Unread books

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):

1. Life of Pi: a novel (one of my kids gave this to me for Christmas a couple of years ago)
2. The Name of the Rose (got this after I had exhausted all the Cadfael books)
3. Don Quixote (read this in college – Spanish literature class)
4. Moby Dick (read this in high school – AP English)
5. The Odyssey (read it with my husband a couple of years ago – he’s chewing through a tremendous stack of Greek and Roman classics)
6. Jane Eyre (read this when I was a teenager)
7. The Brothers Karamazov (went through a big Dostoevsky phase in my youth – actually a Russian/Soviet phase, I read a lot of Solzhenitsyn, too)
8. 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)
9. The Time Traveler’s Wife (sometime in the last 5 years)
10. Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (my daughter is a huge fan, so I read it, too)
11. The Canterbury Tales (college)
12. Brave New World (this fell into my heavy science fiction period)
13. The Count of Monte Cristo (love, love, love this book – read the whole thing, not an abridged version)
14. The Once and Future King (read this as a kid)
15. The Poisonwood Bible: a novel (someone gave this to me because I also lived in Africa as a child)
16. 1984 (see Brave New World)
17. The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (college)
18. Mansfield Park (just read this after seeing the PBS adaption)
19. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (high school – AP English)
20. Gulliver’s Travels (high school – for fun)
21. Dune (the original – accept no substitutes)
22. The Sound and the Fury (high school)
23. Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
24. Slaughterhouse-five (it’s Vonnegut! I’ve read it all)
25. Eats, Shoots & Leaves (it’s grammar)
26. The Mists of Avalon (it’s feminist fantasy)
27. Northanger Abbey (see Mansfield Park)
28. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values (high school – it was lying around the house)
29. Watership Down (this somehow fell into the SF phase)
30. The Hobbit (it’s Tolkein!)
31. 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.