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.)
- Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
- The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
- Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
- Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
- Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
- Them – Joyce Carol Oates
- Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
- Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- Lord of the Flies – William Golding
- Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
- Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
- Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
- The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
- Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
- Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
- The Outsider – Albert Camus
- For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
- Native Son – Richard Wright
- Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
- The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
- Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
- Passing – Nella Larsen
- A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
- The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
- Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
- The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
- Nadja – André Breton
- Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust*
- Amerika – Franz Kafka
- The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Trial – Franz Kafka
- Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
- The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
- Cane – Jean Toomer
- Ulysses – James Joyce
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
- The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
- Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
- Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
- Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
- The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
- Germinal – Émile Zola
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
- Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
- Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
- The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
- Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
- A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
- The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
- Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
- The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
- Candide – Voltaire
- Pamela – Samuel Richardson
- A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
- Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
- Metamorphoses – Ovid
5 comments:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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