1001 Books and What I've Read.

One of the questions I get asked most often is whether I've looked at the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die List (you can see it here). The answer is that yes I have, but I have always steered away from it.

First, the list has been revised a couple of times already. I find it a bit annoying that a book can be removed and another added, so it really makes the list longer than 1001.

Second, I'm offended that the creators of this list neglect plays. I'm sorry, but everyone should read Shakespeare. And while yes, I know you should SEE Shakespeare as it was intended, there is a lot to say about reading his plays. There are so many nuances you can pull from them by seeing the text.

Third, epic pieces, such as The Odyssey, Iliad, etc are also excluded from the list. REALLY?

Anyway, I've pretty much ignored the list for those 3 reasons...but also because I find the list daunting. While I consider myself to be more well-read than the average Joe, looking at the list intimidates me...and well, I know I won't ever complete the list. It's not something I will ever attempt, but I do think it's worth looking at...and maybe reading a few titles from.

You can blame O from Delaisse for inspiring this post. In a very recent post, she mentioned that rather than looking at the whole list, she would simply list the books she HAD read. I really like that idea, so I'm copying that here. :) I don't think she'll mind too much.

The time periods are listed below, with the titles I've read from that era.

The 2000s:
1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
2. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
3. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
4. Atonement – Ian McEwan
5. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood


The 1900s:
6. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
7. Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
8. The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
9. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
10. The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
11. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
12. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
13. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
14. Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
15. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
16. Contact – Carl Sagan
17. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
18. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
19. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
20. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
21. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
22. Sula – Toni Morrison
23. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
24. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
25. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
26. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
27. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
28. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
29. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
30. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
31. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
32. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
33. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
34. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
35. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
36. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
37. On the Road – Jack Kerouac (technically I'm still reading this, but I'll be done soon).
38. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
39. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
40. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
41. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
42. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
43. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
44. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
45. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
46. Animal Farm – George Orwell
47. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
48. Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
49. The Outsider – Albert Camus
50. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
51. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
52. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
53. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
54. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
55. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
56. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
57. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
58. The Waves – Virginia Woolf
59. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
60. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
61. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
62. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
63. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
64. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
65. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
66. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
67. The Glimpses of the Moon – Edith Wharton
68. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

69. Summer – Edith Wharton
70. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
71. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
72. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
73. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
74. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
75. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
76. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


The 1800s:
77. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
78. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
79. Dracula – Bram Stoker
80. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
81. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
82. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
83. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
84. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
85. The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
86. Germinal – Émile Zola
87. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
88. The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
89. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
90. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
91. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
92. Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
93. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
94. Middlemarch – George Eliot
95. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
96. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky

97. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
98. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
99. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
100. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
101. Silas Marner – George Eliot
102. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
103. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
104. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
105. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
106. North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
107. Hard Times – Charles Dickens
108. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
109. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
110. Villette – Charlotte Brontë
111. Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
112. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
113. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
114. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
115. Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
116. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
117. Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
118. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
119. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
120. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
121. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
122. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
123. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
124. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
125. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
126. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
127. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
128. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
129. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
130. Persuasion – Jane Austen
131. Emma – Jane Austen
132. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
134. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
135. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
136. Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth


The 1700s:
137. The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
138. The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
139. Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
140. Candide – Voltaire
141. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
142. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
143. Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
144. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe


Pre-1700s:
145. Aesop’s Fables

There you have it, a good 145. I was a little nervous when I started deleting titles. It's obvious that I haven't read hardly any contemporary fiction. I like my old writers. :)

I was also happy to see at least another 100-200 titles that are on either my 250 list or my list for the Classics Club. I can be happy about that.

So what do you think about lists like this?