Stole this idea from Dave Hingsburger: how many of the 106 top unread books from LibraryThings have you read?
Here’s my list (31 of the top 106):
- Life of Pi: a novel (one of my kids gave this to me for Christmas a couple of years ago)
- The Name of the Rose (got this after I had exhausted all the Cadfael books)
- Don Quixote (read this in college – Spanish literature class)
- Moby Dick (read this in high school – AP English)
- The Odyssey (read it with my husband a couple of years ago – he’s chewing through a tremendous stack of Greek and Roman classics)
- Jane Eyre (read this when I was a teenager)
- The Brothers Karamazov (went through a big Dostoevsky phase in my youth – actually a Russian/Soviet phase, I read a lot of Solzhenitsyn, too)
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (read this after the adaption was aired on PBS – it got really repetitive after a while)
- The Time Traveler’s Wife (sometime in the last 5 years)
- Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (my daughter is a huge fan, so I read it, too)
- The Canterbury Tales (college)
- Brave New World (this fell into my heavy science fiction period)
- The Count of Monte Cristo (love, love, love this book – read the whole thing, not an abridged version)
- The Once and Future King (read this as a kid)
- The Poisonwood Bible: a novel (someone gave this to me because I also lived in Africa as a child)
- 1984 (see Brave New World)
- The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (college)
- Mansfield Park (just read this after seeing the PBS adaption)
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles (high school – AP English)
- Gulliver’s Travels (high school – for fun)
- Dune (the original – accept no substitutes)
- The Sound and the Fury (high school)
- Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
- Slaughterhouse-five (it’s Vonnegut! I’ve read it all)
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves (it’s grammar)
- The Mists of Avalon (it’s feminist fantasy)
- Northanger Abbey (see Mansfield Park)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values (high school – it was lying around the house)
- Watership Down (this somehow fell into the SF phase)
- The Hobbit (it’s Tolkein!)
- The Three Musketeers (see Count of Monte Cristo)
I own very few books that I have not read – I buy them, read them, then put them on the shelf. I hardly ever buy a book with idea of reading it someday in the future.
In the last 10 years or so, though, I’ve become a big library user and really haven’t bought that many books at all.

Go, libraries! There’s a book that I’m dying to read, New Moon (the second in a young adult sci-fi/fantasy series about a high schooler who falls in love with a vampire – who doesn’t love that story?) and I’ve placed a hold on it at the local library, but I’m 5th in the queue, so I may not see it for a while. To stave off my vampire-lit cravings however, I’ve been going down to The College Barnes and Noble after work and reading a few chapters here and there…it’s terrible, but they do encourage it, with all of their huge comfy chairs!