I'm not doing the unread books meme again, because I actually invented it on Sunday. It's funny how these things catch on - it seems to have been copied onto upwards of 300 blogs, and now has even reached the on-line section of the Daily Telegraph. Very gratifying.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book (that is, last time that the algorithm was done - when I checked, I found most of them had a few more added to the total).

( list of books )

Lists of prize-winners, bolded if I've read them.

( Carnegie Medal )

( Newbery Medal )

From wyvernfriend:

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Literate Good Citizen
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Relieved to have just missed the cut as an Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm. Not quite sure how I managed it though. Alas, the nice red lines don't seem to come through on LJ.

The SFBC's list of significant sf and fantasy of the 1953-2003 period, first seen by me chez yhlee here, james_nicoll here and wyvernfriend here but now all over my friends list. As usaul, bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

( meme plus review links )

I am ashamed of not having read Little, Big; but I have never heard of Wilmar Shiras or Children of the Atom.

Come the weekend I shall do some number-crunching of other people's responses to this...

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.

I can't help myself...

(from pshtaku:)

What have I read?
These are the 25 most popular scifi books at What Should I Read Next?

I liked it!

I didn't like it!

I want to read it!

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams

The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien

Neuromancer - William Gibson

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

Dune - Frank Herbert

Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

The Princess Bride - William Goldman

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin

The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

The Stand - Stephen King

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein

The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett

Take the 'What have I read?' test now!
Eight different categories to try!
Buy your books at Amazon US or Amazon UK

1) Male and female reading meme:

Originally from communicator here; also ninebelow here. (And I think a couple of others, but can't find them.)

I rather agree with much of the criticism of these lists, but here goes anyway.

( Read more... )

2) Women's writing meme

Originally from sartorias, I think, but I saw it chez apotropaism here (and again I think elsewhere but can't find it right now). This one is a bit more confessional - includes the possibility of saying not just what you have read but admitting what you haven't.

( Read more... )

From ninebelow:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible (most of the interesting bits anyway)
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

Almost two months ago, truepenny came up with a meme - to list all the novels which have won the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, Tiptree, Dick, Stoker and  World Fantasy Awards and, as so often, bold the ones you have read. It was a pretty short-lived meme; in the next couple of days 34 people did it (all but one on livejournal) and then it died a death as these things do.

I thought it would be intertesting (well, interesting for me, anyway) to crunch through the numbers and see how many people of this self-selected group have actually read each of the award-winners. Excluding the Stoker winners, which seemed to have far less take-up, and the Sidewise Awards, which only one person listed, the results for the other 169 books are as follows (top twenty-ish above the cut tag, and the three which nobody had read below it):

32 (1st): Frank Herbert, Dune

29 (2nd): Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

28 (joint 3rd): Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

27 (5th): J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

26 (joint 6th): Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
William Gibson, Neuromancer

25 (joint 8th): Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
Larry Niven, Ringworld
Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

24 (joint 12th): Connie Willis, Doomsday Book
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

23 (joint 14th): David Brin, Startide Rising
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

22 (joint 16th): David Brin, The Uplift War
Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

21 (19th): Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

20 (joint 20th): Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

( others, all the way down to... )

0 (joint 166th): Carol Emshwiller, The Mount
Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife
Stepan Chapman, The Troika

I confess that I have never heard of either Louise Erdrich or Stepan Chapman, let alone their respective award-winning novels. Howver, I have read the top forty or so. The first I haven't yet read is China Mountain Zhang, followed by Little, Big and Mythago Wood, and then Thomas the Rhymer and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

That Dune came out on top overall is not so very surprising. I'm pleased by Le Guin's performance. Slightly surprised that Flowers for Algernon did not do even better - I thought it was a standard high-school assignment (certainly the most-visited page of my own website) but perhaps if you strictly count the novel rather than the original short story the count goes down. Other interesting data there as well, but I have been working on this for long enough.

(Thanks very much to agrumer, apotropaism, badgerbag, blue_condition, http://browriter.blogspot.com, burger_eater, communicator, ellen_fremedon, feyandstrange, firecat, gummitch, hollowpoint, jodawi, jry, kangeiko, katlinel, kerravonsen, ladyoflight2004, lenora_rose, linda_joyce, marykaykare, nhw, nickeyb, pariyal, peake, pigeonhed, sbisson, shsilver, sooguy, spacedoutlooney, tensegrity, tinaconnolly, vierran45 and especially truepenny for putting it into its standard form - user names link to the relevant entry in each case.)

Of course, I've been tracking the Hugos and Nebulas separately; but this was interesting. (Usual - bold if you've read.)

Thanks to truepenny here, burger_eater here, gummitch here, peake here, sbisson here and ajshepherd here.

( Read more... )

Bah, just realised that I've been reading Dhalgren for the last few days in the mistaken belief that it was also a Nebula winner. Oh well.

The Guardian's list of top 20 geek books: bolding the ones I've read.

( no surprise )

There are many problems with this list, not least that all the authors are male. cassiphone is therefore seeking advice on what should be in the canon by and for Geek Girls. Will be interesting to see what she comes up with.