1001 Books That You Must Read Before You Die
Following kottke's lead, I present the list of the 1001 Books That You Must Read Before You Die (from this book) that I have read. I've completed exactly 100 of the books on the list, nearly 10%, 30 of which I read because it was assigned in an academic setting. Those that are among my favorites I have marked with an asterisk -- the full list of the 100 I have read is after the jump.
Update: I should clarify that I don't think the book's full list of 1,001 is either definitive or unflawed, especially for the past 100 years. Still, those that I have read happen to be representative of some of the best books I've encountered.
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Pastoralia – George Saunder
*Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
Underworld – Don DeLillo
*Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
*The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
*The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
Possession – A.S. Byatt
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
London Fields – Martin Amis
Wittgenstein’s Mistress – David Markson
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
*Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
Contact – Carl Sagan
White Noise – Don DeLillo
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
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
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
*Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
*Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
*One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
*The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
*Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
*Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
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
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
*The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
*Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Story of O – Pauline Réage
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
*Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
*The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Trial – Franz Kafka
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Howards End – E.M. Forster
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
*The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
*Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
*The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
*Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Silas Marner – George Eliot
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
*Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
<<< Post-presidential celebrity and democracy Quake-Catcher Network >>>
I am surprised at some of the ones you have not read, cm. For instance, I thought every middle schooler read Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird. Animal Farm, The Time Machine, For Whom the Bell Tolls-- I'm surprised you haven't read those.
don't effing tell me what to do!
ps, you've never read owen meany? wtf? read that shit; it's the best novel of the 20th century.
That list is heavily biased in favor of Paul Auster. I like him, I think he's very good, but I won't feel like a failure if I don't read 5 more novels by him before I meet my end (which could be tomorrow- and what then? 2 out of 7 is not a very good score). Multiple T.C. Boyle novels but no Cormac McCarthy? William Gibson and Philip K. Dick are there, but no Samuel Delaney to be found. (Full disclosure: I set out with the intention of finding fault- it is strong compensation for my feelings of literary inadequacy.)
To come up with an authoritative list of 1001 books that are "must-reads," wouldn't one need to read, I don't know, 10,000 books to even be reasonably fair? Or is this the Zagat's of literature?
No Marilynne Robinson? Housekeeping is masterful, and that is an egregious oversight. Also, The Known World by Edward P. Jones should be on there- we can knock off one of the Austers or Ballards, there are more than enough of those.
You guys misunderstood me. The list I published here is the full list of books I have read. You'll have to click the link to see the full 1,001. That means I've read Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm, The Time Machine, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Owen Meany.
Incidentally, Jesse, I just started reading Housekeeping.
And yes, this list, as almost all are, is highly subjective and flawed.
Yeah, I was just entertaining myself by giving the list a hard time. I'll be curious to hear what you think of Housekeeping when you're done. It's been a little while since I read it- this summer I'll read Gilead, and at some point I'll definitely pick Housekeeping up again. Her way with language kinda blows my mind.
Also, CM, what did you think of Smilla's Sense of Snow? I read Borderliners, another one by Hoeg- it started off compelling, but as it went on it seemed more and more like a novel-length elaboration of something a moderately talented college student would produce in a creative writing seminar- these pseudo-philosophical digressions on the nature of time that were 100% yawn.
jesse, on your (and another's) rec i read housekeeping, and i thought it was devastatingly good. i can't remember the last time I enjoyed writing so much - I frequently had to go back b/c I'd read a page without getting the plot cuz I'd been so focused on the words...thx.
that makes more sense, then. good work, you nerd!
Smilla I read in high school, so while I remember getting into it, I had little ability to detect pseudo-philosophical digressions. But I remember liking it because: 1) I learned a lot about Greenland; and 2) It was a well-told detective story.
Thanks for posting, Marco. Agree about Robinson (but for Gilead, not Housekeeping). But the bigger crime is listing three books by Bret Easton Ellis (!) and only one by William Gaddis. But seeing that there's nothing by Gass, McCarthy, or even Munro, I can take it less seriously and move on....
I am officially over literature as a semi-mandatory institution. On the other hand, I am officially addicted to books.
Jesse, I had similar problems with Peter Hoeg. His characters seemed sort of emotionless in the same way that Haruki Murakami's do. Since I read both of those in translation (I think -- Scandinavians seem to speak fluent English), perhaps it's a translation problem.
Oh god, Bret Easton Ellis is on there? THREE TIMES? ABORT ABORT!
Two Zadie Smiths? No thanks. And no THe Known World is a crime. But at least they have A Fine Balance. Amazing book. Oh, and big ups to Housekeeping.
Five by Perec and only one by Queneau? And it's Exercises In Style? I would have put Queneau's "The Sunday Of Life", "The Flight Of Icarus" and "The Blue Flowers" all ahead of Exercises and Perec's "A Void".
I have read 39 of the books on the list, plus three I half-finished (including Finnegans Wake, because, you know) and one trilogy I read only the longest book in (Calvino's Our Ancestors-- do most American readers even know what this is, considering it was published here as individual books with unrelated names?)
Jeez, Anne Rice is on there too. Some of these books must be on that list only so that you can make fun of them.
and the shining is the *only* stephen king? FA!
(at least the only SK on cm's "read" list... but he's read most of SK's stuff, yeah? so i'm guessing the shining is the only one on the 1001 list.)
lists are f*!king bush league.
yeah, i think that was the only King on the list. And yes, I've read a good majority of SK's stuff.
I agree about The Known World. Huge omission.
like, being objective and realistic, i can't figure that "christine" would be on the list. ditto "cujo." and what do they know from "the dark tower."
but "the stand"?! "THE STAND" isn't on the list!? christ, it's not even close to being one of my favorite SK books, but isn't it basically the gold-standard for 20th century post-apocalyptic literary novels?
Oh, flea, I'm so glad you enjoyed Housekeeping. I'll send you the Robinson essay I sent to CM as soon as I have a chance (pdf and requires password to get at, otherwise I'd link to it here).
Lorelei, I must say that I think Murakami is a MUCH better writer, and much more imaginative storyteller, than Hoeg, although I don't necessarily think as highly of Murakami as some people seem to.
Nice list. I was just talking up The Things They Carried the other day. A lot of these books came as required reading or suggestions from Dr. Archibald. Gotta love him. I've read some Borges short stories in Spanish which I loved--might have to switch to English for the novels you suggest-gracias!
Annie, the two books by Borges are just two of his short story collections, with quite a bit of overlap.
Post new comment