Apparently these are the 106 books most often listed as 'unfinished' on LibraryThing. The rules are that you bold the ones you've read all the way to the end, underline the ones you read for "school" [I presume uni is included in this], and asterisk the ones you started but didn't finish.
I'm adding italic for those I've re-read.
I have followed Ampersand Duck's directions and here is my list. The bolding is a bit hard to read on screen so I've made my 'read all the way to the end' books a bit bigger.
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 [A] 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*
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
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
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
Apart from being great fun to do, a list such as this raises some interesting questions. What is it about these books that makes us buy them and then not finish reading them? Why is Jane Austen so prevalent in the list? Where is D.H. Lawrence? I read quite a bit of him at uni under sufferance and never want to read him again. I've tried to read Kangaroo a couple of times since, on the basis that it is probably the one Lawrence I should read, but have failed miserably. Why the top 106 and not the top 100? And why do we keep books that we haven't been able to finish reading? Why not donate them to the next Lifeline Bookfair?
Once upon a time I finished every book I began (with the exception of Charles Dickins - I've tried to read Great Expectations and Oliver Twist so many times). These days I am far more ruthless. I do try to give every book a good chance but if the reading is an effort, instead of a joy ... well, life's too short and there are too many books waiting to be read.
Now, with Mr M asleep, I'm going to go and read a book that isn't about Spot, Thomas, Bob or the Wiggles.
