1001 Books

A recent book, 1001 Books To Read Before You Die, lists the thousand and one most essential books, in their opinion. In my opinion, it's heavy on the more recent ones, which have not yet stood the test of time. There are far too many books from 2000-2008 on there: certainly we have not perfected the craft of writing in the last eight years. And of the whopping 716 books of the 1900s, I'd guess that two-thirds of them are from the last one-third of the century. The full list can be seen here. Here's the breakdown of the number of books listed in each century:

2000s: 69
1900s: 716
1800s: 157
1700s: 46
Before 1700: 13

Of these, here is the percentage of each category I have read:

2000s: 1.4%
1900s: 6.8%
1800s: 29.9%
1700s: 13%
Before 1700: 30.7%

Hmm, you can really tell what I like to read from this. And I have to say, the majority of the "ooh, I really want to read that!" were from the 1900s category.

Other inferences: The same authors tend to reappear. For example, the first Thomas Hardy book I read was Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I liked it, so I went on to read quite a bit of the rest of the Hardy opus.

We can also safely assume that I read the French books in the original French. Practically all the French books on the original 1001 list I've also read. Only a few were missing. (Come on, who actually gets through In Search of Lost Time?)

Here's the ones I have read:
2000s
1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon (book on tape)
1900s
2. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
3. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
4. Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
5. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
6. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
7. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
8. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
9. Perfume – Patrick Süskind (in the original German, boo-ya!)
10. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
11. The World According to Garp – John Irving
12. Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
13. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
14. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
15. Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
16. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
17. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
18. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
19. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
20. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
21. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
22. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
23. The Plague – Albert Camus
24. Animal Farm – George Orwell
25. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
26. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
27. The Outsider – Albert Camus
28. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
30. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
31. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
32. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
33. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
34. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
35. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
36. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
37. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
38. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
40. Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
41. Ulysses – James Joyce
42. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
43. Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
44. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
45. Straight is the Gate – André Gide
46. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
47. The Immoralist – André Gide
48. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
49. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
50. Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
1800s
51. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
52. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
53. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
54. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
55. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
56. The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
57. Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
58. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
59. Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
60. The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
61. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
62. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
63. Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
64. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
65. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
66. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
67. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
68. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
69. Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
70. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
71. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
72. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
73. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
74. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
75. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
76. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
77. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
78. Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
79. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
80. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
81. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
82. La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
83. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
84. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
85. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
86. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
87. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
88. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
89. Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
90. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
91. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
92. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
93. Persuasion – Jane Austen
94. Emma – Jane Austen
95. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
96. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
97. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
1700s
98. Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
99. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
100. Candide – Voltaire
101. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
102. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
103. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Pre-1700
104. The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
105. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
106. Metamorphoses – Ovid (much of it in the original Latin, double boo-ya!)
107. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus