Tuesday, May 13, 2008

A Mighty Big List

Via Kottke, 1001 Fiction Books You Must Read Before You Die. It's awfully light on the classical period, or anything pre-Renaissance -- whatever metric makes Ovid's Metamorphoses count as fiction/a novel should qualify a lot more stuff, especially narrative/epic poetry.

But, in keeping with the disclose-it-all practice of my interlocutors, here are the books on the list that I have read. (I have tried to be as honest as possible, not including books begun and not finished, or books purchased, books merely discussed intelligently, books that I have claimed to read for courses, and the like.)

  1. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
  2. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
  3. Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
  4. Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
  5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
  6. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
  7. Them – Joyce Carol Oates
  8. Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
  9. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
  10. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
  11. Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
  12. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
  13. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
  14. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
  15. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
  16. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
  17. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
  18. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
  19. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
  20. Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
  21. Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
  22. The Outsider – Albert Camus
  23. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
  24. Native Son – Richard Wright
  25. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
  26. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
  27. Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
  28. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
  29. Passing – Nella Larsen
  30. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
  31. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
  32. Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
  33. The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
  34. Nadja – André Breton
  35. Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust*
  36. Amerika – Franz Kafka
  37. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
  38. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
  39. The Trial – Franz Kafka
  40. Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
  41. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
  42. Cane – Jean Toomer
  43. Ulysses – James Joyce
  44. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
  45. The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
  46. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
  47. Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
  48. Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
  49. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
  50. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
  51. Germinal – Émile Zola
  52. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
  53. Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
  54. Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
  55. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  56. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
  57. Middlemarch – George Eliot
  58. Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
  59. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  60. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
  61. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
  62. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
  63. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
  64. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
  65. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
  66. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
  67. The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  68. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
  69. Candide – Voltaire
  70. Pamela – Samuel Richardson
  71. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
  72. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
  73. Metamorphoses – Ovid
* Including A la recherche as a single book is diabolical, especially on a list that includes glorified short stories like "Fall of the House of Usher." I have not read every page of every volume of this monumental and wonderful work -- I read it in French, which slowed me down plenty -- but I've read enough books of it to count on a list like this. And that's all I'm going to say about it.

5 comments:

Gavin said...

I'm at 71, give or take one or two.

But still, where's the sense of a list that lists Updike's Rabbit novels separately, but lists Proust as a single novel?

Matt said...

Seriously, such an arbitrary list. No Sir Gawain? Canterbury Tales? Works of Homer? But it does include Sheridan LeFanu and Raymond Queneau? Boggling.

But whatever the quality, lists like these are always a good reminder that there are a lot of Great Books out there waiting for me. I tend to lose sight of that without a syllabus in front of me.

1. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
2. The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
4. The Double – José Saramago
5. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
6. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
7. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
8. Atonement – Ian McEwan
9. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
10. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
11. The Human Stain – Philip Roth
12. House of Leaves – Mark Z
13. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
14. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
15. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
16. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
17. Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
18. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
19. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
20. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
21. Beloved – Toni Morrison
22. Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
23. Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
24. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
25. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
26. White Noise – Don DeLillo
27. A Boy’s Own Story – Edmund White
28. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
29. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
30. The World According to Garp – John Irving
31. The Shining – Stephen King
32. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
33. Sula – Toni Morrison
34. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
35. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
36. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
37. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
38. Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
39. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R
40. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
41. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
42. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D
43. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
44. Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
45. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm – George Orwell
47. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
48. The Outsider – Albert Camus
49. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
50. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
51. The Hobbit – J.R.R
52. At the Mountains of Madness – H.P
53. Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
54. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
55. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
56. The Great Gatsby – F
57. Cane – Jean Toomer
58. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
59. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
60. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
61. Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
62. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
63. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
64. The War of the Worlds – H.G
65. Dracula – Bram Stoker
66. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
67. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
68. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
69. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
70. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
71. The Strange Case of Dr
72. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
73. In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu
74. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
75. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
76. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
77. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
78. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
79. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
80. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
81. The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
82. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
83. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
84. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
85. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
86. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
87. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
88. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
89. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
90. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
91. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
92. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
93. Emma – Jane Austen
94. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
95. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
96. The Monk – M.G
97. The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
98. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
99. The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
100. Candide – Voltaire
101. Pamela – Samuel Richardson
102. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
103. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
104. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
105. Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
106. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
107. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

I hope to be able to add Death in Venice and At Swim, Two Boys by the end of May.

Tim said...

Wait a minute, I must have missed some: I've read Watchmen, and all of the Poe that Matt's read.

And Matt, no Joyce? Read Portrait. It's eminently readable, and really, really good.

Matt said...

Dubliners, which I've read, isn't on there. Same story with, for example, William Faulkner (no Light in August), Michael Cunningham (Specimen Days), and John Steinbeck (East of Eden).

I missed John Banville's The Untouchable, which I've read, and which I was trying to remember the name of recently.

Gavin said...

How did I miss Watchmen too? Well, that puts me at least 75 (along with the Poe and a few others I missed.

But still, I have to question again the methodology of the list. It's a pleasant surprise to see The Making of Americans (#696) and not just The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (#643), (And how did I miss On the Road #484)? I've read that one too) but I've read the Dirk Gently novels (#209 and 210), and almost entirely forgotten them. I don't know that they belong on any reasonable "essential" list.