106 books of pretention

Oh my gosh, how I love these little games where you get to go thru a big list of books and prove what a Smarty von Smartenhauser you are (though if you were an actual smarty, you'd call it a meme--congrats to you if the wiki entry actually helps you figure that one out.)

I found this list via What Would Jane Austen Do? "Below are '106 books of pretention,' compiled from the books most frequently marked unread by Library Thing users." I believe this means the LT users have copped to owning but never reading these books.

So, herewith, all the pretentious books I've read (in bold); books I’ve started but haven’t finished (or skipped huge portions of) in italics; and books I own but haven’t read are marked with a dagger (†).

* Read: 37
* Never finished: 13
* Own, but haven’t read†: 3


1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi : a novel
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick--10th grade, I think. The teacher actually told us to skip all the chapters about the fishing industry. I skipped a heck of a lot more than that, let me tell you.
12. Ulysses--James Joyce hates me. The feeling is mutual.
13. Madame Bovary--In 10th grade, this was my favorite book, like, ever.
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre--this is how much of a freak I am for the English romances: freshman year in college, a guy on my hall was assigned this for frosh English. He hated it and threatened to tear it up. I said No! I'll take it, I've never read it. He mocked me, I read it--and loved it.
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler’s Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assassin†--I'm sure I've got this one around here somewhere
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books†
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex--One of the best books of the last 50 years, easily.
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
37. The Canterbury tales
38. The Historian : a novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New world
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault’s Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
53. 1984
54. Angels & Demons
55. The Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver’s Travels
65. Les Misérables
66. The Corrections
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved
82. Slaughterhouse-five
83. The Scarlet Letter
84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon--I should make an annotation that would mean "obsessed over for about two years in high school"
86. Oryx and Crake : a novel
87. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything--this is on my Amazon wish list. Someday I'll get around to it.
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
98. The Aeneid--Oh, no, I mean, I totally read that all the way thru. Yup, that and Moby Dick. There was a quiz, you know.
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity’s Rainbow
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
103. White Teeth†
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers


There you have it, folks. Now it's your turn!