From Somebody Else’s List

Jason Kottke recently posted a link to a book called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, foreword by Peter Ackroyd and Edited by Peter Boxall. (I’ve used Jason’s referral code, as I’m not a member of Amazon’s program, and somebody should get the bump, should you decide to buy the book from that link.) Posting about a book like this is worthless, really, unless you’ve managed to take a look at the list, and so here it is (or so I’ve been given to understand). The list is composed entirely of fiction, and by that they mean prose fiction so nobody has to worry about struggling through Shakespeare or Milton (why Shakespeare should be much of a struggle is beyond me, but plenty of folks seem intimidated). It’s also pretty heavily biased in favour of books published after 1900, and we could debate forever why some books were chosen and some were not. Why choose Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden, an excellent book, certainly, but not the follow-up Still Life, the only work of literature other than Othello to reduce me to tears? Why so much Faulkner, but no Light in August? The list seems compiled rather than considered, but I suppose that’s the way of lists. And even though this list is presented with less behind it than, say, Harold Bloom’s The Western Cannon, here’s what I’ve read from it (note that I’ve included The Recognitions, because I’m reading it now, and that I have excluded those works that I have not read in full):

1. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
2. On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
3. The Double, by José Saramago
4. Fury, by Salman Rushdie
5. Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk
6. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
7. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
8. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
9. Underworld, by Don DeLillo
10. The Ghost Road, by Pat Barker
11. The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields
12. Regeneration, by Pat Barker
13. Possession, by A.S. Byatt
14. Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
15. Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
16. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
17. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, by Douglas Adams
18. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams
19. The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson
20. Watchmen, by Alan Moore & David Gibbons
21. White Noise, by Don DeLillo
22. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
23. Flaubert’s Parrot, by Julian Barnes
24. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
25. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
26. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
27. The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt
28. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
29. The Public Burning, by Robert Coover
30. Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
31. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson
32. Slaughterhouse-five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
33. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles
34. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, by Vladimir Nabokov
35. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
36. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
37. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
38. The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
39. V., by Thomas Pynchon
40. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
41. The Collector, by John Fowles
42. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
43. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
44. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
45. Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
46. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
47. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
48. Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs
49. The Once and Future King, by T.H. White
50. The Bell, by Iris Murdoch
51. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
52. Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov
53. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
54. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
55. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene
56. The Recognitions, by William Gaddis
57. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
58. Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming
59. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
60. Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
61. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
62. Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
63. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
64. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges
65. The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
66. The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse
67. Between the Acts, by Virginia Woolf
68. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
69. Murphy, by Samuel Beckett
70. The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
71. Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner
72. Miss Lonelyhearts, by Nathanael West
73. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
74. Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
75. Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse
76. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
77. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
78. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
79. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
80. Ulysses, by James Joyce
81. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
82. The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan
83. Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
84. The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
85. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
86. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James
87. The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
88. The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells
89. The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells
90. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
91. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
92. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
93. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
94. The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
95. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll
96. Silas Marner, by George Eliot
97. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
98. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
99. The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe
100. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
101. Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
102. Émile; or, On Education, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
103. Pamela, by Samuel Richardson
104. A Modest Proposal, by Jonathan Swift
105. Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe
106. Love in Excess, by Eliza Haywood
107. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Okay, I’ll be honest, I just like posting lists every so often, and I feel like I’m due. And 107 books, from a list like this one, really isn’t so bad, especially considering I was twenty years old before I started reading much beyond spy novels and bad fantasy.