5) The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

My Unread Books Project has not delivered me a barrel of laughs so far, and I have to say that my heart sank as the narrator is raped at the age of fourteen on the first page; Oh no, I thought, it's Beloved all over again. But in fact this turns into a really heartwarming story of triumph against economic and emotional adversity, of love and laughter overcoming the obstacles of gender and racial segregation. It was also (as the last in a reading programme which included The System of the World and The Brothers Karamazov) really short, only 244 pages. In fact, of the ten books I have read as a result of my pledge to make my "unread" list less embarrassing, I think this is the only one I have unequivocally enjoyed. (I did wonder to what extent the African bits were a response to Things Fall Apart.)

Actually the full list of books I own but haven't read is here. The ten most frequently tagged as "unread" by other Librarything users are:

1. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (☑)
2. Persuasion, by Jane Austen (☑)
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (☑)
4. Beloved by Toni Morrison (☑)
5. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli (☑)
6. The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson (☑)
7. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (☑)
8. The Confessions of Saint Augustine (☑)
9. Villette, by Charlotte Bronte (☑)
10. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (☑)

Some of these were reasonably high on the to-read pile; others will get promoted when I get back.