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
Comments (23)
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.