The ones I've read are:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Catch-22
The Silmarillion
The Name of the Rose
The Odyssey
The Brothers Karamazov
The Iliad
American Gods
The Canterbury Tales
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
The Once and Future King
1984
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
Gulliver’s Travels
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Cryptonomicon
The Scarlet Letter
Cloud Atlas
The Aeneid
The Hobbit
The Three Musketeers

I'm confused. The whole list is books most often marked as "unread" on librarything, and the meme is to see how many of the 'unread' one has read or tried to read?

The read-for-school thing wouldn't work for me, either----I'm pretty sure I was out of school before some of these were in print.

More like an example of how tastes and values are changing, as demonstrated by both personal choice and school requirements.

I don't think I care to define 'brainy' as reading the 'unreadable'(or in this case, the less-often-read): thorough, perhaps. ;)

No prob. That is just the sort of thing that'd be attached to a meme. I'm sure you are very brainy. ;)

I generally try to avoid memes, but the ones with books have an advantage and overwhelm my resistance fairly easily.

A meme like this makes me want to see more data, laid out like a sociological study, demonstrating age groups, schooling levels, publication dates, etc. I would like to know if your observation that you give up on literature more than you used to is common---good grief. I'd better just go back to trying to avoid memes! lol

Read (at least partly) and probably own, sometimes multiple copies of:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion*
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
Great Expectations
American Gods*
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
The Canterbury Tales
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
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
The God of Small Things
Neverwhere
Cloud Atlas
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Aeneid
Watership Down
The Hobbit


Know about but never read:

Life of Pi : a novel
Ulysses
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
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 Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (four times)
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Satanic Verses
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Beloved
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values


Huh? (as in, need more information, I"ve never HEARD of these)

In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
To the Lighthouse
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Confusion

In Cold Blood: (etc) - Truman Capote. Also a movie with Robert Blake. I've seen the movie, but haven't read the book.

Ben

White Teeth, Zadie Smith--came out, oh, maybe 2000, 2001, big literary coming-of-age novel by a young black Brit woman. Very modern, very cool. I liked it, but don't remember a lot of details.

In Cold Blood was arguably the first non-fiction novel, an artful retelling of the circumstances surrounding a particularly horrible murder in the early 60's. It was Truman Capote's greatest (and last)success. Creepy, but compelling.

I'm 52, and I remember (most) of what books I read for school. Possibly because we read them at what seemed like the rate of one page per day, so they had plenty of time to engrave themselves on my memory. I am still Miffed that we had to read Henry IV Part I for O-level, (a) because other areas got Romeo and Juliet (far more appealing to a 15-year-old sap) and (b) we had already read it in the fourth year and, other than fancying Hotspur, I didn't much like it then, either. And "I fancy Hotspur" is not a reaction that goes down well in an exam paper.

These days, I suppose I would be writing Prince Hal/Hotspur slash, and I just know, without looking, that someone out there already has.

That will do nicely, thank you. I don't know why I worry, really, seeing as the slash in Coriolanus (and let's go nowhere with that title) is pretty much canon.

For me,

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Catch-22
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion*
• The Name of the Rose
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• The Tale of Two Cities
• The Iliad
• The Blind Assassin
• Great Expectations
• American Gods*
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Quicksilver
• Brave New World
• Foucault's Pendulum
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• 1984
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune
• The God of Small Things
• Cryptonomicon
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Slaughterhouse-five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• The Confusion
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• Watership Down
• Gravity's Rainbow
• The Hobbit
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers

Tolkien really never worked for me as a kid -- I was hanging out with people who played D&D and it was pretty much expected that you'd read Tolkien, but while I read The Hobbit twice as well as a couple of others (Smith of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles of Ham; The Tolkien Reader), I never managed to read more than the first volume of the Lord of the Rings until some time within the last couple of years. I could probably read The Silmarrillion now, but I'm not sure where my copy is.

The Chabon just didn't engage me at the time I tried it (but might at some other time). And Strange & Norrell just utterly failed to click, despite it seeming to have lots of different things that should have made it fun. I even took it as my only book on a trip so I'd have to read it, and I still just couldn't get enthusiastic about it.

Of course, at the moment I probably have at least a hundred unread books stacked up around the house, including lots of nonfiction and a nice cache of genre books. (Although only one Bear left 'til the new ones come!)

I'm 36 years old. Like I remember what books I read for school.

I'm older than you and I remember quite a few of the books I read at school. Maybe senility is setting in *g*

But it wasn't a bad selection, really - it included The War Of The Worlds, The Lord Of The Flies, the short stories of D.H. Lawrence (I have a problem with the novels, although I have a soft spot for Women In Love - I like Gudrun's crankiness and her penchant for bright stockings - but some of the short stories are superb) and Kes (aka A Kestrel For A Knave). I don't know if the book travels well, but of course we all loved it - we thought it was written especially for us.

See, me and Eve lovelovelove Middlesex, The Poisonwood Bible, and A Confederacy of Dunces. That alone should tell you what kind of writers we aim to be...XD

(Also, I have a very complex love-hate relationship with Beloved... Eve loves Toni Morrison, though...)

Mine on my journal!

There's a lot of Gaiman and Hugo books on the list. Weird.

I got through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because I was reading it to impress a boy. And Watership Down because I had to read it before my parents bought me Lord of the Rings, which I wanted to read to impress a girl.

Les Miserables is my favourite novel.

I was very interested by Guns, Germs and Steel. My dad's tried to read Collapse, also by Jared Diamond, but only gets as far as: "Now let me tell you something about the flora and fauna of Iceland."

I have read 37 of these, started another twenty, and have four more sitting on my book shelf waiting for me to finish any one of the twenty I started. I tend to read in cycles depending on mood. And I read all of Dickens in high school. I was on a Dickens kick. I also have read all the Austen, since I got a collection of all of Austen's books for my sixteenth birthday. I have gotten to the point where I cannot bear to read Russian authors anymore.
Isn't it a book geek cliche to read Catcher In the Rye in junior high or high school? I read it in the ninth grade after stealing it from behind the librarian's desk ( it was a " banned" book). Salinger led me to Vonnegut, so I really have no complaints.
I still can't read The Lord Of The Rings books. Can't figure out why.
I am also shocked that I have actually read all the Joyce on this list. As in I opened the book and actually read every page before finishing the last sentence and then throwing the book against the wall and cursing.