Below is a list of the top 106 books tagged “unread” on LibraryThing.
The rules:
bold = what you’ve read
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
*= you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
6. *Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
7. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
9. The Odyssey by Homer
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Ulysses by James Joyce
12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
13. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
15. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
16. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
17. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
18. The Iliad by Homer
19. Emma by Jane Austen
20. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
21. *Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
23. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer Mostly read. I took a upper division class at Uni.
24. *Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
25. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
26. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
27. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
28. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
30. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
31. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
32. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
33. Dracula by Bram Stoker
34. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
35. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
36. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
38. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
39. Middlemarch by George Eliot
40. *Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
41. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
42. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
45. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
46. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
47. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
48. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
49. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
50. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
51. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
54. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
55. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
56. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
57. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
58. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
59. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
60. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
61. *To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
62. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
63. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
64. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
65. Persuasion by Jane Austen
66. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
68. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
69. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
70. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
71. Atonement by Ian McEwan
72. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
73. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
74. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
75. *Dubliners by James Joyce
76. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
77. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
78. Beloved by Toni Morrison
79. Collapse by Jared Diamond
80. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
81. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
82. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
83. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
84. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
85. *Watership Down by Richard Adams
86. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
87. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
88. Beowulf by Anonymous
89. *A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
90. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
91. The Aeneid by Virgil
92. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
93. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
94. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
95. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
96. *Possession by A.S. Byatt
97. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
98. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
99. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
100. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
101. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
102. Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire
103. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
104. The Plague by Albert Camus
105. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
106. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazie

What really sticks out for me, (besides there a ton of books that I need to read and a few I need to revisit because I haven’t looked at them for 15 years) is I really need to call on Mr. Dickens.

Meme away if you so desire. Do a search on your name and the phrase, ‘likes to’ and comedy will ensue. I would like to thank Ms. Richie for making my name what it is today.

Here’s mine. Nicole likes to:

Nicole likes to party. Anyone that reads this knows that I am one martini away from cirrhosis.
Nicole likes men. Yep.
Nicole likes guys who look like they have no blood in em. I don’t know about you, but this seems to be counterintuitive?
Nicole likes this boy named Brandon Chavez. Is it just me or do I sound like a complete slut?
Nicole likes men. Yeah. I am a big slut.
Nicole likes her men circumcised. I sound like a dumb slut.
Nicole likes to chow down. I’m recusing myself.
Nicole really likes cocaine. You know. . . never been interested. I’ve always been more of an oxycontin girl.
Nicole likes to take risks. Well obviously. I like to party and do coke with Brandon Chavez while sucking all of the blood out of his circumcised penis.

DANIEL! MATE! WHOMEVER THE MOTHERFUCK YOU ARE! STEP OFF BITCH!

Why you ask is Nicole going bonkers?  *87% of her spam comments are from a Daniel person that says something like, ” I didn’t understand what you were saying about  BLAH-BLAH-BLAH (insert random blog post title here) but I will check and—– aghhhhh Nicole shoots herself in he head in the first case of self-inflicted spam-rage.

Spam-rage. I warn ya- It ain’t pretty. Had a friend that made a joke about the gooey jelly gunk surrounding the meat product that is spam. . . He called it after spam. I wonder what Daniel, that spamalishness spam-stud freak will find to say about after spam. . .”

Something tells me it would be. “I couldn’t understand portions of your article about after-spam but I need to look into it more. Happy Tuesday!**

**Those of you that don’t blog do not know the pain that those of us that do go through weeding out the BS from the 1% normal folks that are real actual living breathing creatures and not spiders. If you don’t know what I mean by spider, look it up. I’m too tired (drunk) to explain. . .

Until tomorrow. . . And– Happy Tuesday.

This year I thought I would just do NaNoBloPo or National Blog Posting Month but a few moments ago I thought. . . oh hell. Why don’t I go for it. 50,000 words. Maybe 100 of them will be words that are part of well constructed sentences.

I had a comment from Bill Nighy.

