Great Books For Dummies
Posted on May 13, 2008
in books, top whatever lists
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is an edited list of, you guessed it, 1001 great books from pre-1700 to the present. Picking up the book will get you a critical essay accompanying each entry, or you can just check out the full list on its own.
The few I have read:
| # Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro # Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami # Choke – Chuck Palahniuk # After the Quake – Haruki Murakami # House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski # Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami # The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami # Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons # White Noise – Don DeLillo # The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera # The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien # Herzog – Saul Bellow # Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges # To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee # Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov # Lord of the Flies – William Golding |
# The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway # The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger # Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell # The Plague – Albert Camus # Animal Farm – George Orwell # Cannery Row – John Steinbeck # The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry # Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck # The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien # The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway # The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald # The Trial – Franz Kafka # We – Yevgeny Zamyatin # Siddhartha – Herman Hesse # The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy # Candide – Voltaire |
Faced with a list of notable books throughout history, I quickly see that I do not read nearly as much fiction as I would like; 32 out of 1001 is far from impressive. In my defense, most of my reading these past few years has been non-fiction (periodicals or books) or short stories, but it makes me feel no less guilty. At least my obsession with Haruki Murakami finally came in handy.
New life goal: read 500 books from the list not counting ones already read. A book a month for 42 years? Easy.
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