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, italicize what you started but didn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The number after each title is the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.
Put an asterisk before each book you want or plan to read. 


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)   (...it's a good concept, but moves very slowly...)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and Punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (115)  
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi: A Novel (94)
*The Name of the Rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84) (is this the joyce?)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)   (i love the long movie...but can't stand reading austen.  boooooring.)
Jane Eyre (80)
A Tale of Two Cities (80)
*The Brothers Karamazov (80)
*Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (79)
War and Peace (78)
Vanity Fair (74)
The Time Traveler's Wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)      (the only reason i made it through this austen was because it was assigned...)
*The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (70)
American Gods (68)
*A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
*Atlas Shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury Tales (64)
The Historian: A Novel (63)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
*Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's Pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
*A Clockwork Orange (59)
*Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (57)
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (57)  (yeah...kind of got bored.  sorry to all my close friends who love this book.)
1984 (57)
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
*One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's Travels (53)
Les Misérables (53)
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
*The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52)
Dune (51)  (VERY good. and i'm not even a sci-fi freak)
The Prince (51)
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
*A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present (51)
*Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
*A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
*A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50)        (again...i don't do well with classic american/english literature)
*The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (49)  (i kind of can't stand toni morrison's books)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49)
The Scarlet Letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake: A Novel (47)
*Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (46) (I HATE THIS BOOK.  WITH A PASSION)
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's Rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (44)
*White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The Three Musketeers (44) 

so. tonight (in just less than 12 hours, actually) i will be on my TRAIN to frankfurt. :-D so exciting. am sort of done packing. my suitcases are so freaking heavy. i'm glad kirsten and christoph are driving me to the train station; it will be much less torturous. i still have a billion of little last minute things i have to do. hrm. i can't believe the fulbright is OVERRRRR. sweet.

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22.5 days until i will be on a train to Frankfurt.
23.5 days until i will be on Lufthansa 0446 from Frankfurt to Denver.
23.5 days + 11 hours until i am back in a country where people understand and appreciate me.
ok, maybe that's too harsh...
just have had some setbacks in the last two weeks or so.
now i am SO ready to go home.

only person/thing HERE that's keeping me sane at this point is christoph. so grateful he is willing to ride his bike across town at 11 P.M. when i have a crisis, take me down to the riverside, split a bottle of wine with me, and listen to me vent until 2 A.M.

things i am looking forward to:
--getting my certificate of completion/evaluation from Fulbright and my school
--seeing my parents
--tackling my dog
--seeing my 2 aunts and uncle and 2 cousins who live in colorado
--drinking pomalutes with aunt maribeth (pomalute= pomegranate juice, absolute vodka, tonic, ice, lime =heaven)
--my nanny coming to visit from august 4-18
--seeing my 1st grade teacher and her husband, who live in denver
--seeing my childhood best friend, ryan, who just moved to denver!
--road trip: denver-st. louis-gambier-ann arbor-granger-chicago
--meeting and bonding with my car
--driving. loud music. glass roof open.
--mexican food
--possible august trip to florida to see lizzy
--getting a manicure/pedicure with my mommy
--calling people on my cell phone
--starbucks drive-through
--sushi
--hiking
--going to the hot-springs

--knowing that somehow, i survived this profoundly difficult year.

Violence as 30,000 join G-8 demos

ROSTOCK, Germany (AP) -- Tens of thousands of protesters marched through the northern port city of Rostock on Saturday to protest the upcoming Group of Eight meeting of industrialized powers.

Around 13,000 police were on hand, and authorities said about 30,000 protesters had come for the daylong demonstration under the motto "another world is possible."

Police helicopters hovered overhead as thousands of demonstrators marched behind a truck blowing out soap bubbles and carrying a rock band that played anti-globalization songs like "Block G-8."

Riot police were deployed as a precaution and officers videotaped the demonstration. Some protesters covered their heads and faces with black hoods, sunglasses and scarves, while others chanted protest slogans through megaphones, blowing whistles and waving flags.

A group of protesters attacked police cars with rocks, bottles and paint bombs, authorities said, adding that a hotel where a U.S. delegation is supposed to stay during the G-8 summit was also attacked.

Rocks and broken beer bottles lay on the ground in front of a bank building where protesters smashed half a dozen windows.

Most stores along the route had boarded up there windows before the protests -- with the exception of sausage stands and other fast food restaurants.

Dozens of different groups, including communists, anarchists and environmentalists, were taking part and messages were mixed: Some urged action from the G-8 countries in the fight against HIV/AIDS, African poverty and climate change, while others questioned the legitimacy of the existence of the G-8 itself.

