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From syaffolee who got it from dustbury who got it from fillyjonk who got it from Steph.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as unread by Library Thing's users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded....

Bold = books I've read
Italics = books I've started but haven't finished

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: the fates of human societies
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 : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
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 Miserables
The Corrections
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: a novel
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
The Three Musketeers

My thoughts on this list: Dickens, Dostoevsky, the Brontes, Austen, Woolf I understand - honestly, I find them hard to get through. Atwood, Eco and Tolstoy? That's harsh.

• High-pitched voices are most attractive -- with a few exceptions
• Researchers watch brain rewire itself after stroke
• What happens when you split your brain
• Fiddling Around With History
• And everything of ThinkDenkespecially the caption contest

I didn't know there was a forger, Han van Meegeren who made a lot of money on fake Vermeers until I read this book review on nytimes and this other article here. Here you can see a collection of his forgeries.

Christ at Emmaus

Washing of Christ Feet

Christ and the Adulteress

I couldn't believe they were Vermeers - they were stiff, almost 2D, almost well, ugly. Well, yes, Vermeer is not always wonderful. Pieces I classify as painting-on-a-bad day are Diana and Her Companions, Christ In The House of Martha and Mary and St Praxedis. Perhaps, it is quite close to St Praxedis on the badness scale that it could be mistaken as Vermeer. These pieces seem to be far worse than Vermeer on a bad day.

Then, I realised that if they were signed as IVMeer, it is difficult to assert they are forgeries unless there is concrete proof and fairly accurate dating.

On the other hand, they are so...ugly. Look at the window and table of Christ at Emmaus and the bread in the Washing of Christ Feet. The light treatment of the window looks harsh and the table as if it's being stopped from floating. The furniture in Vermeer always looks heavy and stuck firmly to the ground. The bread is so unappetizing, unlike the bread in The Milkmaid no wonder Christ doesn't even want it! Big clue there!

Or is it only me being hungry again?

The Maturity Structure of Corporate Risk Management.
The method of deriving the depth of firm hedging and the maturity of hedging for oil trading companies is intelligent and tricky and I love it! An oil company will buy some crude oil futures. Assuming no margins posted, there is no movements in the accounting books. (Simplistic idea because mark to market would occur monthly at least.) At time of book closing, when we have to put it in the balance sheet, we update the prices and include in our books the unrealised gains. Company buys crude at spot and this is registered as inventory. Any realised gain is realised to cash. Once the crude is refined, this is sold off and this is registered as Cost of Goods Sold as the amount of the hedge put in place (crude oil futures). The inventory is reduced. Profits is posted as well for the sale of goods. TADA!

Since the hedging can take place any time but since the futures contract is quarterly, the assumption is that hedging can take place 3/6/2/25 months. Alternatively, the hedging can take place at 3 month and rolled over every three months to reach the desired hedging maturity. Any the hedging activity will show up in the cost and sales using lagged futures prices and where do they show up? COGS. TADA!

So, the authors fix numerous stimulus equation to breaking down cost and revenue and the cost or profits relating to hedging using GMM. All the equations whizzed by with a series of question marks in my head. Then, they feed in accounting data and found that there is not a lot of hedging done by the corporations.

Institutional Investors, Credit Supply Uncertainty, and the Leverage of the Firm
The concept seemed interesting when I scanned the abstract and summary. It seems that the reason for not coming up with bonds is because of supply-side problems not just demand side problems. Then, I came home and lost interest in this paper. I like generalisations, I guess. Now the problem becomes, on one hand, on the other.

VIX Option Valuation
I came in when the presenter was showing strings and strings and strings of greek letters and furiously daydreamt about lunch. Does she really expect everyone to be able to follow all that in 20 minutes?

Predicting Credit Spreads
I think he was talking about credit spreads. Yeah. I was trying very hard to follow the talk - really, I did. I was listening and I could recognise the slope, curve and level of spreads in the equation. Then, he went on about riskless factor and somewhere in my mind, brakes were jammed and screeched and I was thinking "WHAT RISKLESS FACTOR?" and that went on until he began to showed some error graphs at the end of the models he made and said, I'm the king of the world. Not literally but the picture of the lion on the thank you slide said it.

Risk Assessment and Asset Allocation with Gross Exposure Constraints for Large portfolios
I wish I have a pet babelfish because in the middle of his talk he said something like "I will show you the money" and got the portfolio/investment managers incredibly excited. The article is not completed but he seem to have created a particular formula to allocate assets. The troublesome thing with allocation of assets is the with a constraint on the expected return and the ability to hold short positions and he said he has done it. The math looks impossibly brilliant, however. Yeah, it has a lot of greek letters.