I saw this meme on Livejournal and I just had to do it! I love love love reading, but I haven’t had as much time for it lately, due to all my schoolwork, volunteering, and research. I am determined to sit down during Thanksgiving break and read a book off of my to-read list ^__^

These are the top 200 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.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (260)
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (238)
3. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (215)
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (210)
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (185)
6. The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien (184)
7. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (179)
8. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (169)
9. Ulysses by James Joyce (169)
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (168)
11. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (155)
12. The Odyssey by Homer (154)
13. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (153)
14. The Iliad by Homer (150)
15. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (146)
16. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (145)
17. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (141)
18. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (140)
19. Moby Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville (140)
20. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (137)
21. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (136)
22. Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (136)
23. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (135)
24. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (135)
25. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (134)
26. Emma by Jane Austen (134)
27. Dracula by Bram Stoker (128)
28. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (126)
29. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (122)
30. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (122)
31. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (119)
32. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco (119)
33. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (119)
34. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (118)
35. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (118)
36. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (118)
37. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (117)
38. Middlemarch by George Eliot (117)
39. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (117)
40. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (116)
41. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (115)
42. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (115)
43. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (113)
44. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (111)
45. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (110)
46. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (110)
47. Inferno by Dante Alighieri (109)
48. Dune by Frank Herbert (109)
49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (108)
50. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (108)
51. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (107)
52. American Gods by Neil Gaiman (107)
53. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (107)
54. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (106)
55. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson (105)
56. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (105)
57. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (105)
58. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (104)
59. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (104)
60. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire (104)
61. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (104)
62. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (102)
63. Dubliners by James Joyce (101)
64. Atonement by Ian McEwan (101)
65. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (101)
66. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (101)
67. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (101)
68. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (101)
69. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (99)
70. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (99)
71. Persuasion by Jane Austen (98)
72. The Once and Future King by T. H. White (98)
73. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (98)
74. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (98)
75. The Complete Works of Shakespeare by William Shakespeare (97)
76. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (96)
77. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (95)
78. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (94)
79. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (94)
80. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (94)
81. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (94)
82. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (93)
83. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence (92)
84. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (92)
85. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt (92)
86. Tess of the D’Urbervilles: a pure woman faithfully… by Thomas Hardy (92)
87. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (92)
88. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (92)
89. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (92)
90. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (90)
91. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (90)
92. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (90)
93. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (90)
94. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (89)
95. Watership Down by Richard Adams (89)
96. The Plague by Albert Camus (89)
97. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder (88)
98. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (88)
99. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (88)
100. The Aeneid by Virgilio (87)
101. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (87)
102. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (87)
103. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (86)
104. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (86)
105. Tender is the Night: A Romance by F. Scott Fitzgerald (85)
106. On the origin of species by Charles Darwin (85)
107. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (85)
108. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (85)
109. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (85)
110. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (84)
111. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (84)
112. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (84)
113. The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien (84)
114. The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien (84)
115. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (84)
116. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (84)
117. Angels & Demons by Dan Brown (83)
118. The Confusion by Neal Stephenson (83)
119. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (83)
120. Possession by A. S. Byatt (83)
121. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (82)
122. Beloved by Toni Morrison (82)
123. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (82)
124. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (82)
125. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (82)
126. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (82)
127. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (81)
128. The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (80)
129. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (80)
130. Underworld by Don DeLillo (80)
131. Uncle Tom’s cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (79)
132. The Trial by Franz Kafka (79)
133. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes… by Neil Gaiman (79)
134. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (79)
135. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (79)
136. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (79)
137. The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien (78)
138. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to… by Lynne Truss (78)
139. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (78)
140. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (78)
141. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (78)
142. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (77)
143. East of Eden by John Steinbeck (77)
144. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (77)
145. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (77)
146. The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again by J. R. R. Tolkien (77)
147. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (76)
148. White Teeth by Zadie Smith (76)
149. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (76)
150. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (76)
151. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott (76)
152. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt (75)
153. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at… by Erik Larson (75)
154. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (75)
155. Candide by Voltaire (75)
156. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (75)
157. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (75)
158. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (75)
159. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (74)
160. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (74)
161. Baudolino by Umberto Eco (74)
162. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (74)
163. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (73)
164. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (73)
165. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (73)
166. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (72)
167. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (72)
168. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (72)
169. The Republic by Plato (72)
170. The Hours by Michael Cunningham (71)
171. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster (71)
172. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (71)
173. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (71)
174. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (71)
175. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (70)
176. Silas Marner by George Eliot (70)
177. The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first… by Thomas L. Friedman (70)
178. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (70)
179. The Stranger by Albert Camus (70)
180. Cloud atlas by David Mitchell (70)
181. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (70)
182. The System of the World by Neal Stephenson (69)
183. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (69)
184. The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan (69)
185. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs (69)
186. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (69)
187. Eragon by Christopher Paolini (69)
188. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (69)
189. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (69)
190. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene (69)
191. The Gunslinger by Stephen King (68)
192. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (68)
193. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (68)
194. A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin (68)
195. Neuromancer by William Gibson (68)
196. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (68)
197. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (67)
198. Empire Falls by Richard Russo (67)
199. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (67)
200. The Art of War by Sun Tzu (67)

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I was reading an article, Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It, at New York Times today and it made me sad. According to the piece, bookstores are slowly losing revenue and some are even closing due to the easy of buying and reselling books online.

“In other words, it’s all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them.”

In some ways, the Internet has made it easier to read more books, making lesser known and rarer books available, especially the classics and out-of-print books that are now hard to find in some stores. On the other hand, though, it cuts into profits for both bookstore, publishing companies, and authors, because when people like me or you sell or trade books with each other, the three entities mentioned above don’t get a single cent out of our transaction.

I’ll admit that I’m one of those guilty of using the Internet (and libraries because they’re free!) a lot more than bookstores when it comes to acquiring new books. Lately, I’ve been using Swaptree.com, which allows you to list all the old books, dvds, and CDs that you don’t want anymore, create a wishlist of items that you do want, and then uses a system to match you up with someone who can trade with you so that everyone ends up happy. Neat, right? So far, I’ve gotten an almost brand-new copy of Kung Fu Panda, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the book The Queen’s Fool in exchange for old books I didn’t read anymore. Someone else’s trash is another person’s treasure, right? And what’s wrong with spreading the love of books all around?

I do love going to Barnes and Nobles, but just looking at the price tags on some of the books makes me cringe. Why should I pay $20 for a hardcover copy of Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes when I can get the same book, used but in almost new condition, for around $5 or less online? Or pay $200 for a new textbook when I can find the same thing for $100 on Half.com? I think what the publishing companies and bookstores need to do is capitalize on the advantages that the Internet offers. E-books are quickly becoming popular, and it’s an area they should look further into. Otherwise, they have to find other means of luring customers into stores or face a slow death of the industry :(

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