Gallimaufry

[neadods]

Happy birthday jigglykat!

I have tried on several occasions to bring zen into my life. This always happens.

Apparently Library Thing has a meme about the top books that people own to look smart but don't read. I take issue with anyone thinking that Angels and Demons makes you "look smart" because the appropriate words to describe it are more like "... like a Hoover. Like a *Dyson*!"



Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights No. Codependency as romance makes me bilious - and besides if you want to be clever, you should read the not-obvious famous one by the most famous sister. Try Agnes Grey. Or Tenant of Wildfell Hall
The Silmarillion aka, prozac on paper
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice There's a lot of Austen on this list. Y'all are missing out.
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities Not yet, but it's in the TBRs
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel Also To Be Read
War and Peace
Vanity Fair I've tried a couple of times. Can't get into it
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma Austen's personal favorite heroine. The Paltrow movie is surprisingly accurate
The Blind Assassin
Zatoichi
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods Started. Didn't like it
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged Rand can bite me.
Reading Lolita in Tehran In the TBRs
Quicksilver Exposition
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian Does skimming the audiobook and being unimpressed count?
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World I had to look up "pneumatic." I still think it's a weird word to use in that context
The Fountainhead See above comment.
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys Listened to audiobook. According to Gaiman, it's his favorite audio
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath In TBR
The Poisonwood Bible
1984 Not on a bet
Angels & Demons I didn't like its more famous cousin, why search it out?
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility Emma Thompson really got the feel of this one
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park Nope. The one Austen I can't get into
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Not on a bet
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
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere TBR
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 OMG, it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The person who wanted me to read it found it so romantic. There wasn't a damned moron in the whole damned thing I didn't want to hit repeatedly with a brick
Oryx and Crake
Collapse
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion Meh
Northanger Abbey A personal favorite. I totally was Catherine
The Catcher in the Rye See comments about Rand and Avalon. I do not tolerate "oh, woe, nobody understands my deep self-centeredness" well
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics Because I want to read unscientific propaganda... why?
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down One of five books I reread every year during my teenaged years, along with Fear No Evil, Up the Down Staircase, and Dibs in Search of Self
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit For years I refused to read Lord of the Rings because I was told Bilbo wasn't in it
In Cold Blood No, but I should put it on my wishlist
White Teeth
Treasure Island Does watching a bazillion homages, parodies, and remakes count?
David Copperfield

Where's A Distant Mirror? The House of Seven Gables? SHAKESPEARE? (Yes; yes; yes; and yes, seen or read all of 'em by the way)

Comments

[jennetj.livejournal.com]

Great Expectations was on the list. You read it. I read it in high school. My friend wrote on my notepad "Pip is a dip." Truer words were never writ.

You really should read Dracula. I'm not into scary stuff, but this is horror the way it should be done. The end of Jonathan Harker's diary is one of the most terrifying things ever.

There are a whole lot of books I would have expected to be on there. There's no poetry, for example, nor any plays at all, not just Shakespeare.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

*facepalm*

Pip is a dip, but Holden needs a boot up the ass in the worst way.

There was once an LJ comm that released Dracula as diary entries on the day that they were written. I should go dig that up at some point.

[prof-pangaea.livejournal.com]

it's not a list of the books that people own to look smart, it's a list of the books that people on library thing most often marked as "unread". which is why there are so many contemporary "intelligent best-seller" types on there, like reading lolita in tehran or the corrections; they're the types of books that a lot of people buy (or get given) because they've been told they're good, and probably meant to read at some point, but never quite got there. "i keep hearing that neil gaiman guy is pretty good. i should read that book of his at some point. yeah."

meanwhile i hate the time traveller's wife. i am glad lots of people haven't read it, because it is bad.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

i am glad lots of people haven't read it, because it is bad.

*snicker* I certainly feel that way about others on the list. Angels and Demons? *shudder*

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Do yourself a favor and skip The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck couldn't write his way out of a paper bag with the end open. I had to read way too much of his schlock in high school.

What's your beef with 1984? Just curious.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

There's horror, and then there's being terrified of my own society beyond the point of feeling I can do anything about it.

Which reminds me: Animal Farm's not on that list. I have read that.

[ponygirl72.livejournal.com]

There's horror, and then there's being terrified of my own society beyond the point of feeling I can do anything about it.

Welcome to my world.

Of course, I didn't need to read 1984 for that... though I have (and enjoyed it, actually).

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I still feel I can do something.

[ponygirl72.livejournal.com]

I still feel that I *must* do something, but have absolutely no expectation of it making any difference whatsoever.

At this point, it is solely in order to allow me a modicum of street cred when, as it all falls apart, I stand on my doorstep and scream to the world "I TRIED TO TELL YOU!!".

Sadly, I fail at nobility. :-(

[jigglykat.livejournal.com]

<3!

[swallowedbysky.livejournal.com]

It's funny, I have read Angels and Demons, but only in the secrecy of my own home because I feared that reading it would make me look dumb.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Hee!

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I don't mark my LT "unread" but all of the books on that list that I own, I've read. Some of them several times. (Guns and Germs and Steel is one of those books that changed the way I think: I am grateful to Diamond. Much his best book.) Though, to be fair, I didn't finish The Mists of Avalon - a book that appeared to be totally unresearched, a view I know is shared by experts on the period/legend - and gave away my copy, which I understand ended up in a waste basket somewhere. I have, of course, read more of them than I own.

And where is Stephen Donaldson?

[thanatos-kalos.livejournal.com]

You might like the Aeneid-- just remind yourself that the whole Dido thing is actually a metaphor for the Punic wars and you can even get through book 4. There are some absolutely breathtaking moments, especially the destruction of Troy through Aeneas' eyes in Book 2 and the end of Book 12.