Back to Blogging: Booklist and New Tool

OK, so I live in Cincinnati now, and I have been thinking that I wanted to get back to blogging (since summer is PRIME TIME for basking in the sunshine and reading my afternoons away) but "the road outside my house, is paved with good intentions" as it were.

Anyway, today I was sitting at my desk in my new lab, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work related reading that I have to do, so I decided to take a break and find something else to read.

So I went to the blogger website. In blogs of note for the month, they have listed Women in Science, which seemed interesting... since I suppose I am one. From there, I checked out Neurosciencegirl... since I suppose I am one of those too. There I found the list below, which I thought was interesting.

This is the list of the 100 or so books most often listed as "unread" by LibraryThing users. You're supposed to bold the books you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started and didn't finish. Interestingly, blogger doesn't seem to have an underline feature, I assume because that implies that something is a link, so I'm just bolding what I've read, no matter what the reason. I'm also putting a (*) next to the ones that I own but haven't read, (**) for books that are in my digital book's library but not yet read. Here's my list:

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
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities**
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
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
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
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
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**
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
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
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**

So a couple of things I think are slightly interesting: There are 102 books on this list, and I have read only 36 of them, (which doesn't seem like so very many). I traced the list back as many blogs as I could (turned out to be four) and 36 seems better than average. Also, I seem to be a lot less likely to start but not finish.

Of course, the other intriguing thing about this is : "Where does this list come from again? What exactly is Library Thing?" And it turns out that LibraryThing.com is a very cool little website where you can create a personal profile with all the books in your own library, rate and review them, and then connect with people that have similar taste in books or get recommendations for things to read. So I joined up, and while my library is not even sort of started yet, here it is.

So that makes this list make a little more sense to me, because it didn't seem like a real "Top 100" by any criteria I can think of, but it totally makes sense to me as the "100 books that people that really love books are most likely to have bought, be willing to admit that they own, but not gotten around to actually reading." If that's the criteria, then a list that combines classics (cult and literary) with a bunch of fairly recent popular fiction and some interesting but general non-fiction makes perfect sense. A list of books that would lead readers to think, "I really should read that..."

And by that standard, I am a pretty boring, normal reader. Because there are only about three books here that I have not at least picked up and considered at one point or another... such is life.

Anyway, I'll get internet access back on Monday, and then spend a couple of days playing with my LibraryThing bookshelf, and writing some reviews and figuring out what standards I am going to rate books by, and hopefully using this all as a reason to get back to blogging. We'll see how that goes.