Cold Spaghetti

I’m worked up. Too much anxiety to sleep. Too heartsick to be still. Too tired to concentrate on grading.

To wind down, I’m wasting time on an interesting meme BC4 did awhile back. In it, you take the first 106 books from LibraryThing tagged as unread. (I just copied BC4’s list.) Then, you:

Bold what you have read, italicize your did not finishes, strikethrough the ones you hated, put *asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once, and put a + cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf.

This was the result (with some commentary)…

• Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment
• +Catch-22
• One hundred years of solitude (On my short-list of ‘books I want to read, and soon, because I can’t believe I haven’t read them’)
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi: a novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary
• +*The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• A Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveller’s Wife
• +*The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• +Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods
• A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
• Atlas Shrugged (I refuse to read Ayn Rand on principle)
• Reading Lolita in Tehran
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• +Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera (On my short-list of ‘books I want to read, and soon, because I can’t believe I haven’t read them’)
• Brave new world
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum (Not read this, but I have read plenty of Foucault)
• 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
• 1984
• Angels & Demons (Not read it, but I did read The DaVinci Code, which was enough literary torture to convince me to steer clear of Dan Brown)
• The Inferno
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (I know I started long ago, but I’m not sure if I finished it?)
• Mansfield Park
• One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
• 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 : 1492-present
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces (Another top must-read and soon)
• +A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• +Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five (I don’t feel a pressing need to read this, yet I’m a bit embarrassed that I haven’t)
• 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 (I can’t believe this book is on this list.)
  
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I refuse to read it on principle)
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• +*The Hobbit
• In Cold Blood
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers

Observations… although some on the list I had “issues” with one way or another, I couldn’t say that I didn’t like any of them. (The only books I can think of that I really haven’t liked are Snow Crash and anything by Hemingway.) I’m also impressed that I’ve got so few on the bookshelf (an academic who purges books!) The “pluses” are therefore, by definition as something I’ve kept, books I really enjoyed. There were a number of books I’d never heard of on the list. A good exercise, if only because it reminded me that there are some fiction books that I really am enthusiastic about reading some day (I tired of fiction awhile back and haven’t been able to re-engage.)