, I learn about an interesting book meme: “106 Books of Pretension,” which [...]