Librarything's Top Unread Books

Teddy Rose posted this meme on her blog. It started at The Library Thing. I love these kind of lists.

These are the top 106 books most often marked "unread" (or the equivalent) by LibraryThing's users. The rules are as follows: BOLD the books you have read, italicize the books you started but did not finish (DNF), *STAR* the books you've read more than once, underline books that are on your TBR pile, and cross out books that you hated.

Here's mine:

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
Ulysses
Moby Dick
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
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
The Inferno
Angels & Demons
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-presentCryptonomicon
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

The Man Who Ate the 747

I haven't read any really great, great books this year but I think this will be in the top 10 for this year. The book focuses on J.J. Smith, a keeper of records for the Book of Records and his discovery of a man eating a 747 because of his love for a woman. I thought the concept sounded interested and how does one eat a metal plane? I soon found out. A very sweet story that takes place in the heart of America.

A few of my favorite quotes (and there are many like this in the book)

"Remains of last night's dinner-some macaroni and a few cargo door hinges-lay congealed in a pot on the stove."

Now remember, if you feel nervous, you don't have to say a thing. Just smile and eat the plane."

Rumspringa

Another book that I would have not probably read if my book wasn't reading it. Rumspringa is a time that Amish teenagers go and experience the world and see if they would still like to be baptized in the Amish faith. I learned a lot about the Amish and their faith through this book. The chapter on shunning and why it is done is very interesting. I liked the real life stories and was much less interested in the experts opinions. Why the Amish go through rumspringa is interesting too. I want to see the documentary, The Devil's Playground, which is about some of the Amish highlighted in this book.

The Right Stuff

I have been wanting to read this book ever since I started my astronaut obsession last year (see http://amyreads.blogspot.com/2007/07/man-on-moon.html

This book is about the 7 original Mercury astronauts plus pre space pioneers like Chuck Yeager. After learning more about the space program last year, I wondered why Chuck Yeager didn't become an astronaut and this book answered the question for me. Very interesting on the public and private views of America's first astronauts. Another book that I will have the see the movie soon.

Five Children and It Movie

I read Five Children and It a few months ago (see http://amyreads.blogspot.com/2008/04/five-children-and-it.html) and decided to get the movie through Netflix. I saw that they were 2 versions; a BBC version from 1997 and a 2004 movie version. Kenneth Branaugh is in the 2004 version (I love him!) but it looked like the 1997 version was more like the book.

The BBC version is done in a series of episodes (6, I think) with a wish per episode. It was very true to the book with just a few minor changes. I enjoyed seeing the film version of the book.

The Saturdays

I have heard so much about this series. I realized I had the last 3 books in the series and not the first and it took me a while to get the first one. I don't like this cover I found (not the one I have) because it makes the books look like a younger child's series. They are young adult, though. The Melendy sibiling live in New York City in the 1940s and the Melendy books are about their various adventures. The first book was good, not my favorite YA series but still very pleasant.

The Mennyms Alive

The last book in the Mennyms series. I've enjoyed the series and the book ended perfectly with just the right amount of sense of closure and wondering. A great series for anyone.

Party Princess

The seventh book in the Princess Diaries series. Wow, this series seems to go on forever. The books are funny and always full of Mia's dilemmas with trying to live a normal life and that of a princess. Sometimes the pop culture references are over the top and I can't believe the things that Mia does but the overall the books are fun.

Heads or Tails

I read the first book in this series a few months ago. Each book is about Jack in a different year at school. His family moves around a lot so each year is pretty much in a different place. Jack seems like such a typical boy and his adventures are hilarious.

Water for Elephants

My bunco club has decided to start a book club and discuss a book every month before bunco. So this was the book picked this month. I have heard about it through various book groups but didn't really have a desire to read it. I know I wouldn't have read it otherwises. It was ok, but not really my type of book. The part that interested me the most was the historical context and how some smaller circuses were run in the Depression era.

The Romanovs

In my 11th grade World Cultures class, we could read the book Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert Massie, take a test on the book and get our grade up one letter. Even back then, I never passed up a chance to read anything and I was enjoying our unit on Russian history. I got the book out of the library and read all 700 some pages and enjoyed most of it. The Romanov history is fascinating from the time Nicholas became tsar to their execution.
This book is about how they found the family's remain, the various testing to prove it was them, along with those claiming to be Anastasia and Alexis. It's very interesting who got involved and what happened. The book was written in the 90s and everything was not settled yet.
Funny enough, I read an article today from the L.A. Times that officials have found remains of Marie and Alexis, the two missing family members (Anastasia was not a missing one)

I am always so behind

I should really write up about the book as soon as I read it. But I tend to wait until the end of the month and write them all at once. I am going to try to be better about it from now on.