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1001 books you must read before you die.

Glad to see this thread bumped up again :)
Reminds me I should check my list again.:rolleyes:
But I don't think I have been making much progress lately. :sad:
Now! which names shall I carry with me to Borders today? Let me see . . .
 
There are definitely some titles I very much disagree with on that list; they're doing fine up to 1970 or so, even mixing in a decent number of non-English language titles, and then... On Beauty? Morvern Callar? Fury, but not Midnight's Children? Really?

That said, I've apparently read 154 of them in 35 years and have another 10 sitting on my shelf, so give me another 200 years or so and I'll plow through the rest too.
 
beer good said:
There are definitely some titles I very much disagree with on that list; they're doing fine up to 1970 or so, even mixing in a decent number of non-English language titles, and then... On Beauty? Morvern Callar? Fury, but not Midnight's Children? Really?

That said, I've apparently read 154 of them in 35 years and have another 10 sitting on my shelf, so give me another 200 years or so and I'll plow through the rest too.
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Do you really want to read every title on this list? I don't think I do. Part of the fun of this sort of list is picking and choosing, and cheerfully passing on the ones that don't make the cut in our personal TBR lists.
 
abecedarian said:
Do you really want to read every title on this list? I don't think I do. Part of the fun of this sort of list is picking and choosing, and cheerfully passing on the ones that don't make the cut in our personal TBR lists.
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Of course I don't. The comment was more intended as a comment on the futility of trying to read every book on every list. Especially since out of the ones I've read, I doubt that even half would make my own personal top 1001 list. Which I'll post here on my 80th birthday, so stay tuned. :innocent:
 
beer good said:
Of course I don't. The comment was more intended as a comment on the futility of trying to read every book on every list. Especially since out of the ones I've read, I doubt that even half would make my own personal top 1001 list. Which I'll post here on my 80th birthday, so stay tuned. :innocent:
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Since I'd be ever so much more than 90 by then, I hope I'll be still around:lol:
 
I know that there has been debate on whether we should take any notice of the books on this list and also whether we should read them as reading books should be up to our own choice and interests!

From personal experience and putting my attention to reading these books, I have to admit that I am now reading a higher standard of books :) No more Shopaholic books for me, James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks, etc!

I have read only about 20 or so books from the list, and currently reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and this list has completely opened up my eyes to some great authors that I would otherwise not have heard about or known about! I thorougly recommend Rebecca!

I am very happy that I wandered across this list!
 
Nice to see this thread again; it's an old friend. Thanks Crawford, for finding it and bumping it up. :flowers:

My library continues to grow at astronomical speed, now seemingly without any help from the list at all -- maybe even faster than the cosmos itself is expanding. I don't know what it is, but I think my skull must have about 100,000 names inscribed around the inside of it -- or maybe 100 million -- for me to so easily find interesting titles in any bookstore I go into.

It's too late now -- and my memory won't help -- but I wish I had kept a list of all the books I have ever read in my life.

And I wish I had started making notes of what they were about, after I finished reading them, to help jog my memory.

But wishes, wishes....
 
Update:
According to LibraryThing I now own 87 books of that list.

The updated list of the ones I've read so far:
The Lover by Marguerite Duras (2006/2008 Edition)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (2006/2008 Edition)
Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers (2006/2008 Edition)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (2006/2008 Edition)
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (2006/2008 Edition)
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (2006/2008 Edition)
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (2006/2008 Edition)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (2006/2008 Edition)
Of Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende (2008 edition)
The crime of Father Amaro by Eça de Queirós (2008 edition)
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (2006/2008 Edition)
The Story of O by Pauline Reage (2006/2008 Edition)
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (2006/2008 Edition)
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (2006/2008 Edition)

And I'm currently reading The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (2006/2008 Edition)
 
Must read before I die?
What if I die in a car accident tomorrow?
What are the consequences if I haven't read these books? :eek::blink:
 
Okay I re-read the list I think read 30-50 out of the books listed there.

I only liked one,which was the earlier one I posted and that was just a alright book.Some of the books I looked up off the list,really didn't look that good at all.I wonder why people like Patterson,Jack Higgins,and Grisham are not up there.
 
I thought I posted in this thread. Anyway, here are the ones I read:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Perfume – Patrick Süskind
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Shining – Stephen King
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Junky – William Burroughs
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Gulliver's Travels-Jonathan Swift
Moll Flanders-Daniel Defoe
 
The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen I can't stand, but I agree on:
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood;
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver;
The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy (oh, yes);
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco;
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf;
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle;
and, of course, a touch of Dear Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë.
 
I searched through the thread for Lists of Bests but didn't find it.

The website allows you to register and keep track of your progress through various lists. The "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" is on there, along with over 2000 other "definitive" lists. Kinda neat.
 
I do shorter lists these days. 1001 Books would take 20 years to complete at the rate of 50 books a year. Sounds like a list for the younger among us. :whistling:
 
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