Book List

From Maude in Progress .

The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.
Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

I always finish a book even if it’s a struggle. From this list I don’t see much I had to read for school. Perhaps a reflection of once you get GCSE English at 16 you don’t need to satisfy any other English requirement. For GCSE English we did 1984 (but I’d already read it I was and am a bit of a George Orwell fan), Macbeth and Flowers for Algernon. We did Romeo and Juliet in Year 9 (8^th Grade) along with a bunch of 20^th Century young adult writing. The Aeneid was the set text for the literature component of my Latin exam so I’ve read it in both English and Latin. I found it bizarre that I did Latin literature and never French. Especially as I did a total of 7 years of French. I have read Camus, Beckett and a couple of other things in French though (when I had time to attempt to stop my French getting rusty).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
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
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel (Although I've read it for teaching my undergraduate tutorials and lecturing about environmental determinism, as opposed to having to read it for a course I was taking)
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’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
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
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
1984
Angels & Demons
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
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
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter (brought and read my first time in the US, I also re-read all the relevant American literature I had at the time including the Buccanneers by Edith Wharton)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves

The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion is this (?)
There is Confusion (?)
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
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 (in English and Latin, I was a geek at school and did Latin in my lunch hours)
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (in Junior School)
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield