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.