170 down, 831 to go
I recently picked up a used copy of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. As the title would suggest, it features essays on 1,001 books that the editors have chosen as important or essential reading. The book is fundamentally flawed as it features eleven selections by J.M. Coetzee and only two by F.Scott Fitzgerald. It also entirely skips over William Styron, Walker Percy, A.M. Homes, Denis Johnson, John Fante, Richard Yates, Richard Powers, Norman Mailer, etc. It's an interesting book, though, and I'm sure it'll become a valuable resource as I look for new books to read.
Of course, the first thing I have to do when I get a book like this is go through it and write down all the books I've already read. I've read 170 of them so far. I have highlighted my favorites in red; my least favorites are in green. What did I learn from all this? Well, it turns out that I've read far too much D.H. Lawrence. At the same time, I've also managed to skip over just about everything ever written by a woman. Watch out Brontë sisters, you're next.
- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra - Don Quixote
- Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
- Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Frankenstein
- James Fenimore Cooper - Last of the Mohicans
- Edgar Allan Poe - The Fall of the House of Usher
- Edgar Allan Poe - The Pit and the Pendulum
- Edgar Allan Poe - The Purloined Letter
- Alexandre Dumas - The Three Musketeers
- Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
- Herman Melville - Moby Dick
- Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
- Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
- Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons
- Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from the Underground
- Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
- Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
- Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
- Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Idiot
- Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
- Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There
- Jules Verne - Around the World in Eighty Days
- Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
- Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
- Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
- Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island
- Leo Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilyich
- Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- H.Rider Haggard - King Solomon's Mines
- Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper
- Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
- H.G. Wells - The Time Machine
- H.G. Wells - The Island of Dr. Moreau
- Bram Stoker - Dracula
- H.G. Wells - The Invisible Man
- H.G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
- Henry James - The Turn of the Screw
- Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim
- Rudyard Kipling - Kim
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles
- Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
- Henry James - The Wings of the Dove
- E.M. Forster - Where Angels Fear to Tread
- E.M. Forster - A Room with a View
- E.M. Forster - Howards End
- Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome
- D.H. Lawrence - Sons and Lovers
- D.H. Lawrence - The Rainbow
- Ford Madox Ford - The Good Soldier
- Akutagawa Ryunosuke - Rashomon
- James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- D.H. Lawrence - Women in Love
- Sinclair Lewis - Main Street
- Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence
- James Joyce - Ulysses
- Sinclair Lewis - Babbitt
- Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha
- E.M. Forster - A Passage to India
- Yevgeny Zamyatin - We
- Franz Kafka - The Trial
- F.Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
- Franz Kafka - The Castle
- Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises
- Virginia Woolf - To The Lighthouse
- D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover
- William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
- Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
- Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms
- Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
- Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
- F.Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night
- Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer
- Halldor Laxness - Independent People
- J.R.R. Tokien - The Hobbit
- John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
- John Dos Passos - U.S.A.
- James Joyce - Finnegans Wake
- John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
- Richard Wright - Native Son
- Albert Camus - The Outsider
- George Orwell - Animal Farm
- Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited
- Albert Camus - The Plague
- Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano
- Alan Paton - Cry, the Beloved Country
- Graham Greene - The Heart of the Matter
- George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four
- J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
- Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
- Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
- James Baldwin - Go Tell It on the Mountain
- William Golding - Lord of the Flies
- Nikos Kazantzakis - The Last Temptation of Christ
- Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
- J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
- John Barth - The Floating Opera
- Lawrence Durrell - Justine
- Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin
- Jack Kerouac - On the Road
- T.H. White - The Once and Future King
- John Barth - The End of the Road
- Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
- Saul Bellow - Henderson the Rain King
- John Updike - Rabbit, Run
- Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
- Joseph Heller - Catch-22
- Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
- J.D. Salinger - Franny and Zooey
- Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
- Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
- Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
- Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- John Fowles - The Collector
- Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Cat's Cradle
- Thomas Pynchon - V.
- Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
- Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
- John Fowles - The Magus
- Milan Kundera - The Joke
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Richard Brautigan - In Watermelon Sugar
- Vladimir Nabokov - Ada
- Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
- Kingsley Amis - The Green Man
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Slaughterhouse Five
- Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Breakfast of Champions
- E.L. Doctorow - Ragtime
- Stephen King - The Shining
- Anais Nin - The Delta of Venus
- John Irving - The World According to Garp
- Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
- Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
- Alice Walker - The Color Purple
- Graham Swift - Waterland
- Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- Don DeLillo - White Noise
- Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tail
- John Irving - The Cider House Rules
- Amy Hempel - Reasons to Live
- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons - Watchmen
- Toni Morrison - Beloved
- Don DeLillo - Libra
- Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
- Thomas Pynchon - Vineland
- Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho
- Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient
- Jeffrey Eugenides - The Virgin Suicides
- Irvine Welsh - Trainspotting
- Alan Warner - Morvern Callar
- Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
- Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter
- Ian McEwan - Amsterdam
- Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves
- Zadie Smith - White Teeth
- Chuck Palahniuk - Choke
- Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections
- Ian McEwan - Atonement
- Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
- Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
- T.Coraghessan Boyle - Drop City
- Philip Roth - The Plot Against America
- Zadie Smith - On Beauty
[NOTE: I doubt anyone out there actually has an interest in this, but I wasted two hours writing it all down, so I figured I should post it here instead of just storing it on my computer in an Excel file.]
Comments
It's nice that with the list you've found it's less expensive to work on checking off all the items.
That's a great story. You've got to admire the man for his optimism. Or maybe he's already visited all the places and just wanted to double-check to make sure he didn't overlook one.
I'm going to look for 1001 Places the next time I'm in a bookstore. I bet I've only been to seven or eight of the places mentioned.
Of your 170, I've read 24!
Sure, you've only read 24 of my 170, but I bet you've read a lot of the other 831 I haven't gotten around to. On top of that, you've read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the original Russian. That's very impressive. I had enough trouble with them in English.
As far as To The Lighthouse vs. Lolita goes, I thought the former was perhaps the most boring book I've ever slogged through. I read Lolita as a teenager and I honestly don't remember much of it. I don't often reread books, but it's one I'd like to revisit. Nabokov is one of my all-time favorites, but that is really based more on Pnin and Pale Fire.
LOVED Pale Fire. I thought the poem alone was worth the cost of admission, and then you get that whole meta-fiction around it. Genius.
Any John Cheever on their list? He's essential for my money--although ironically I've only read his journals and short stories, none of the novels yet.
"Genius" is a word that is thrown around too often, but you're definitely right in applying it to Nabokov and Pale Fire.
John Cheever is another one they skipped over. His big red book of short stories is probably my all-time favorite collection and should have been included. (The only other collection that even comes close for me is Stories by T.C. Boyle.) As far as Cheever novels go, the only one I've ever read is The Wapshot Chronicle. I'd highly recommend it.