One page at a time

I see P. Z. has another book meme thing (following Wilkins). Now the point of this one is not to show how well-read you are, or to list classics (indeed, some of these books are far from great), but to see which books one might have left unread (a commenter at one of those two places thinks the list is of those books most likely to be labeled "to be read" at LibraryThing). Bold means I finished it; italics means I read part of it.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

This one's long, but if you get past the slow beginning you won't be able to stop.

Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment

I loved this – no trouble here.

Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude

I blazed through this one in a couple of days.

Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose

Same here – what a great book. In fact I think it was the very next thing I read after One Hundred Years of Solitude (so, a good week).

Don Quixote

Okay, you got me. I did read part I though, which is plenty long.

Moby Dick
Ulysses

I read all the way to the end – the last three chapters are brilliant – but I skipped some in the middle.

Madame Bovary

High school extra credit. Not worth it to me at the time.

The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov

Not as gripping as Crime and Punishment, but worth reading. I'm sure a lot of it went right over my head though (read it 20+ years ago).

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace

Someday.

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

Never.

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

Skip Ulysses if you must and read this one instead.

Love in the Time of Cholera

I guess I'm just afraid it won't be as good as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Brave New World

High school.

The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch

Finished Book I, before it picks up (if it ever does, that is).

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

Isn't this Dan Brown?

The Inferno
The Satanic Verses

Never read any Rushdie. I hear Midnight's Children is good.

Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray

A while ago. Too clever by, well, more than half.

Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Not this one, but The Mayor of Casterbridge is a kick in the head (that's good).

Oliver Twist

I barely cracked this. I did a book report on it though.

Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Why would anyone stop reading this one? It's short and very readable.

Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury

I did bog down in As I Lay Dying, which I picked precisely because it was short. On the other hand, I finished Absalom, Absalom, which is not only long, but also, as I read it, purposely oppressive in its difficult prose. Must be a masochist (I don't hate it I don't).

Angela's Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present

Howard Zinn, right? No thanks.

Cryptonomicon

I like this guy, really I do, but I don't know about those doorstops.

Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces

This I found overrated.

A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners

This is a book of short stories, for crying out loud. Just read it.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This is good, but The Joke is the key Kundera. I think I've had enough though.

Beloved

I did bog down in Song of Solomon. Just didn't grab me.

Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter

High school. I did finish it, out of pure spite (though not without bitter complaint). I do hope they don't assign it any more.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon

About 400 pages too long, but I did get through it.

Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita

Now, Ada is the one to ask about. A long time ago I puzzled through about 20 pages of that one. My guess here also is that once you get over the hump you're set.

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

Why yes. (See my post here.)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

I actually liked this. He messes it up ultimately, but for a non-philosopher (okay, he was a grad student in philosophy) he does pretty well. That is, while making mistakes of his own, he at least avoids other mistakes made by certain name-brand philosophers who will remain undesignated by me here today.

The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow

Good one to ask about. Never started it. I did read V though, which isn't that much shorter (nothing since except Crying).

The Hobbit

Get real.

In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Not sure what I was expecting here. I got about half way though.

Now of course there are plenty of others one might ask about. Proust, for example. Like many others, I too have begun Recherche without reaching the end. On the other hand, though, I have read Swann's Way, However you want to translate the second one, and The Guermantes Way, petering out some 200 pages into Sodom and Gomorrah. Great stuff, but it really does take determination.

One more thing. I eventually did read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I liked, I think. The reason I mention this is that when I picked up his When We Were Orphans at one of those library book sales I said that I had been putting him off, and that I would try Never Let Me Go first. So maybe I'll start The Unconsoled – and not finish it.