There has been a list going around lately of the most-unread books in folks’ del.icio.us libraries. I have very few of these books, but have read a number of them. Most of these books are ones I have Not Read because I have zero desire to read them. I'm going to simply omit the ones that I don't care about. Sure, they may be great works of literature. No rules out there saying I gotta read 'em if they're not my cuppa tea.
So instead, I have 'read', 'want to read someday', 'tried and went bleah'. The numbers in parens are preserved from the original listing, and represent the number of libraries in which these were not-read.
Read these:
- Ulysses (84)
- The Odyssey (83)
- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
- Watership Down (44)
- The Hobbit (44)
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
- Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
- Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West [I loved this! I need to remember to check the sequels out of the library.]
- Brave new world (61) [How can they NOT have read this?! Oh, man. A *must read* for today.]
- Frankenstein (59) [I know I read this for Fantasy Fiction class in college, but I don't remember it! I just remember finding a paper I wrote on it while cleaning out some old papers!]
- 1984 (57)
- The inferno (56) [Dante's, I presume? Not Stig's? 😉 ]
- Gulliver's travels (53)
- Dune
- The scarlet letter (48) [In high school; blech; hated it.]
- The catcher in the rye (46) [High school; didn't really 'get it'.]
- Treasure Island
Haven't read these, but may read them 'someday':
- One hundred years of solitude
- Don Quixote (skimmed in high school)
- Canterbury Tales (want to read a translation)
- Dracula (59) [Some folks published this as a BLOG a year or three ago, and it was GREAT, I got very hooked on it but then forgot to keep up with it. It turns out to be a very natural style because of the first-person style of the book and the extensive use of letters to other people. Oh, and it's *actually creepy*, which was cool! Just in time for Halloween, Dracula, by Bram Stoker, as blog]
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
- Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
- The Three Musketeers [There was a really well-done DC Comics adaptation of this back in the 1970's, with really good art. I know, I know. Some stories are just BETTER as manga.]
Books I started, but which convinced me on their own that I didn't want to bother reading them:
- Anna Karenina (132)
- The Silmarillion (104)
- The name of the rose (91) [loved the movie!]
- Moby Dick (86)
- American gods (68) [I had such high hopes for this based on the little Foglio 2-pager, but no, it's just too full of itself and its own smugness. Cut a lot of the excess floweriness out, or have the Foglios do a graphic novel, and I'd surely read it.]
- Atlas shrugged (67)
- Foucault's pendulum (61)
- One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
- Oliver Twist (54)
- Cryptonomicon (50)
- The mists of Avalon (47)
- Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47) [This one had me for a chapter or two, but as a serious student of world agronomy, indigenous crops, and alternative methods of agriculture, I soon hit too many fallacies to consider the remainder of the book worth reading. GIGO.]
- Gravity's rainbow (44)
Relentless Inquiry 
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