I’m such a sucker for these meme/booklist things. Sigh.
Courtesy of Jaquandor:

…it’s a list of books most often marked “Unread” on LibraryThing, indicating books people have copies of either so they can say they own them, or in the best intentions of reading ’em someday if only James Patterson would quit churning out must-read thrillers or whatnot. (Like I’m any different!) Anyway, the instructions are to bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you’ve started but not finished. I’ll add another two rules: strike the ones you know you’ll never, ever read and don’t even own a copy of, and mark with a star (*) the ones you own and really, genuinely intend to read one of these days. OK? OK!

(Note: I made a few minor editorial changes to Jaq’s set-up; hope nobody minds!)

To this set of instructions, I’d also add a mark to indicate the books you do not own but would like to read one of these days. Let’s make that one a plus sign ( +).

Alright then, shall we?

• 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
  (I’ve only read an excerpt of this one in college, but it was enough to know that, while it was ambitious and fascinating of James Joyce to attempt to reconstruct the English language, it’s also an impossible slog to actually read.)
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• A Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies +
• 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
  (I know enough of Ayn Rand by reputation to know that I’d end up hurling this book across the room before I got a third of the way through it.)
• 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*
  (I’m ashamed — and amused — to note that I’ve had my copy of this book since the fifth grade, and still haven’t gotten around to reading it. But I will one of these days, dammit!)
• The Grapes of Wrath*
• The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
• 1984
• Angels & Demons
  (No interest in this one whatsoever…Dan Brown can keep all his Vatican conspiracy nonsense.)
• The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
  (I read The Inferno, but not the other two. I’ve also read Larry Niven’s updated version of Inferno, in which a dead science-fiction writer embarks on a journey through Dante’s hell, convinced he’s in some kind of highly sophisticated amusement park or simulation.)
• The Satanic Verses
  (Sorry, Robert, I know this is one of your faves, but I’ve never heard anything about this book that really piques my interest…)
• 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
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
  (Wonderful celebration of the early days of comic books, Literature-with-a-capital-L that dares to focus on the lowbrow pulp stuff I personally love…)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
  (I really dislike Faulkner. Somebody should’ve told that man about the concept of the run-on sentence.)
• 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
  (Unlike Ulysses, the excerpt of which that I read being sheer torture, I found Joyce’s short stories delightful, and some of the imagery from “Araby” in particular still lingers in my memory…)
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves +
• The Mists of Avalon +
• Oryx and Crake: a novel
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The 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
  (One of those books that seems very trendy for young men of a certain age to really dig into and hash over during late-night dorm room conversations, like Way of the Peaceful Warrior, but which I have always suspected to be filled with hogwash. Besides, I’m no longer a young man of a certain age.)
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down +
• Gravity’s Rainbow
  (Ugh, Pynchon. Again, apologies to my friend Cranky Robert, but I really disliked Pynchon the one and only time I tried to read him.)
• The Hobbit
  (I think I’ve read this one; to tell you the truth, I don’t remember for sure. I may have just seen the Rankin-Bass cartoon, then started reading the book but never finished it, and somehow conflated the two in my mind.)
• In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences +
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island*
• David Copperfield +
• The Three Musketeers*

Hm. You know, I like to think of myself as a fairly well-read and literary guy, but lists like this really make me question that. It isn’t just the gaps in my background (i.e., the titles I haven’t read) or even the large swath of them that I don’t have much interest in, one way or the other (the Russian authors and the Bronte sisters, for instance, fill me with indifference). No, it’s the large number of ones I haven’t even heard of. Or, if I have heard of them, only dimly, peripherally… that is, I know I’ve heard the titles, but I have no idea what they’re about or why I should care. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is an example, or Life of Pi, or The Kite Runner… all books that I know people have been chattering about, but somehow they just haven’t impinged on my awareness. What’s wrong with my life that I don’t know what these things are?