Following the lead of my friend, Sonny, I looked at the list of books on 1001 books to read before you die and typed out the titles of the books I have read. I’ve read 101 of them. Ten percent seems pretty low – to finish the list before I die (assuming that I might live to be 85 (a random number between the ages my grandmothers passed), I would have to read 2-ish books a month to complete the list. Frankly, there are only a few “holes” in my reading – the Russians, Borges, and Marquez come readily to mind. Also, I am very low in the 2000s category…I guess I need to catch up.
One small rant about the site: It’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (not lonely!) And, I thought the list was fiction, but In Cold Blood is on the list, so that open’s up creative non-fiction. By excluding poetry, drama, and non-fiction, even if a person had read all 1001 books, his or her literacy education is still greatly lacking. Think: Shakespeare, Milton, T. S. Eliot, Spenser, Wilde, Arthur Miller, N. Scott Momaday, Terry Tempest Williams, etc. Too many to list!
There are lots of great books on the list (and some novellas and short stories), and I can tell that I was lucky as a teen to have teachers that required difficult reading. On the other hand, I was a voracious reader, and consumed books like candy. I vividly remember reading The Godfather when I was 13-years-old, and younger still when I read The Three Musketeers. I was lucky that my parents never censored what I read.
Several great books and/or authors were left off the list: Carson McCullers, Willa Cather, Joyce Carol Oates (other than Blonde), Louise Erdrich (or any Native American writers that I remember seeing.) Cold, Sassy Tree; Fall on Your Knees; Cold Mountain; The Good Earth; The Flame Trees of Flika; Season of Migration to the North; Idylls of the King; The Natural; Lancelot; As I Lay Dying; The Shining; The Red Tent; The Education of Little Tree; The Red Badge of Courage; The House on Mango Street; Interpreter of Maladies; The Joy Luck Club.
The books and short stories I have read from the list:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Sky – Mark Haddon
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
The Human Stain – Philip Roth
Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
Jazz – Toni Morrison
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor (short story collection)
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor (short story collection)
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
The Once and Future King – T. H. White
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
Out of Africa – Isak Dineson
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Passage to India – E. M. Forster
Cane – Jean Toomer (excerpt)
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H. G. Wells
“The Yellow Wallpaper” – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter – Nathanial Hawthorne
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
“The Fall of the House of Usher” – Poe
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
Frankenstein – Mary W. Shelley
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Dafoe
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyon
Don Quixote – Cervantes
The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
Metamorphoses – Ovid
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus
What am I reading right now? The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow (very depressing, very beautiful). I began a YA novel by Joshua Lester called Othello.
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