Unread Books at LibraryThing

There's a meme going around that inventories the top 106 books tagged "unread" at LibraryThing. The rules are:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded [or were bookclub choices that you never read that month]. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

I remember seeing this a while ago, and thinking it would be a straight-forward meme to grab. But I wondered, when I went to do the meme this morning -- had the rankings changed?

They have changed. I don't know when the original list was created, but here's what LibraryThing was showing as the top 100 "unread" books as of 7:45am edt today. 23 May 2008:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (236/9195)
Anna Karenina (211/9152)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (183/12222)
Crime and Punishment (176/10899)
Wuthering Heights (162/12388)
Catch-22 (158/11121)
The Silmarillion (155/8980)
Don Quixote (152/6835)
The Odyssey (136/11183)
The Brothers Karamazov (136/7309)
Ulysses (135/6385)
War and Peace (132/6123)
Madame Bovary (132/6396)
A Tale of Two Cities (124/7600)
Jane Eyre (124/14044)
The Name of the Rose (120/7876)
Moby Dick (119/7879)
Emma (117/9347)
The Iliad (117/8902)
Vanity Fair (115/3885)
Love in the Time of Cholera (114/7312)
The Blind Assassin (110/4938)
Pride and Prejudice (108/18747)
The Historian: A Novel (108/6596)
The Canterbury Tales (108/6298)
The Kite Tunner (106/13964)
Great Expectations (106/8790)
Life of Pi (105/12940)
The Time Traveler's Wife (105/11628)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (104/7638)
Atlas Shrugged (102/6103)
Foucault's Pendulum (101/5730)
Dracula (100/7076)
The Grapes of Wrath (99/7967)
Frankenstein (97/9327)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (97/6549)
Mrs. Dalloway (97/5684)
Sense and Sensibility (96/8798)
Middlemarch (96/4239)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (96/4491)
The Count of Monte Cristo (95/5295)
The Sound and The Fury (94/5141)
Memoirs of a Geisha (94/11834)
Brave New World (93/12677)
Quicksilver (92/4107)
American Gods (92/10560)
Middlesex (91/9084)
The Poisonwood Bible (91/7609)
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (90/9089)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (89/7338)
Dune (89/9416)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (89/6766)
The Satanic Verses (88/3305)
Mansfield Park (88/5483)
Gulliver's Travels (88/4967)
The Three Musketeers (87/4221)
The Inferno (84/5988)
The Corrections (84/5146)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (83/6091)
The Fountainhead (83/5925)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (83/4825)
Oliver Twist (83/4488)
To the Lighthouse (83/4711)
A Clockwork Orange (83/6890)
Robinson Crusoe (82/4528)
Persuasion (82/6634)
The Scarlet Letter (82/7927)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (82/6014)
The Once and Future King (81/4375)
Anansi Boys (81/6665)
Atonement (80/7193)
The God of Small Things (80/5615)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (79/6433)
Cryptonomicon (78/6203)
Dubliners (78/5643)
Oryx and Crake (78/4069)
Angela's Ashes (77/6498)
Beloved (77/5651)
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (76/3914)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (75/2570)
In Cold Blood (75/5603)
Lady Chatterley's Lover (73/3246)
A Confederacy of Dunces (73/6186)
Les Misérables (73/4799)
The Amber Spyglass (72/6819)
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (72/6483)
Watership Down (72/6362)
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (72/6470)
The Aeneid (71/5154)
A Farewell to Arms (71/5219)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (71/5658)
Treasure Island (69/4736)
David Copperfield (69/4408)
Sons and Lovers (69/2617)
Possession (67/4211)
The Book Thief (67/3743)
The history of Tom Jones (67/2171)
The Road (67/5323)
Tender is the Night (66/3204)
The War of the Worlds (66/3131)

The numbers in parenthesis are first, the number of times the book has been tagged "unread," and second, the number of times the book appears in the LibraryThing catalog.  The weighted list -- the one that ranks the books by percentage of copies tagged "unread" -- is reasonably different, in ranking if not content.  The number one "unread" book on the weighted list is The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which should be bolded, because I have read it).

Most LibraryThing members do not use the "unread" tag -- only 4,555 members out of 416,142 total, or one percent. I doubt that that one percent is a representative sample, either -- there must be correlations between the types of people who would take the time to tag their books "unread" and the books they would inventory on LibraryThing.

Comments

[electriclady]

Fascinating--I'm going to have to do this one too. I can already see from skimming the list that I'm going to have a lot of underlining (English major with focus on the novel).

[Andrea]

I wonder what it says that I've read and enjoyed more of hte books on this list than on the standard top-100 book lists.

I might have to steal this one....

[Denise]

OK, I'm a geek so I counted how many I've read. 60--most of those I really liked. A few were so heavy I see why they were unread. About half of the 40 I've never read I feel like I "should," the others...little interest.

Interesting that 2 Margaret Atwood books are on the list!

[lisa]

I didn't count, but I think I've read 3/4 of these-with no regrets. I was disappointed in the new verse translation of Beowulf, and thus never finished it, but read the original Old English several times and loved it. Does that count? Um, yeah-that would be my dissertation topic... ~lmc