I Can Haz A Reading List

From Notes From Evil Bender (which has to be a one of the best blog names I've seen in a while), Welcome to the “106 Books of Pretension,” meme which is really “the top 106 books most often marked as ‘unread’ by LibraryThing’s users.” I wouldn't rate a lot of these books as being pretentious some of them are very good and not at all up themselves a few are probable shite - Altas Shrugged comes to mind for one. Anyway copying Evil Bender's style, books I’ve read are in italics and books I began but didn't finished are crossed out:

* 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 I got it out of the school libary it was probably a bit too dense for me as a 13 yo
* Moby Dick
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary found it dull
* The Odyssey
* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre
* The 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 I had to pack it away when I moved here.
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations
* American Gods
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
* Atlas Shrugged
* 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 not sure why I haven't finished this, I've rather enjoyed what I've read so far
* The Once and Future King
* The Grapes of Wrath
* The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
* 1984
* Angels & Demons
* The Inferno
* The Satanic Verses
* 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
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* Dune
* The Prince
* The Sound and the Fury
* 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
* 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 to my shame
* 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 thought it was rubbish
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down
* Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit
* In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
* White Teeth
* Treasure Island
* David Copperfield
* The Three Musketeers

Not A Reference Book

Not A Reference Book, originally uploaded by Jane Goth.

I used to think that Waterstones was a relatively decent book shop but that opinion has been evaporating recently. The popular science section has books about the human soul and the afterlife slotted in, the academic science section had books about "The Law of Attraction" aka "The Secret" stocked there. The Secret is not science ffs it's woo of the highest order. Now you can just about understand that book shops are pretty poor on what is science after all their employees are not trained librarians and they tend to work there because they love reading (classics, literature) not because they love the science, but surely they should be able to recognise a reference book from entertainment.