1001 books you must read before you die.

[tartan_skirt]

My difficulty with the 1001 list was exactly the reverse. There were way too many authors represented, and mostly none that I reccognized. The 300 or so different ones I have for my shorter list at least have some vague familiarity for me. If it is different authors you are looking for then I think the long list is actually one good place to look. But, just my opinion. :flowers:

I know what you mean in some respect, but just about every book by authors such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen and Philip Roth does not need to mentioned on the same list. Maybe they could solve both our problems and mention more books by some of the lesser known authors?

 

[Peder]

Maybe they could solve both our problems and mention more books by some of the lesser known authors?

Like: Acker, Adams, Amado, Andric, Arlen, Ballard, Banks, Barbusse, Barrico, Barker, Barnes, Bassani, Battaile, Behn, Berger, Bernhard, Blanchot, Bowen, Abreton, Buchan, Byatt, Cain, Canetti, Carey, Chang, Chartwell, Chatwith, Childers, Coe, Crace, Cummings, Dabbydeen, Dangarembga, Desani, Dewsponde, Dillon, Dodge, Drakulic, Dunker, Edgeworth, Equiano, Farrell, Faulks, Frisch, Garner, Gary, Gemmel, Gaskell, Gissing, Godwin, Gordimer, Gracq, Green, Greene, Hemon, Herr, Hoigg, Jameson, Jansson, Kelman, Kennealy, Kennedy, King, Kotzwinkle, Kraznahorkai, Lagerlof, Leavit, Lee, Lem, Lispector, Manning, Manson, Marias, Maturin, McCabe, McGahern, Mcgowan, Mishra, Multatuli, Oe, Ozdamar, Pagnol, Peake, Plunkett, Radiguet, Rose, Seghers, Selvon, Svevo, Thornburg, Timm, Toomer, Tressell, Verga, Warner, Wolf, Wright or Yourcenar?

If there is some author you like that you think is under-represented in the list I'd be glad to look. :flowers:

 

[tartan_skirt]

If there is some author you like that you think is under-represented in the list I'd be glad to look. :flowers:

:lol: Just give me more of the Scots and I'll be happy. Iain Banks, Irvine Welsh and Alasdair Gray were all there, but sorely skimped on.

 

[Peder]

:lol: Just give me more of the Scots and I'll be happy. Iain Banks, Irvine Welsh and Alasdair Gray were all there, but sorely skimped on.

Then it sounds like we are looking at the same list, just differently. Hope I don't offend you by saying those would be examples of names that mean nothing to me and haven't made it to my short list. Nor Dickens either, for that matter, for different reasons.

 

[silverseason]

Like: Acker, Adams, Amado, Andric, Arlen, Ballard, Banks, Barbusse, Barrico, Barker, Barnes, Bassani, Battaile, Behn, Berger, Bernhard, Blanchot, Bowen, Abreton, Buchan, Byatt, Cain, Canetti, Carey, Chang, Chartwell, Chatwith, Childers, Coe, Crace, Cummings, Dabbydeen, Dangarembga, Desani, Dewsponde, Dillon, Dodge, Drakulic, Dunker, Edgeworth, Equiano, Farrell, Faulks, Frisch, Garner, Gary, Gemmel, Gaskell, Gissing, Godwin, Gordimer, Gracq, Green, Greene, Hemon, Herr, Hoigg, Jameson, Jansson, Kelman, Kennealy, Kennedy, King, Kotzwinkle, Kraznahorkai, Lagerlof, Leavit, Lee, Lem, Lispector, Manning, Manson, Marias, Maturin, McCabe, McGahern, Mcgowan, Mishra, Multatuli, Oe, Ozdamar, Pagnol, Peake, Plunkett, Radiguet, Rose, Seghers, Selvon, Svevo, Thornburg, Timm, Toomer, Tressell, Verga, Warner, Wolf, Wright or Yourcenar?

Many names here that I don't know and many represent other cultures/languages than the American English/English English I have spent most of my time with.

Exceptions: the names bolded are English/English and first class and should be on anyone's list.

 

[Peder]

Many names here that I don't know and many represent other cultures/languages than the American English/English English I have spent most of my time with.

Exceptions: the names bolded are English/English and first class and should be on anyone's list.

Many thanks for the bolded recommendations. I'll go check my short list.
/returns/
No Bowen, Byatt or Gaskell on my short list. But Greene is definitely there, with The Quiet American(read), The Third Man(read) and The Power and the Glory.
I put the two greens in to see if anyone was paying attention. Couldn't resist. :lol: :flowers:

 

[silverseason]

No Bowen, Byatt or Gaskell on my short list. But Greene is definitely there, with The Quiet American(read), The Third Man(read) and The Power and the Glory.

Peder, I'm impressed by your flexibility. Recommendations follow.

Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (She knew Bronte and wrote this bio using her letters and family stories.)
Byatt, Possession (a literary mystery, ignore the movie which was awful)
Bowe, The Death of the Heart or The Heat of the Day or The House in Paris.

 

[Peder]

Peder, I'm impressed by your flexibility. Recommendations follow.

Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (She knew Bronte and wrote this bio using her letters and family stories.)
Byatt, Possession (a literary mystery, ignore the movie which was awful)
Bowe, The Death of the Heart or The Heat of the Day or The House in Paris.

Silverseason, Recommendations and browsing bookstores and forums are the ways I find titles and authors, so I especially appreciate your recommendations.
Many thanks for your consideration. I'll have to look into the Scotsmen whom Tartan Skirt mentioned also.

 

[pontalba]

I've just gone through the list and according to my calculations I have only read 58 of them, and have 107 in my TBR stack.
Oh, and thanks to silverseason I have a Gaskell in the stack, Cranford.

