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.
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5 comments:

  1. Gavin1:30 PM, May 13, 2008

    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?

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  2. Matt1:50 PM, May 13, 2008

    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.

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  3. Tim2:13 PM, May 13, 2008

    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.

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  4. Matt3:15 PM, May 13, 2008

    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.

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  5. Gavin7:41 PM, May 13, 2008

    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.

    ReplyDelete

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