I adore Bill Nighy. I saw him eating at Circus once and luckily I wasn’t drunk so I didn’t go to his table and tell him how much I love him. I am sad to say I haven’t seen him on stage yet. My love is from his performance as the washed up rock star in Love Actually: “Hiya kids. Here is an important message from your Uncle Bill. Don’t buy drugs. Become a pop star, and they give you them for free.” As well as some smaller indie films. (Rent I Capture The Castle today. Is a lovely adaptation of the Dodie Smith novel. Then go read the novel for 101 Dalmations which I remember loving when I was ten. Much better than Walt Disney.)

So an actor I adore has left a comment on my stupid little blog!

I looked closer.

Bill Nighy | wwedivasws@gmail.com | bill-nighy.info | IP: 64.22.107.90

Hi there…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Wednesday

It was spam. Bill Nighy spam.

I love Bill but I think this is even odder spam than the Best Cat Litter Boxes.

I’m hoping that he is wrong and all of that does not come to pass. I haven’t really noticed anything here other than the initial articles saying, “Wow! Who knew? That’s kinda groovy.” Well. Not exactly that. I don’t think anyone in the British Press would say groovy.

A bit in the LA Times that I think is overwhelming in its vanilla lameness called, Seven Clues that ‘Potter’s’ Dumbledore Was Gay manages to redeem itself with the last paragraph:

“No matter how many ‘clues’ I can put down that Dumbledore was gay, no matter how many millions of people have read these books again and again, Rowling surprised even the most die-hard fans with the announcement that Dumbledore was gay. And in the end, the fact that we never would have guessed is what makes Dumbledore being gay so real. So many times I have encountered friends who are gay that I never would have predicted. It has shown me that one’s sexual orientation is not some obvious ‘lifestyle choice,’ it’s a precious facet of our multi-faceted personalities. And in the end whatever the differences between our personalities are, it is time that our world heeds Dumbledore’s advice: ‘Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.’ Today as I write this, I believe that it’s time for our aims to be loyal to what the greatest wizard in the world would have wanted them to be: love.”

Most of my gay friends are out. Darren’s homophobic and conservative parents became huge gay rights supporters after they heard the news. Other friends have had rockier experiences. Scott told me that when he tried to bring up the subject with his mother, she deftly changed the subject and everything was left unsaid.

I know we have a come a long way since Stonewall but there is so much further to go.

My Freshman year in University one of our theatre students was murdered. Tortured. For being gay.

On November 23, 1988, Gordon Church, a 28-year-old a drama student at Southern Utah University, was brutally murdered by Michael Archuleta, 25, and Lance Wood, 19. The murder was one of the most sadistic murders in the history of the state, gay or straight, but only a few people are aware of the torture killing because a judge placed a gag order over the case to shelter a prominent Mormon family in Delta from public humiliation that their son was gay.

I can’t tell you how much that disgusts me. . . the “judge placed a gag order over the case to shelter a prominent Mormon family in Delta from public humiliation that their son was gay.”

We all knew Gordon was gay. We all knew that he was targeted for being gay. I didn’t know until today doing a search for the articles for the links that there was a gag order on the truth getting out.

How I managed to last four years in Utah, I will never know.

A little under ten years later Matthew Shepard was murdered. Tortured. For being gay.

Where am I going with this. Not really sure.

I guess, while I agree with FAF that this revelation should not get the attention of the news cycle that he is afraid it will get. . . I think that one can never underestimate the power of story. Read Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung. . . Stories can change the world. That’s why one of the first people they go after to shut up are the artists.

While I think the Dumbledore back story is interesting and not a big deal to me, I hope that this means that it is interesting and not a big deal to the thousands that have read the books and it is just another step toward the day that when my friend tries to come out to his mother, she won’t cut him off and say, “I don’t want to hear this.” Another step forward to the day when someone won’t be murdered and tortured for being gay.

I supposed they’ll be murdered and tortured for an altogether different reason, but that’s a rant for another day.

It is usually for a variety of things. I’m sure you can guess the usual suspects.

Today however, I had some spam for Best Cat Litter Boxes.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think they may want to rethink their online business model.

I’ve had a couple of comments and e-mails lately that are very nice indeed. I often wonder if it is worth while doing this little selfish project and you have given me a bit of a spark back.

Cheers!