Statute of Frogs

A little late to the party, perhaps, but following in the footsteps of divine angst and Yayarolly (and apparently pretty much everyone else in the blogosphere), I’m picking up on the “most unread at LibraryThing meme.” The list below is the books most often tagged “unread” at LibraryThing.¹ Like all such lists, it points out my embarrassing lack of attention to the classics in my reading. I actually do reasonably well on the recent ones. In any case, ones I’ve read on my own are bold, ones I read for school are underlined. Others have italicized ones they started by never finished. I didn’t have any in that category. Perhaps I’ll turn my attention to picking some of these off over the summer.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Crime and Punishment
Wuthering Heights
Catch-22
The Silmarillion
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
The Brothers Karamazov
Ulysses
War and Peace
Madame Bovary
A Tale of Two Cities
Jane Eyre
The Name of the Rose
Moby Dick
Emma
The Iliad
Vanity Fair
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Blind Assassin
Pride and Prejudice
The Historian: A Novel
The Canterbury Tales
The Kite Runner
Great Expectations
Life of Pi
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Atlas Shrugged
Foucault’s Pendulum
Dracula
The Grapes of Wrath
Frankenstein
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Mrs. Dalloway
Sense and Sensibility
Middlemarch
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Sound and The Fury
Memoirs of a Geisha
Brave New World
Quicksilver
American Gods
Middlesex
The Poisonwood Bible
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dune
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Satanic Verses
Mansfield Park
Gulliver’s Travels
The Three Musketeers
The Inferno
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Fountainhead
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
To the Lighthouse
A Clockwork Orange
Robinson Crusoe
Persuasion
The Scarlet Letter
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Once and Future King
Anansi Boys
Atonement
The God of Small Things
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Cryptonomicon
Dubliners
Oryx and Crake
Angela’s Ashes
Beloved
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
In Cold Blood
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
A Confederacy of Dunces
Les Misérables
The Amber Spyglass
The Prince
Watership Down
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
The Aeneid
A Farewell to Arms
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Sons and Lovers
Possession
The Book Thief
The History of Tom Jones
The Road
Tender is the Night
The War of the Worlds

1. I believe they’re ordered by proportion of listed copies tagged “unread.” [↩]

This is depressing. According to a new survey, one in four Americans didn’t read a book last year and the average American read only four books. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. When I was a software consultant, most of my colleagues weren’t readers. But nearly all of them read at least occasionally.

One of the ways in which my new career is a better fit is that I’m more likely to be surrounded by people who read. But I find it hard to imagine how people who don’t read spend their time. And I shouldn’t be too dismissive. Maybe those people who don’t read books read several newspapers every day or something. But I’m dubious.

UPDATE: A less depressing (and pleasingly snarky) view of the survey is here.