 

[Peder]

For those interested, my short list of 300 books is now up in my blog. As the general disclaimer says, the list impllies no recommendations one way or the other.

 

[Ronny]

I have read 65 of those books and I have about twice that many on my TBR shelf from the list, I also started maybe 10 of the list and didn't like or finish them.

 

[Peder]

II also started maybe 10 of the list and didn't like or finish them.

I can definitely identify with that feeling, now that I have put the list together and can view it as a whole. Looking at the books I have read I can certainly agree the quality is very variable, and some of the best books I have read don't appear.

 

[silverseason]

The quality is variable, but so the length. Short stories by Poe - The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum - as listed as are entire "collections" of books - Remembrance of Things Past, Dance to the Music of Time.

That said, I intend to mine the list for authors I have missed until now.

 

[Peder]

That said, I intend to mine the list for authors I have missed until now.

That's wonderful! :flowers:
I assume you are meaning the longer list of 1001. There you will definitely meet authors you haven't heard of (I think). On my list they may be mostly familiar, because name-recognition was my purpose.
I also think it is great that you seek out unfamiliar authors to broaden your reading, again not specifically a purpose of my condensation.
One of these days I'm going to have to get hold of Boxall's book and see how the synopses sound. Just for the moment, I am restraining my clicking finger. :sad:

 

[Heteronym]

From the list I've read:

8 The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
25 The Double – José Saramago
37 The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
57 Ignorance – Milan Kundera
62 The Human Stain – Philip Roth
99 American Pastoral – Philip Roth
114 Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth
137 Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
188 Moon Palace – Paul Auster
194 The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago
206 Libra – Don DeLillo
213 The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
227 Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
236 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
245 White Noise – Don DeLillo
251 The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
293 The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
294 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
312 The Shining – Stephen King
315 Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
324 Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
338 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
350 Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
371 The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
375 Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
376 The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
389 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
399 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
434 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
441 Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
449 Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
462 The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
464 Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
494 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
508 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
526 Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
529 The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
547 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
572 Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
649 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
675 Orlando – Virginia Woolf
695 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
701 The Trial – Franz Kafka
706 The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
716 Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
723 Ulysses – James Joyce
736 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
741 Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
750 Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
778 The Immoralist – André Gide
781 The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
783 Kim – Rudyard Kipling
789 The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
790 The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
791 The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
794 Dracula – Bram Stoker
796 The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
797 The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
803 Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
804 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
809 The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
820 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
823 King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
848 Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
850 The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
854 Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
862 The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
866 Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
887 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
888 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
871 Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
874 Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
880 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
900 Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
902 Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
904 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
909 The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
911 The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
913 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
916 The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
923 The Red and the Black – Stendhal
931 Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
959 The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
965 The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
970 Candide – Voltaire
983 Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
987 Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

I'm such an erudite, well-read person

The omissions are more than glaring; it's actually painful to browse it. I noticed that, in spite of the list being about books and not specifically novels or prose, not a single poem made it. I guess poetry is dead and let's not talk about it anymore. Also, once they left the 1800s they began grasping at straws to reach their magical number; the list gives the impression that between NOW and that ominious day when our forefathers left the trees there was a big void (or avoid?) in literature.

It's a list as funny and pointless as any other I've seen.

 

[Peder]

It's a list as funny and pointless as any other I've seen.

One can certainly say that with justification!

Oddly enough, Boxall's lists are by no means unique. There are huge anthologies of American Literature, and English Literature and almost any other kind of collection, selection, anthology, best-of, etc, that one can imagine (or can't) on the shelves at Borders and I am not sure how many readers pay much attention to them either. Maybe as gifts for other people.

Anyway, for amazement or amusement, the final updated list of 300 is up. :flowers:

 

[PhilW]

I hate to rain on everyone's parade, but...

1001 books to read before I die? Based on what - or whose - criteria? I really don't see the point of these lists and 'TBR piles'. And I rarely take anyone's recommendation for a book, except for my wife's and she knows me and my taste in literature well enough to make recommendations.

Seems to me like a lot of people are putting themselves under some kind of pressure - "oh no, got 437 books on my TBR list, how am I ever going to get through them?". Read what you like when you like and at a pace that suits you - why does it have to be any more complicated than that?

 

[Heteronym]

I doubt you'll be raining on anyone's parade. No one seems to be taking this list too seriously. Sure, it's amusing to see how many books we've read off the list, but apart from crazies, I doubt anyone will be making it a life mission to complete it.

 

[PhilW]

I doubt you'll be raining on anyone's parade. No one seems to be taking this list too seriously. Sure, it's amusing to see how many books we've read off the list, but apart from crazies, I doubt anyone will be making it a life mission to complete it.

Oh I don't know...I think there may be a few who do. "Competitive reading" I like to call it! Still, each to his/her own.

 

[impalpable]

I hate to rain on everyone's parade, but...

1001 books to read before I die? Based on what - or whose - criteria? I really don't see the point of these lists and 'TBR piles'. And I rarely take anyone's recommendation for a book, except for my wife's and she knows me and my taste in literature well enough to make recommendations.

Seems to me like a lot of people are putting themselves under some kind of pressure - "oh no, got 437 books on my TBR list, how am I ever going to get through them?". Read what you like when you like and at a pace that suits you - why does it have to be any more complicated than that?

My TBR pile is just a stack of stuff that I want to read but haven't gotten to yet, and not necessarily because someone thinks it is something i should read. However, I like taking recommendations from people who have enjoyed books similar to those I enjoy because I end up reading a lot of things I may not have known about otherwise. Also, it seems to be the general concensus in this thread that the 1001 books (etc, etc) is a great way to read a bio for books from authors you may not have known about otherwise. I guess this book is definitely more beneficial to people who take recommendations though...