These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132) Loved it! Just a big, long, Russian soap opera. I have fond memories of reading it while sitting under the trees at UOP.
Crime and punishment (121) Depressing, of course.
Catch-22 (117) ROTFL.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi: a novel (94)
The Name of the Rose (91)
Don Quixote (91) Not as good as I'd hoped.
Moby Dick (86) Generations of high school students are right--booorrrinnnggggg....
Ulysses (84) Sorry, just couldn't deal with it. And since it wasn't assigned reading, I saw no reason to prolong my suffering.
Madame Bovary (83) Another soap opera and more evidence that human nature is constant across both time and space.
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80) Loved it.
A Tale of Two Cities (80) One of my favorites! And it's about time I read it again.
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies (79)
War and Peace (78) Good, but Anna Karenina was better. Tolstoy could have cut about 200 pages by condensing the long descriptions of military tactics in the battle scenes.
Vanity Fair (74) Required reading in my English novel class in college. For the most part, I really enjoyed it. Gotta love those big Victorian soap operas...er, I mean novels.
The Time Traveler's Wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Great Expectations (70) Hated it in 9th grade, loved it as an adult. Dickens rocks!
American gods (68)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66) OK, I think I'm the only woman on the planet that read this and didn't like it. I didn't hate it, but I really didn't like it.
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : The Llife and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64) Love 'em.
The Historian : A Novel (63).
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's Pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61) Another big ol' Victorian novel I read in college. Good stuff.
Frankenstein (59) I love horror, but I couldn't get into Frankenstein. I think it's because I found it so depressing. I felt sorry for the monster, didn't want to read about his suffering, and thought the doctor was cruel.
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (59)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (57) Terribly depressing but incredible. I found this one especially interesting, because my father's family came to California during the Dust Bowl migrations. Dad talked a lot about going to bed hungry and eating beans night after night, but he didn't talk much about the rest of the experience.
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel (57)
1984 (57) Chilling.
Angels & Demons (56) I really want to finish this one. I got about halfway through and got distracted. Not as good as the Da Vinci Code, but good.
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (54) Truly chilling.
To the Lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54) Loved it. Almost as good as Jude the Obscure. The Victorians had some fascinating and frightening views on sexuality. Makes me glad I live now.
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53)
Les Misérables (53) Another one I need to finish someday.
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52)
Dune (51)
The Prince (51)
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49)
The Scarlet Letter (48) Incredible.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48) Should be mandatory reading for every middle school student. Why are otherwise-intelligent people baffled by the apostrophe?
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : A Novel (47)
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45) - I really want to read this.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry Into Values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44) I recommend reading this one while curled up in front of a crackling fire, with a steaming mug of cocoa close by.
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