1001 books?

[AlysonofBathe]

Hey everyone,

I'm Alyson, very new here, and I was just wondering whether anyone is working on the 1001 books challenge? I've become more than slightly preoccupied with it. I've been blogging about it here (http://for-the-reading.blogspot.com), and was wondering whether I have any company.

Cheers,
Alyson

[Heteronym]

I don't like to read from lists, so I'm afraid I won't join you :smile5:

I have my own tastes, and I never plan too far ahead. But I find your plan laudable. Where can one find the 1001 list, by the way? Now I'm curious to know how many I've read so far.

[AlysonofBathe]

There is an excellent spreadsheet here (http://johnandsheena.co.uk/books/?page_id=1806), created by the very helpful Arukiyomi to track progress/see where you stand.

Cheers,
Alyson

[LitNetIsGreat]

Hi, I enjoyed your write up of Pride and Prejudice, very well written. Where is the actual list though. That link didn't seem to lead anywhere. I won't be joining you on a reading list of 1001 books though, but I am curious as to see what they are and what I have read of them (and who selected them).

[ave d]

THIS (http://www.listology.com/ukaunz/list/1001-books-you-must-read-you-die) is what came up when I googled 1001 books.

I've read 80 (give or take a few) from that list. Of those I'm familiar with there are a few real oddities (Impressions of Africa, The Third Policeman), a lot of great classics that everyone has probably heard of anyway, even more 20th century best-sellers, and of course some real dogs (Mysteries of Udolpho - yuck!).

My favorites that don't appear on the list include The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, The Confidence-Man, The Box Man, Woman in the Dunes, The Obscene Bird of Night, and The Invention of Morel & Other Stories.

That's a long list! How long do you think it will take to get through all of those?

I find I like reading much more when I leave myself open to mostly just select whatever random books I find on my shelf, at the library, or sound interesting at a moment, so I could never stick to such a curriculum.

[Charles Darnay]

I really enjoy reading your blogs!

[mortalterror]

This 1001 list looks kind of awful, especially pre-1700s. It doesn't take into account that most of the world's great literature was actually written well before then. I put together my own lists as sort of an exercise if anyone is interested.

Classical Era
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12267
Medieval Europe
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12262
15th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12248
16th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12247
17th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12246
18th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12245
19th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12189
20th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=11497
21st Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12249
The Eastern Canon
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12190

[Heteronym]

Good job.

I've given the list a look: it contains too many writers I dislike for me to even think of trying to read it from head to toe. But it seems I have read 126 of them already. The list has strange criteria: there's the odd non-fiction book, and then some short-stories are listed individually, whereas some trilogies count as one book and others count as three books (compare Beckett to Calvino and Tolkien, for instance). But here's what I've read:

The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
The Double – José Saramago
The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
Ignorance – Milan Kundera
The Human Stain – Philip Roth

Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth
The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee
Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
Libra – Don DeLillo
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
White Noise – Don DeLillo
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Broken April – Ismail Kadare
Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
The Shining – Stephen King
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
The Joke – Milan Kundera
The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Story of O – Pauline Réage
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
The Plague – Albert Camus
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
The Outsider – Albert Camus
The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
Ulysses – James Joyce
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
Fantômas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
The Immoralist – André Gide
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad

The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
What Maisie Knew – Henry James
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
She – H. Rider Haggard
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
The Red and the Black – Stendhal
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg

The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
Candide – Voltaire
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

[AlysonofBathe]

That's strange - I don't know why the spreadsheet didn't link for you; it comes up just fine for me. If you want it, just google Arukiyomi and spreadsheet, it's very prevalent within the community.

The criteria is pretty loose, but the overall linking theme is influence on the canon, again loosely defined. Not all the books are to my taste, and there's certainly a Western bias that greatly bothers me, but I personally like the challenge. I constantly read anyway, and this gives me a larger goal to work towards.

Cheers,
Alyson

[Mutie]

I enjoyed your Watchmen review.

[kasie]

Goodness - don't let Scheherazade see this thread! She'll be off on another challenge....:smile5:

[AlysonofBathe]

I enjoyed your Watchmen review.

Thanks - it was fun to do. :)

[bouquin]

I suppose you mean the "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die." I use it as a rough guide, I've read more than 150 books on the list.




____________________
Currently reading: The Emigrants (W. G. Sebald)

[AlysonofBathe]

That's an awesome number!

A rough guide is good; reading is supposed to be enjoyable, no point slogging through a list if it's not your cup o' tea. :)

Cheers,
Alyson

[bouquin]

My most recent reads: January-Aug. 2012
(#254) The Wasp Factory , Iain Banks
(#128) How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman
(#772) Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster
(#243) Perfume, Patrick Suskind
(#146) The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald
(#468) The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
(#053) Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, Ismail Kadaré
(#205) Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
(#586) Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler
(#609) Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
(#427) Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
(#445) Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger
(#897) The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
(#142) The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields

[AlysonofBathe]

(#243) Perfume, Patrick Suskind


How did you like Perfume? It's been on my tbr list for ages and I haven't yet managed to get around to it.

Cheers,
Alyson

[OrphanPip]

Ha, I've read about 90 on the list, but only 28 of those post-1900.

It's not a terrible list, but it's also not quite a representative list in any sense, it's just a collection of some pretty good, some just OK, novels.

[AlysonofBathe]

Oh it's absolutely not totally representative. I mean, how could you even make a list that would satisfy every literary critic/theorist?

I still think it's fairly good guide to influential works, but of course there are neglected texts. My main criticism is that's is so Western; very biased.

[bouquin]

My most recent reads: January-Aug. 2012
(#254) The Wasp Factory , Iain Banks
(#128) How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman
(#772) Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster
(#243) Perfume, Patrick Suskind
(#146) The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald
(#468) The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
(#053) Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, Ismail Kadaré
(#205) Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
(#586) Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler
(#609) Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
(#427) Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
(#445) Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger
(#897) The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
(#142) The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields




September - December 2012:
(#156) The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
(#552) Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
(#208) Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga
(#150) A Heart So White, Javier Marias
(#158) The Butcher Boy, Patrick McCabe
(#198) The Book of Evidence, John Banville
(#498) The Trusting and the Maimed, James Plunkett
(#368) Mercier et Camier, Samuel Beckett

I've made a more thorough accounting, my total is 174 books.




____________________
Currently reading: David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)

[JBI]

This 1001 list looks kind of awful, especially pre-1700s. It doesn't take into account that most of the world's great literature was actually written well before then. I put together my own lists as sort of an exercise if anyone is interested.

Classical Era
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12267
Medieval Europe
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12262
15th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12248
16th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12247
17th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12246
18th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12245
19th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12189
20th Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=11497
21st Century
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12249
The Eastern Canon
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=12190


This is actually a terrific list. Though the Chinese and Japanese content are a bit lacking for me. But I understand we are working from translations here, so it is a bit shaky,

[JBI]

Ha, I've read about 90 on the list, but only 28 of those post-1900.

It's not a terrible list, but it's also not quite a representative list in any sense, it's just a collection of some pretty good, some just OK, novels.

Well, it certainly is a collection of novels, which makes it rather boring. Filling 1000 must read novels is merely an abuse of time. There are other forms of literary art out there. Then again, I am one of those few who reads very few plays, so I cannot argue too much.