October 5, 2007...10:04 am

Books and more books

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Since John is doing it, I suppose I should as well. I apologize for not posting here more. It is merely a function of a lack of time. I’ve bolded those I’ve read and italicized those I’ve partially read.

  • Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
  • Anna Karenina
  • Crime and Punishment
  • Catch-22
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • Wuthering Heights
  • Life of Pi
  • The Name of the Rose
  • Don Quixote
  • Moby Dick
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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

6 Comments

Filed under Books, generally boring

6 Comments

  • John Lynch
    October 5, 2007 at 3:59 pm

    You really need to read “The Name of the Rose” - a “Da Vinci Code” for smart people - lots of Aristotle and suchlike. Probably one of my favorite books ever.

  • annethomsenlord
    October 5, 2007 at 8:16 pm

    How did you get on a first name basis with MY professor?

  • amelo14
    October 16, 2007 at 2:00 pm

    Enjoyed this exercise very much. Just thought you might be interested in a similar exercise I did some time ago. Here is the link for you:

    http://amelo14.wordpress.com/2005/12/09/reflections-on-the-desire-to-read/

  • Aidan McGlynn
    March 13, 2008 at 9:37 pm

    Wait - Dan Brown’s ‘Angels and Demons’ is on this list? It seems a little out of place.

  • Errol Lord
    March 14, 2008 at 8:43 am

    Aidan,

    I think that the list is of the most popular books that people have on their bookshelves but haven’t read. Here is how I would explain Angels and Demons‘ place on the list: an obscene amount of people read The DaVinci Code and ‘loved’ it. The next time they were at Barnes and Noble, they noticed ‘hey, Dan Brown has written more than book. Since I absolutely loved The DaVinci Code, I should buy that.’ They thus bought it but then never read it. And that’s how it got on the list.

  • Aidan McGlynn
    March 14, 2008 at 9:21 am

    Oh, I see. I was looking for the principle that would cover Angels and Demons, along with The Satanic Verses, The God of Small Things, Foucault’s Pendulum, etc…

    I actually thought Angels and Demons was considerably more fun than the Da Vinci Code. It was silly as all hell, and as badly written as its more famous sequel, but it made a more entertaining badly written silly action novel than the DVC. I’m confident the movie version next year will suck, though.

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