Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I've Never Read

The Red Badge of Nope

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by the Broke and the Bookish.

According to my Goodreads profile, I've read nearly 4,000 books so far in my life, and that's only counting the books I've added on Goodreads. I read across a wide variety of books - picture books, young adult novels, adult nonfiction, etc. Even so, there are a few books that "everybody" has read that I just haven't. Without further ado, here are ten books that everyone has read that I have not and probably will not:

1. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. I am not a horse fan. I never went through a horse phase as a child, and although I read books where the main character was a dog, I never got into the horse stories.
2. The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks. I never read this one as a child. I'm not sure why. 
3. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I think I would have liked this one as a child, but I never read it, either.
4. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. I recommend this one regularly to kids who enjoy adventure stories, but I've actually never read it. 
5. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Everyone was talking about this book a while back, and I still see it circulating occasionally, but it's not for me.
6. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. My mother loved this book and the movie that followed. I couldn't possibly be interested in either. 
7. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Nope. I didn't read this one, either, and I know people who loved this book.
8. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. In college I assisted a high school teacher by marking her students' papers so she could grade them more quickly. I read through a large stack of papers written about this book without ever having read it. 
9. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I taught senior English for one year, and I had to teach this book, but I was less interested in reading it than the kids were, so I didn't. I discussed it with them, I wrote quizzes over it and gave them projects, but I never actually read the book. In fact, I didn't even try.
10. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. This book is the first book that was ever assigned to me where I did not finish it. It was not my cup of tea then and it still isn't now. I even completed a final project on this book - for which I received an A - and hadn't read more than two chapters. What's more, I taught this book to my 11th grade students for six years in a row, and I still never read through the entire book. When kids would ask questions in class about a particular point in the book, I would pretend I was a really good teacher and turn it back to the class: "What does everyone else think about this?" 

I could attempt to go back and redeem myself by reading these books, but honestly my to-read pile is large enough as it is, and I need to keep up with current children's and teen books for my job, so it's not likely that I will read any of these books any time soon.