WordRidden

1001 Books to Read Before You Die

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Following on from the food meme, here’s a meme about my other favorite thing: books!

The 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die meme (if you could even really call it a meme) is several months old. It’s based on the book of the same name which was published two years ago to much grumbling about what was included and what wasn’t. I went through the list back in May and noted which books I’d read with the intention of writing about them here, but…then I kind of forgot.

Well, better late than never, eh? What follows is not a list of all 1001 books, but rather a list of the 96 that I’ve actually read. I’ve tried to be fair and not include books that I’ve “kind of” read or just read some of—like Heart of Darkness, The Tin Drum and Ulysses, all of which I’ve started but not (yet) gotten to the end of. In some cases, I found it hard to remember whether I’d really read a particular book or just seen the movie—appalling, I know. It’s also appalling to see how many classic books I haven’t read, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or anything by Jane Austen, or indeed most anything by Dickens. Oh, the shame.

Still, I have read 96 of the 1001 books, which apparently makes me 9.59% well read—that’s not too bad, I suppose. My rate was bumped up by three main factors: that I actually read most of the books assigned to me in high school, that I studied German literature in college, and that I now read so much George Orwell, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan (five each from the list). And I suppose the fourth main factor would be that I just like to read.

If you want to keep track of your own progress on the 1001 books, you can download a handy Excel spreadsheet from Arukiyomi. The spreadsheet will also tell you, based on your current age, how many books you need to read per year to get through all 1001 before you kick the average bucket. In my case, it’s 20—a not entirely unreasonable number if I were to dedicate myself solely to reading books off the list. Which I have absolutely no intention of doing.

So, with no further ado:

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Saturday – Ian McEwan
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson (I recently re-read this. So. Much. Fun.)
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Enduring Love – Ian McEwan

Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
The Reader – Bernhard Schlink (read in German)
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg (in German)
The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
Possession – A.S. Byatt
Moon Palace – Paul Auster
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving

Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco (one of my favorite books EVAR—read many times)
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks (interesting to see this included)
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
World’s End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons (interesting to see this too—read twice)

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
Contact – Carl Sagan (read several times)
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (read several times)
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Shame – Salman Rushdie
Waterland – Graham Swift
The Color Purple – Alice Walker

Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally
The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco (in German and English)
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino (in German)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The World According to Garp – John Irving
The Shining – Stephen King
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Sula – Toni Morrison
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess (read at least twice)
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Once and Future King – T.H. White

On the Road – Jack Kerouac
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien (Jeremy read the whole thing to me, and I’ve read it myself)
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (read at least twice)
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell (another all-time fave—read many times)
If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Outsider – Albert Camus
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Coming Up for Air – George Orwell

The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
Burmese Days – George Orwell
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
The Castle – Franz Kafka (in German)
The Trial – Franz Kafka (in German)
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann (in German)
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
Death in Venice – Thomas Mann (in German)
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann (in German—so very, very long)
Dracula – Bram Stoker (I’ve read this myself, and Jeremy’s read it to me as well)
Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane (in German)
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky