1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Jessa Crispin has an interesting interview with Peter Boxall, editor of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I loved what Boxall said at the end:

“Having benefited from an extraordinary number of emails and letters as well as reviews asking why I haven’t put this or that title on, I think that a second edition of the book would look different in many ways. One irate Australian man wrote a furious, but incredibly insightful letter, giving me a list of perhaps sixty great writers who I had ignored. I found that letter extremely enlightening. I have it still. So the answer is yes, the very idea of a canon of 1001 titles that is closed and complete seems a ludicrous idea. But the aim of the book, as far as I am concerned, is not to produce a finished, exclusive list, but to stimulate debate about what we read and why.”

I love lists. They make me think. I always get good suggestions for further reading as well.

Here are some fun lists I’ve linked to – or posted myself – with cool discussions in the comments.

100 greatest novels of all time

The lifetime reading plan

Book list: Books I’ve read

My list of favorite history/biography/historical fiction

My list of contemporary must-read fiction

My favorite fictional characters

Books that made me cry

I thought I had posted Thomas Jefferson’s essential reading list – he put it in a letter to a nephew, I think – “books an intelligent man MUST have read” – but I can’t find it on my blog. Hmmm. I know I have a copy of it somewhere – it’s wonderful, I’ll post it sometime.

And now: JUST FOR FUN:

Here is the actual list from the book 1001 Books You Must Read. It took me forever but I picked out the ones I read. I had to be honest and leave off books I STARTED but did not complete … and I know I read a picture book of Aesop’s Fables when I was a kid, I think we might have even had a copy – but I don’t know if that’s the “original”. I included it anyway.

Things I noticed:

— I just don’t read that much contemporary fiction anymore, I guess. The list itself is broken up by century (or, by decade, in the more recent years) – and I read a ton of the books in the 80s – many of the hit books, much more fiction back then, but currently not so much. (Oh – and I MUST put Geek Love on the list. I just MUST.)

— I also noticed that once I started going back in time, further and further, there were more and more books I had read. Still:

There are a TON I have not.

Obviously. I have 874 more I need to read before I die!

I’ve read 127 of these books – I listed the ones I read below. I’m totally jet-lagged – so I might have missed some.

The 127 I read off that main list

Atonement – Ian McEwan
House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
Underworld – Don DeLillo
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Amongst Women – John McGahern
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
Possession – A.S. Byatt
Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
Contact – Carl Sagan
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavi?
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Waterland – Graham Swift
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
The World According to Garp – John Irving
The Virgin in the Garden – A.S. Byatt
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
The Shining – Stephen King
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
The Once and Future King – T.H. White
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Rebel – Albert Camus
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Magic Mountain– Thomas Mann
The Plague – Albert Camus
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
Howards End – E.M. Forster
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus