Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Book List

I do love lists of books to read. There is a new book out that is a list of books (but, wait, does that book make the list?). The new book lists the 1001 books you should read before you die.
(via kottke)

These are the books on the list that I've read. I do pretty well in contemporary literature, and pretty well in the 1700s thanks to a couple of college classes, but I think I need to go back to some classics.

And, Interview With a Vampire? Really? I could suggest a hundred other things you could do with that span of time. Come see me if you really are feeling some Anne Rice coming on, and I'll give you something else to do. Unless you're in high school, and into black lipstick, and then go for it.


2000s

1. The Sea – John Banville
2.
The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
3.
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
4.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
5.
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
6.
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
7.
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
8.
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
9.
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
10.
After the Quake – Haruki Murakami

1900s

11.
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
12.
Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
13.
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
14.
Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
15.
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
16.
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
17.
Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
18.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
19.
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
20.
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
21.
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
22.
The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
23.
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
24.
Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
25.
Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
26.
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
27.
Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
28.
Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
29.
Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
30.
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
31.
Possession – A.S. Byatt
32.
Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
33.
The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
34.
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
35.
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
36.
Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
37.
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
38.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
39.
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
40.
Beloved – Toni Morrison
41.
Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
42.
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
43.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
44.
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
45.
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
46.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
47.
Neuromancer – William Gibson
48.
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
49.
The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
50. Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
51.
Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
52.
Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
53.
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
54.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
55.
The World According to Garp – John Irving
56.
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
57.
The Shining – Stephen King
58.
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
59.
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
60.
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
61.
Crash – J.G. Ballard
62.
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
63.
Sula – Toni Morrison
64.
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
65.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
66.
Rabbit Redux – John Updike
67.
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
68.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
69.
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
70.
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
71.
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
72.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
73.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
74.
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
75.
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
76.
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
77.
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
78.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
79.
Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
80.
Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
81.
V. – Thomas Pynchon
82.
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
83.
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
84.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
85.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
86.
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
87.
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
88.
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
89.
Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
90.
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
91.
The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
92.
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
93.
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
94.
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
95.
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
96.
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
97.
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
98.
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
99.
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
100.
The Story of O – Pauline Réage
101. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
102.
Junkie – William Burroughs
103.
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
104.
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
105.
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
106.
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
107.
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
108.
Animal Farm – George Orwell
109.
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
110.
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
111.
Loving – Henry Green
112.
Arcanum 17 – André Breton
113.
Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
114.
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  1. Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
  2. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
  3. Native Son – Richard Wright
  4. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
  5. Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
  6. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
  7. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
  8. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
  9. Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
  10. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
  11. Independent People – Halldór Laxness
  12. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
  13. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
  14. Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
  15. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
  16. The Waves – Virginia Woolf
  17. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
  18. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
  19. The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
  20. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
  21. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
  22. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
  23. We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
  24. The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
  25. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
  26. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
  27. The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
  28. Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
  29. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
  30. Howards End – E.M. Forster
  31. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
  32. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
  33. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

1800s

  1. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
  2. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
  3. Dracula – Bram Stoker
  4. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
  5. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  6. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  7. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
  8. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
  9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
  10. The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
  11. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
  12. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
  13. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
  14. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
  15. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
  16. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
  17. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
  18. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
  19. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
  20. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
  21. Hard Times – Charles Dickens
  22. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
  23. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
  24. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
  25. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
  26. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
  27. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
  28. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
  29. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
  30. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
  31. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
  32. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
  33. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
  34. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  35. Emma – Jane Austen

1700s

  1. The Monk – M.G. Lewis
  2. The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
  3. Vathek – William Beckford
  4. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
  5. The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
  6. Candide – Voltaire
  7. Fanny Hill – John Cleland
  8. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
  9. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
  10. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

1600s

  1. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
  2. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
  3. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

2 comments:

Unknown said...

um, i agree wholeheartedly with the anne rice stuff. blah.

replace that with "the bean trees' by barbara kingsolver and that's a pretty good list.

Dawn Fortune said...

or "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" by Carolyn Chute. More current and real than any Stienbeck.

I was discouraged to know that I have read none of the ones from this century, although I did pretty well from the previous two. I even had a few in the real old stuff. I counted 40 out of 1001 that I had read. That's upsetting, if I measured myself by someone else's standards. I happen to think I did ok.

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