"The world shaped by the dominance of the G-8 is a world of war, hunger, social divisions, environmental destruction and barriers against migrants and refugees," organizers said in leaflets handed out on the streets. "We want to protest against this and show the alternatives."

The protest comes before the three-day summit that opens Wednesday in the nearby northern resort town of Heiligendamm, where German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosts the leaders of the other G-8 nations -- Britain, France, Japan, Italy, Russia, Canada and the United States.

In the morning, protesters gathered at two meeting points in town, to march along two different three-mile (five-kilometer) routes into downtown Rostock and converge in the late afternoon at the harbor for speeches, followed by a concert.

Protester Kay Stenzel got up at 3 a.m. (0100 GMT) to drive in from the eastern city of Bautzen with four friends to voice his discontent with the G-8 leaders.

"They want to impose their wills upon the poor nations," he said at the meeting point outside Rostock's main train station.

He waved a red flag onto which he had painted a black cat, an animal he chose because it was "unruly."

On their Web site, organizers emphasized that they wanted a peaceful protest.

"There is no reason to be afraid to come to the big demonstration in Rostock," they said. "We will have a very big, very colorful and very strong demonstrations. We do not expect major problems with the police."

They then added, however: "This may be different with the actions following later in the week of protest."

After a demonstration by the far-right National Democratic Party in nearby Schwerin was banned on Saturday morning, about 40 party members gathered at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and briefly uncovered their party's flag before police stopped them.

Several right-wing extremist protesters were detained, police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said.

i'm tired, but it's a really satisfied kind of stupor. I try to go on my long runs on saturdays, so today i went for 2 hours. it was really good. the sun actually came out from time to time. i think soon i'll up the weekend run to 2.5 hours. so then if i total up my weekly runs, i'll be going approx 4-4.5 hours per week. that's like a marathon per week. not bad. kind of dreading moving back to colorado because the altitude totally fucks up my endurance. last summer i would go 4 days a week, and i could never make it longer than 45 minutes and i'd be totally dead at the end. the altitude at my parents' is even higher than denver (which is the "mile-high city") so i guess that's why i had so many problems.

topher- i'm kind of obssessed with your e.p. lately. i put it on the ipod and listen to it way too loud. :-)

i've actually been (gasp) somewhat busier lately. not at school, but my social life. i've been hanging out with christoph, one of kirsten's colleagues. he has a weird sense of humor, so we get along well. we went out last wednesday night to see "das leben der anderen", a film that takes place in berlin in 1984...i think it just won an oscar. anyway, REALLY good movie. very suspenseful. then, we went to this cuban restaurant for dinner. i promptly ordered a huge long island because i didn't have to work the next day. christoph had to work the next morning at 8 am, so i figured he wouldn't drink, but we ended up each having 3 long islands. i wasn't wasted, but nicely buzzed, so we had a good time. we exchanged drunk stories, etc etc. didn't get home til 12.30 or so. he sent me a text the next morning saying how hungover he was. ha!

then on friday, christoph came over and kirsten and he and i had pancake night. i made my chocolate chip fluffy american pancakes and christoph made his complicated german ones with walnuts and banana and meringue. yes, christoph fits the stereotype of gay man who loves cooking. anyway, it was fun to binge on pancakes together. we then lined up a few weekends in march/april for going to the theater and going to berlin and stuff.

on saturday i spent the day with gabi and frank and their friends from leipzig who came up for the weekend. we went and walked on the beach first, for like 3 hours. germans shouldn't ever say "let's go on a walk", they should say "let's go on a neverending trek until everyone is sweating and panting." seriously, whenever germans say they are going on a "walk", it really means something much more involved and strenuous. i'm used to it by now so it was no surprise, but it's still a funny german quirk i notice. then we went to karl's erlebnishof and saw their ice sculptures. fun. then had to endure torsten, one of the leipzig guys, and his hour-long rant about how americans don't build their houses correctly, and it's our own fault they blow over in tornadoes, and blah blahblah. kind of annoying.

now must go to work. maybe more later. if you're lucky.

i stand in my bare feet
on the warm concrete
seeping the heat of the summer day
quick to pass but slow to die.

smoke curls under the eaves
dog on the grass

we pass our evenings like this.

seemingly unimportant times
but we repeat this scene
with the unfolding of years
it is a well-worn crease
on my mind.

we don't look at each other
we'd rather look out
our words drift up with the smoke
caught in the trees
for me to ponder.

and when i'm far
my feet on some foreign plane
i still have your words
from a much greater distance

but we can't stand together
with the smoke curling up
into the eaves
and the words
hovering in the trees.