Book Meme

From My imaginary friend is more erudite and charming than your imaginary friend.

These are the instructions: "Bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list."

These are my comments: I have left untouched those that I can't remember if I read. And there are a lot of those. Mostly a condemnation of my scattered mind, not the book in question! I once had a book borrowed for a long time from Ms. My imaginary friend, and I took it off my shelf one day to read it, thinking, "Wow, I've had this for a long time and I should really read it and send it back." I read it for, as I recall, more than thirty pages before I realized I'd read it already, a few months before. So there you go. Also: The "to-read" list is a really nebulous concept for me. I tried to be realistic about what I'm really going to read, considering I'm going to give birth to my first child in two months or less. And now, having completed the list: I am as poorly read as I have always claimed to be, for an English major especially. And it is embarrassing how many of these I had to look up on Wikipedia for the author and what-the-heck-is-it!

By the way: My favorite book of all time is on this list. And the list is supposed to be "most unread" or something like that. So not only am I hideously unlettered, I have odd taste.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (underline)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Don Quixote
Moby Dick (strikethrough)
Life of Pi: a novel (I've tried twice)
The Name of the Rose
Ulysses
The Brothers Karamazov
Jane Eyre
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
A Tale of Two Cities
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Iliad
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
The Kite Runner
The Blind Assassin
Emma
The Time Traveler's Wife
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
Middlesex
Memoirs of a Geisha
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Miserables
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: a memoir
The God of Small Things*
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (strikethrough)
Beloved*
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye*
On the Road (strikethrough)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit*
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers