1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

[kitty_kitty]

Any body got this book?

My mum got me it for Christmas and got the OH 1001 albums you must hear before you die (he was so engrossed i did not hear a peep out of him for days)

I really like this book as it gives some infor about the book the author, when it came out, whether it is a film but not too much info to spoil the book.

It does not contain childrens books so i hope they do a childrens books version

[Janet]

I have looked at this book, but not bought it.

Perhaps it might be a suggestion for ma-in-law to buy me for my birthday later in the year. :)

ETA: I'd like the album one too!

[benedicklover]

Both of those books were in The Works over Christmas and dropped hints at my mum and what did I get? The Beano annual:lol: as a joke.

[Kylie]

I would like this book but I'm afraid that if I get it I'll wind up on some crazy quest to track down every single book to read. I think my TBR list is big enough already! :mrgreen:

[Liz]

I've got the "1001 Books" one. It's quite handy when you want to know a little bit of information about a certain book. I could spend ages looking through it.

[kitty_kitty]

i have got obsessed with looking at the books i have read and the TBR books, books i would like to read and books i am not interested in!

[Kell]

Does anyone here have this book? I don't, but I keep hearing about it and went in search of a list of the books included in it and found THIS (http://www.listsofbests.com/list/2222?page=1) handy listing. Anyone else care to share?

Out of the 1001 books listed, I have already read the following:
1. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
3. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
4. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
5. Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
6. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
7. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
8. Perfume - Patrick Suskind
9. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
10. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
11. Interview with the Vampire - Anne Rice
12. Chocky - John Wyndham
13. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (currently reading)
14. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
15. The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham
16. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
17. The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
18. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
19. Animal Farm - George Orwell
20. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
21. Brave new World - Aldous Huxley (currently listening)
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
24. War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
25. The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells
26. Dracula - Bram Stoker
27. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
28. She - H. Rider Haggard
29. King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard
30. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
31. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There - Lewis Carroll
32. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
33. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
34. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
35. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
36. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
37. Emma - Jane Austen
38. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
39. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
40. Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe (unfinished)

And I have these ones on Mount To-Be-Read:
1. Disgrace - J M Coetzee
2. Captain Corelli's Mandalin - Louis de Bernieres
3. The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood
4. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Drag me to re-order
5. The Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
6. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
7. The Time Machine - H. G. Wells
8. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
9. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
10. The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
11. Ben-Hur - Lew Wallace
12. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte
13. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Drag me to re-order
14. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
15. Vanity Fair - W M Thackeray
16. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
17. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
18. Les Liaisons Dangereuses - Choderlos de Laclos
19. Candide - Francois Voltaire
20. Fanny Hill - John Cleland

And I rather fancy reading these ones:
1. Saturday - Ian McEwan
2. Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
3. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
4. Atonement - Ian McEwan
5. The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
6. Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters
7. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
8. The Hours - Michael Cunningham
9. Veronika Decides to Die - Paulo Coelho
10. Silk - Alessandro Baricco
11. Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood
12. The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
13. Hideous Kinky - Esther Freud
14. Get Shorty - Elmore Leonard
15. The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi
16. Sexing the Cherry - Jeanette Winterson
17. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
18. The Trick is to Keep Breathing - Janice Galloway
19. The Black Dahlia - James Ellroy
20. The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
21. Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard
22. Schindler's Ark - Thomas Keneally
23. The Na,e of the Rose - Umberto Eco
24. The World According to Garp - John Irving
25. The Shining - Stephen King
26. Crash - J. G. Ballard
27. The Godfather - Mario Puzo
28. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
29. The Graduate - Charles Webb
30. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
31. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
32. The Prime of Miss Jean Brode - Muriel Spark
33. To Kill a Mocking Bird - Harper Lee
34. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
35. The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
36. The Story of O - Pauline Reage
37. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
38. Casino Royale - Ian Fleming
39. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
40. The Third Man - Graham Greene
41. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
42. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
43. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
44. Out of Africa - Isak Dinesen
45. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
46. Keep the Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell
47. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
48. Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller
49. Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
50. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
51. The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
52. Orlando - Virginia Woolf
53. A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
54. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
55. Tarzan of the Apes - Edgar Rice Burroughs
56. A Room with a View - E.M. Forster
57. Kim - Rudyard Kipling
58. A Turn of the Screw - Henry James
59. The Island of Dr Moreau - H.G. Wells
60. The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
61. The Adventures fo Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
62. Around the World in 80 Days - Jules Verne
63. Journey to the Centre of the Earth - Jules Verne
64. The Waterbabies - Charles Kingsley
65. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
67. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
68. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
69. La Reine Margot - Alexandre Dumas
70. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
71. The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
72. Persuasion - Jane Austen
73. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
74. The Monk - M. G. Lewis
75. The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe
76. The 120 Days of Sodom - Marquis de Sade
77. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
78. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
79. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

[kitty_kitty]

I have this book - i posted a thread earlier about it.

I will go through and see how many books i have read

[Gyre]

That is some list, I am going to print it out x

[Kylie]

I found this site (http://johnandsheena.co.uk/books/?p=30) where you can download a spreadsheet of the entire list. It's been set up really well and you can simply enter an 'r' for 'read' in the left-hand column and it will automatically keep count of how many (and what percentage of) books you've read.

I suppose you can modify it further to suit your own needs if you like (adding columns to show the books you own but haven't read yet etc).

I'm going through it now to see how many I've read (not many I suspect, and apparently none that have been published in the 2000s). :lol:

[Kylie]

I went through the spreadsheet and I've read 28 books, with 32 on my shelf to be read and a further 97 that I want to read! :eek2:

I used the forumula in A8 to do a new count for 'books TBR', and another one for 'want to read', and I'm entering TBR and W into the spreadsheet respectively.

[Arukiyomi]

@ Kylie -- thanks so much for posting a link to Arukiyomi's book blog (http://www.johnandsheena.co.uk/books) and the spreadsheet. I really hope you all find it useful.

Also great to hear you are customising it!

:D

[Icecream]

That's great. I couldn't be bothered going through 20 pages of lists.

[Kylie]

@ Kylie -- thanks so much for posting a link to Arukiyomi's book blog (http://www.johnandsheena.co.uk/books) and the spreadsheet. I really hope you all find it useful.

Also great to hear you are customising it!

:D

Welcome to the forum Arukiyomi! I found your site when I did a search for the 1001 books. I'm going to go back and check out your blog because I noticed there are reviews of Atlas Shrugged, Jane Eyre and Invisible Man - three books that I have on my TBR list! I'll be interested to see what you thought of them. :smile2:

[Arukiyomi]

thanks so much Kylie... please post your thoughts on the reviews on the blog... Arukiyomi would love to hear your comments

:D

[Fiona]

Which ones have you read, got or want to read? (Apologies for successive posts but 1001 books is too long!)

Bold - Got
Underlined - Read
Italicised - Want to read

2000s
# Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
# Saturday – Ian McEwan
# On Beauty – Zadie Smith
# Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
# Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
# The Sea – John Banville
# The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
# The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
# The Master – Colm Tóibín
# Vanishing Point – David Markson
# The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd
# Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair
# Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
# Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
# The Colour – Rose Tremain
# Thursbitch – Alan Garner
# The Light of Day – Graham Swift
# What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt
# The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
# Islands – Dan Sleigh
# Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee
# London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
# Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
# Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
# The Double – José Saramago
# Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
# Unless – Carol Shields
# Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
# The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor
# That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern
# In the Forest – Edna O’Brien
# Shroud – John Banville
# Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
# Youth – J.M. Coetzee
# Dead Air – Iain Banks
# Nowhere Man – Aleksandar Hemon
# The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
# Gabriel’s Gift – Hanif Kureishi
# Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
# Platform – Michael Houellebecq
# Schooling – Heather McGowan
# Atonement – Ian McEwan
# The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
# Don’t Move – Margaret Mazzantini
# The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
# Fury – Salman Rushdie
# At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill
# Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
# Life of Pi – Yann Martel
# The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
# An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma
# The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
# Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
# White Teeth – Zadie Smith
# The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda
# Under the Skin – Michel Faber
# Ignorance – Milan Kundera
# Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace
# Celestial Harmonies – Péter Esterházy
# City of God – E.L. Doctorow
# How the Dead Live – Will Self
# The Human Stain – Philip Roth
# The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
# After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
# Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande
# Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
# House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
# Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
# Pastoralia – George Saunders
#
# 1900s
# Timbuktu – Paul Auster
# The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
# Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
# As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli?
# Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
# Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
# The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
# Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
# Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
# Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
# Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
# Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
# Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
# All Souls Day – Cees Nooteboom
# The Talk of the Town – Ardal O’Hanlon
# Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters - have tried to read this but only got half way through
# The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
# Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
# Another World – Pat Barker
# The Hours – Michael Cunningham
# Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
# Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
# The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
# Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
# Great Apes – Will Self
# Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
# Underworld – Don DeLillo
# Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
# The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
# American Pastoral – Philip Roth
# The Untouchable – John Banville
# Silk – Alessandro Baricco
# Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
# Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
# Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
# The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
# Forever a Stranger – Hella Haasse
# Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
# The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
# Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
# The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
# Morvern Callar – Alan Warner
# The Information – Martin Amis
# The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
# Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth
# The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
# The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
# A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
# Love’s Work – Gillian Rose
# The End of the Story – Lydia Davis
# Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
# The Folding Star – Alan Hollinghurst
# Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
# Land – Park Kyong-ni
# The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee
# The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
# Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
# City Sister Silver – Jàchym Topol
# How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman
# Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
# Felicia’s Journey – William Trevor
# Disappearance – David Dabydeen
# The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm
# The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
# Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
# Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks - Tried to read but never really got into it.
# Looking for the Possible Dance – A.L. Kennedy
# Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
# Complicity – Iain Banks
# On Love – Alain de Botton
# What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe
# A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
# The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
# The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
# The House of Doctor Dee – Peter Ackroyd
# The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
# The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald
# The Secret History – Donna Tartt
# Life is a Caravanserai – Emine Özdamar
# The Discovery of Heaven – Harry Mulisch
# A Heart So White – Javier Marias
# Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
# Indigo – Marina Warner
# The Crow Road – Iain Banks
# Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
# Jazz – Toni Morrison
# The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
# Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
# The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
# Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
# The Heather Blazing – Colm Tóibín
# Asphodel – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
# Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
# Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud
# Arcadia – Jim Crace
# Wild Swans – Jung Chang
# American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
# Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
# Mao II – Don DeLillo
# Typical – Padgett Powell
# Regeneration – Pat Barker
# Downriver – Iain Sinclair
# Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernieres
# Wise Children – Angela Carter
# Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
# Amongst Women – John McGahern
# Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
# Vertigo – W.G. Sebald
# Stone Junction – Jim Dodge

[Fiona]

# The Music of Chance – Paul Auster
# The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
# A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham
# Like Life – Lorrie Moore
# Possession – A.S. Byatt
# The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
# The Midnight Examiner – William Kotzwinkle
# A Disaffection – James Kelman
# Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
# Moon Palace – Paul Auster
# Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
# Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
# The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
# The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
# The Trick is to Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
# The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago
# Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
# A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
# London Fields – Martin Amis
# The Book of Evidence – John Banville
# Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
# Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
# The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
# Wittgenstein’s Mistress – David Markson
# The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
# The Swimming-Pool Library – Alan Hollinghurst
# Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
# Libra – Don DeLillo
# The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
# Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
# The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
# Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
# The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble
# The Afternoon of a Writer – Peter Handke
# The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
# The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
# The Pigeon – Patrick Süskind
# The Child in Time – Ian McEwan
# Cigarettes – Harry Mathews
# The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
# The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
# World’s End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
# Enigma of Arrival – V.S. Naipaul
# The Taebek Mountains – Jo Jung-rae
# Beloved – Toni Morrison
# Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
# Matigari – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
# Marya – Joyce Carol Oates
# Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
# The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis
# Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
# An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
# Extinction – Thomas Bernhard
# Foe – J.M. Coetzee
# The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
# Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel
# The Parable of the Blind – Gert Hofmann
# Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
# Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
# The Cider House Rules – John Irving
# A Maggot – John Fowles
# Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
# Contact – Carl Sagan
# The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
# Perfume – Patrick Süskind
# Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard
# White Noise – Don DeLillo
# Queer – William Burroughs
# Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
# Legend – David Gemmell
# Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavi?
# The Bus Conductor Hines – James Kelman
# The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
# The Lover – Marguerite Duras
# Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
# The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
# Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
# The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
# Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
# Neuromancer – William Gibson
# Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
# Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
# Shame – Salman Rushdie
# Worstward Ho – Samuel Beckett
# Fools of Fortune – William Trevor
# La Brava – Elmore Leonard
# Waterland – Graham Swift
# The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee
# The Diary of Jane Somers – Doris Lessing
# The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
# The Sorrow of Belgium – Hugo Claus
# If Not Now, When? – Primo Levi
# A Boy’s Own Story – Edmund White
# The Color Purple – Alice Walker
# Wittgenstein’s Nephew – Thomas Bernhard
# A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
# Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally
# The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
# The Newton Letter – John Banville
# On the Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin
# Concrete – Thomas Bernhard
# The Names – Don DeLillo
# Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
# Lanark: A Life in Four Books – Alasdair Gray
# The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
# July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
# Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonid Tsypkin
# Broken April – Ismail Kadare
# Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
# Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
# Rites of Passage – William Golding
# Rituals – Cees Nooteboom
# Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
# City Primeval – Elmore Leonard
# The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
# The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
# Smiley’s People – John Le Carré
# Shikasta – Doris Lessing
# A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
# Burger’s Daughter - Nadine Gordimer
# The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll
# If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
# The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
# The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
# The World According to Garp – John Irving
# Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec
# The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
# The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
# Yes – Thomas Bernhard
# The Virgin in the Garden – A.S. Byatt
# In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
# The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
# Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
# The Shining – Stephen King
# Dispatches – Michael Herr
# Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
# Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
# The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
# The Left-Handed Woman – Peter Handke
# Ratner’s Star – Don DeLillo
# The Public Burning – Robert Coover
# Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
# Cutter and Bone – Newton Thornburg
# Amateurs – Donald Barthelme
# Patterns of Childhood – Christa Wolf
# Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
# W, or the Memory of Childhood – Georges Perec
# A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
# Grimus – Salman Rushdie
# The Dead Father – Donald Barthelme
# Fateless – Imre Kertész
# Willard and His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan
# High Rise – J.G. Ballard
# Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow
# Dead Babies – Martin Amis
# Correction – Thomas Bernhard
# Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
# The Fan Man – William Kotzwinkle
# Dusklands – J.M. Coetzee
# The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
# Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
# Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
# Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
# A Question of Power – Bessie Head
# The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G. Farrell
# The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Italo Calvino
# Crash – J.G. Ballard
# The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene
# Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
# The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
# Sula – Toni Morrison
# Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
# The Breast – Philip Roth
# The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
# G – John Berger
# Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
# House Mother Normal – B.S. Johnson
# In A Free State – V.S. Naipaul
# The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
# Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
# Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
# The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
# Rabbit Redux – John Updike
# The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
# The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark
# The Ogre – Michael Tournier
# The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
# Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke
# I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
# Mercier et Camier – Samuel Beckett
# Troubles – J.G. Farrell
# Jahrestage – Uwe Johnson
# The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
# Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado
# Pricksongs and Descants – Robert Coover
# Blind Man With a Pistol – Chester Hines
# Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
# The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
# The Green Man – Kingsley Amis
# Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
# The Godfather – Mario Puzo
# Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
# Them – Joyce Carol Oates
# A Void/Avoid – Georges Perec
# Eva Trout – Elizabeth Bowen
# Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
# The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch
# Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
# Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
# The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
# 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
# Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
# Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid – Malcolm Lowry
# The German Lesson – Siegfried Lenz
# In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
# A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
# The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf
# Chocky – John Wyndham
# The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
# The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa
# One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
# The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
# Pilgrimage – Dorothy Richardson
# The Joke – Milan Kundera
# No Laughing Matter – Angus Wilson
# The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
# A Man Asleep – Georges Perec
# The Birds Fall Down – Rebecca West
# Trawl – B.S. Johnson
# In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
# The Magus – John Fowles
# The Vice-Consul – Marguerite Duras
# Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
# Giles Goat-Boy – John Barth
# The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
# Things – Georges Perec
# The River Between – Ngugi wa Thiong’o
# August is a Wicked Month – Edna O’Brien
# God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
# Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
# The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector
# Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
# Come Back, Dr. Caligari – Donald Bartholme
# Albert Angelo – B.S. Johnson
# Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe

[Fiona]

# The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein – Marguerite Duras
# Herzog – Saul Bellow
# V. – Thomas Pynchon
# Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
# The Graduate – Charles Webb
# Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
# The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
# The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
# Inside Mr. Enderby – Anthony Burgess
# The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
# One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
# The Collector – John Fowles
# One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
# A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
# Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
# The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
# The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
# Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
# Girl With Green Eyes – Edna O’Brien
# The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
# Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
# Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
# A Severed Head – Iris Murdoch
# Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
# Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
# Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
# The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
# Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
# The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
# How It Is – Samuel Beckett
# Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
# The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
# To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
# Rabbit, Run – John Updike
# Promise at Dawn – Romain Gary
# Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee
# Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
# Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
# The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
# Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes
# Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
# Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
# Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Böll
# Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
# The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
# Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
# A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
# The Bitter Glass – Eilís Dillon
# Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
# Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
# Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
# Borstal Boy – Brendan Behan
# The End of the Road – John Barth
# The Once and Future King – T.H. White
# The Bell – Iris Murdoch
# Jealousy – Alain Robbe-Grillet
# Voss – Patrick White
# The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
# Blue Noon – Georges Bataille
# Homo Faber – Max Frisch
# On the Road – Jack Kerouac
# Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
# Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
# The Wonderful “O” – James Thurber
# Justine – Lawrence Durrell
# Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
# The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon
# The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
# Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
# The Floating Opera – John Barth
# The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
# The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
# Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
# A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
# The Trusting and the Maimed – James Plunkett
# The Quiet American – Graham Greene
# The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
# The Recognitions – William Gaddis
# The Ragazzi – Pier Paulo Pasolini
# Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
# I’m Not Stiller – Max Frisch
# Self Condemned – Wyndham Lewis
# The Story of O – Pauline Réage
# A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
# Lord of the Flies – William Golding - read most of it but it was boring
# Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
# The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
# The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
# The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
# Watt – Samuel Beckett
# Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
# Junkie – William Burroughs
# The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
# Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
# Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
# The Judge and His Hangman – Friedrich Dürrenmatt
# Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
# The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
# Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
# The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
# Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
# Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
# Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
# Foundation – Isaac Asimov
# The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
# The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
# The Rebel – Albert Camus
# Molloy – Samuel Beckett
# The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
# The Abbot C – Georges Bataille
# The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz
# The Third Man – Graham Greene
# The 13 Clocks – James Thurber
# Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
# The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
# I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
# The Moon and the Bonfires – Cesare Pavese
# The Garden Where the Brass Band Played – Simon Vestdijk
# Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
# The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge
# The Heat of the Day – Elizabeth Bowen
# Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
# The Man With the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren
# Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
# All About H. Hatterr – G.V. Desani
# Disobedience – Alberto Moravia
# Death Sentence – Maurice Blanchot
# The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
# Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
# Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
# The Victim – Saul Bellow
# Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
# If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
# Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
# The Path to the Nest of Spiders – Italo Calvino
# The Plague – Albert Camus
# Back – Henry Green
# Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
# The Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andri?
# Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
# Animal Farm – George Orwell
# Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
# The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
# Loving – Henry Green
# Arcanum 17 – André Breton
# Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
# The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham
# Transit – Anna Seghers
# Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
# Dangling Man – Saul Bellow
# The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
# Caught – Henry Green
# The Glass Bead Game – Herman Hesse
# Embers – Sandor Marai
# Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
# The Outsider – Albert Camus
# In Sicily – Elio Vittorini
# The Poor Mouth – Flann O’Brien
# The Living and the Dead – Patrick White
# Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
# Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
# The Hamlet – William Faulkner
# Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
# For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway (READING)
# Native Son – Richard Wright
# The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene

[Fiona]

# The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
# Party Going – Henry Green
# The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
# Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
# At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
# Coming Up for Air – George Orwell
# Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
# Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
# Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
# The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
# After the Death of Don Juan – Sylvie Townsend Warner
# Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
# Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
# Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
# Cause for Alarm – Eric Ambler
# Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
# U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
# Murphy – Samuel Beckett
# Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
# Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
# The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
# The Years – Virginia Woolf
# In Parenthesis – David Jones
# The Revenge for Love – Wyndham Lewis
# Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
# To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
# Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner
# Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
# The Thinking Reed – Rebecca West
# Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
# Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
# Wild Harbour – Ian MacPherson
# Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
# At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
# Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
# Independent People – Halldór Laxness
# Auto-da-Fé – Elias Canetti
# The Last of Mr. Norris – Christopher Isherwood
# They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy
# The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
# England Made Me – Graham Greene
# Burmese Days – George Orwell
# The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
# Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
# Novel With Cocaine – M. Ageyev
# The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
# Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
# A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
# Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
# Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
# Call it Sleep – Henry Roth
# Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
# Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
# The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
# Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
# A Day Off – Storm Jameson
# The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
# A Scots Quair (Sunset Song) – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
# Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
# Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
# Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
# To the North – Elizabeth Bowen
# The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
# The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
# The Waves – Virginia Woolf
# The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
# Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
# The Apes of God – Wyndham Lewis
# Her Privates We – Frederic Manning
# Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
# The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
# Hebdomeros – Giorgio de Chirico
# Passing – Nella Larsen
# A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
# Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
# Living – Henry Green
# The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
# All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
# Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
# The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen
# Harriet Hume – Rebecca West
# The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
# Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
# Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
# Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
# Orlando – Virginia Woolf
# Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
# The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
# The Childermass – Wyndham Lewis
# Quartet – Jean Rhys
# Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
# Quicksand – Nella Larsen
# Parade’s End – Ford Madox Ford
# Nadja – André Breton
# Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
# Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
# To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
# Tarka the Otter – Henry Williamson
# Amerika – Franz Kafka
# The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
# Blindness – Henry Green
# The Castle – Franz Kafka
# The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek

[Fiona]

# The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence
# One, None and a Hundred Thousand – Luigi Pirandello
# The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
# The Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein
# Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
# Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
# The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
# The Counterfeiters – André Gide
# The Trial – Franz Kafka
# The Artamonov Business – Maxim Gorky
# The Professor’s House – Willa Cather
# Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
# The Green Hat – Michael Arlen
# The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
# We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
# A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
# The Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet
# Zeno’s Conscience – Italo Svevo
# Cane – Jean Toomer
# Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley
# Amok – Stefan Zweig
# The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
# The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
# Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
# Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
# The Glimpses of the Moon – Edith Wharton
# Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair
# The Last Days of Humanity – Karl Kraus
# Aaron’s Rod – D.H. Lawrence
# Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
# Ulysses – James Joyce
# The Fox – D.H. Lawrence
# Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley
# The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
# Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
# Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
# Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
# Tarr – Wyndham Lewis
# The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
# The Shadow Line – Joseph Conrad
# Summer – Edith Wharton
# Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsen
# Bunner Sisters – Edith Wharton
# A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
# Under Fire – Henri Barbusse
# Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
# The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
# The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
# Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
# The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
# The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
# Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
# Locus Solus – Raymond Roussel
# Rosshalde – Herman Hesse
# Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
# The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
# Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
# Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
# The Charwoman’s Daughter – James Stephens
# Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
# Fantômas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
# Howards End – E.M. Forster
# Impressions of Africa – Raymond Roussel
# Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
# Martin Eden – Jack London
# Strait is the Gate – André Gide
# Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells
# The Inferno – Henri Barbusse
# A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
# The Iron Heel – Jack London
# The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett
# The House on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
# Mother – Maxim Gorky
# The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
# The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
# Young Törless – Robert Musil

[Fiona]

# The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy
# The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
# Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann
# Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
# Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
# Hadrian the Seventh – Frederick Rolfe
# The Golden Bowl – Henry James
# The Ambassadors – Henry James
# The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
# The Immoralist – André Gide
# The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
# Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
# The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
# Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
# Kim – Rudyard Kipling
# Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
# Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
#
# 1800s
# Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Somerville and Ross
# The Stechlin – Theodore Fontane
# The Awakening – Kate Chopin
# The Turn of the Screw – Henry James - in year 9, it's ****
# The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
# The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
# What Maisie Knew – Henry James
# Fruits of the Earth – André Gide
# Dracula – Bram Stoker
# Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
# The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
# The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
# Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane
# Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
# The Real Charlotte – Somerville and Ross
# The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
# Born in Exile – George Gissing
# Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
# The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
# News from Nowhere – William Morris
# New Grub Street – George Gissing
# Gösta Berling’s Saga – Selma Lagerlöf
# Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
# The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
# The Kreutzer Sonata – Leo Tolstoy
# La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola
# By the Open Sea – August Strindberg
# Hunger – Knut Hamsun
# The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
# Pierre and Jean – Guy de Maupassant
# Fortunata and Jacinta – Benito Pérez Galdés
# The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg
# The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
# She – H. Rider Haggard
# The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
# The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
# Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
# King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
# Germinal – Émile Zola
# The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
# Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
# Marius the Epicurean – Walter Pater
# Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
# The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
# A Woman’s Life – Guy de Maupassant
# Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
# The House by the Medlar Tree – Giovanni Verga
# The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
# Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert
# Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace

[Fiona]

# Nana – Émile Zola
# The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
# The Red Room – August Strindberg
# Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
# Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
# Drunkard – Émile Zola
# Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev
# Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
# The Hand of Ethelberta – Thomas Hardy
# The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
# Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
# The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
# Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
# In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu
# The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
# Erewhon – Samuel Butler
# Spring Torrents – Ivan Turgenev
# Middlemarch – George Eliot
# Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
# King Lear of the Steppes – Ivan Turgenev
# He Knew He Was Right – Anthony Trollope
# War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
# Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
# Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
# Maldoror – Comte de Lautréaumont
# The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
# The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
# Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
# Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
# The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope
# Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
# Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
# Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
# Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
# Uncle Silas – Sheridan Le Fanu
# Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
# The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley
# Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
# Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
# Silas Marner – George Eliot
# Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
# On the Eve – Ivan Turgenev
# Castle Richmond – Anthony Trollope
# The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
# The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
# The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne
# Max Havelaar – Multatuli
# A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
# Oblomovka – Ivan Goncharov
# Adam Bede – George Eliot
# Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
# North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
# Hard Times – Charles Dickens
# Walden – Henry David Thoreau
# Bleak House – Charles Dickens
# Villette – Charlotte Brontë
# Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
# Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
# The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
# The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
# Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
# The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
# David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
# Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
# Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
# The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
# Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
# Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
# Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
# Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
# The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
# La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
# The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
# The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
# Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
# The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
# Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
# A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
# Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
# The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
# The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
# The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
# Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
# The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
# Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
# Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac
# The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
# The Red and the Black – Stendhal
# The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
# Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
# The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
# The Albigenses – Charles Robert Maturin
# Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Robert Maturin
# The Monastery – Sir Walter Scott
# Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
# Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
# Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
# Persuasion – Jane Austen
# Ormond – Maria Edgeworth
# Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
# Emma – Jane Austen
# Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
# Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
# The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
# Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
# Elective Affinities – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
# Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth
#
# 1700s
# Hyperion – Friedrich Hölderlin
# The Nun – Denis Diderot
# Camilla – Fanny Burney
# The Monk – M.G. Lewis
# Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
# The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
# The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
# The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin
# Justine – Marquis de Sade
# Vathek – William Beckford
# The 120 Days of Sodom – Marquis de Sade
# Cecilia – Fanny Burney
# Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
# Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
# Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
# Evelina – Fanny Burney
# The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
# Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett
# The Man of Feeling – Henry Mackenzie
# A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne
# Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
# The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
# The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
# Émile; or, On Education – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
# Rameau’s Nephew – Denis Diderot
# Julie; or, the New Eloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
# Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
# Candide – Voltaire
# The Female Quixote – Charlotte Lennox
# Amelia – Henry Fielding
# Peregrine Pickle – Tobias George Smollett
# Fanny Hill – John Cleland
# Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
# Roderick Random – Tobias George Smollett
# Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
# Pamela – Samuel Richardson
# Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
# Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus – J. Arbuthnot, J. Gay, T. Parnell, A. Pope, J. Swift
# Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
# A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
# Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
# Roxana – Daniel Defoe
# Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
# Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
# Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
# A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift
#
# Pre-1700
# Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
# The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
# The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
# Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
# The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe
# Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly
# Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais
# The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
# The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
# Aithiopika – Heliodorus
# Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton
# Metamorphoses – Ovid
# Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

[Paul]

Fiona,
That is a huge labor of love for the benefit of all of us and I admire you enormously for presenting such a list. Many sincere thanks. Some day I'll do my own tally against it and gladly report back. For the moment though. I am wondering about the source and why those particular books. To be a little less than serious, I even wonder if there were any books that were left off such a lengthy list. :) And now I also see that my favorite obscure book, Therese Racquin, will have to move over and make room in my mind for an equally obcure book, Castle Rackrent, that I don't think I'll get to before I die. My sincerest regrets to the two whomevers. :)
But my greatest thanks and admiration to you,
Paul

[Fiona]

Cripes, I haven't read all of those. It's from that book 1001 Books to read before you die. Source, some saddo must have typed the list up from the book.

Gah, crossouts don't work, will have to redo. :irked:

I've read about eleven or twelve. 989 more to go...

[Paul]

The results are in: 47 - 20 - 2 - 1 for the four categories.
I better get busy reading. :)
I know others will do much better than that. :(

[~V~]

I've copied the list down - I plan to work my way through it.

I'll report back when I have

[Lilywhite]

I have read 32 of them, which is double what I thought it would be. I do have plans to read a lot more of them.

[~V~]

Have read - 48.

Own - 46

[Freewheeling Andy]

I have read a pretty impressive 114 of them:

1 - Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
2 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
3 - The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
4 - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
5 - Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
6 - Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
7 - Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
8 - The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
9 - Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
10 - The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
11 - Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
12 - The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
13 - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
14 - Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
15 - The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
16 - Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
17 - A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
18 - The Crow Road – Iain Banks
19 - Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
20 - Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
21 - Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
22 - Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
23 - The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
24 - Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
25 - London Fields – Martin Amis
26 - Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
27 - The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
28 - Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
29 - The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
30 - Perfume – Patrick Süskind
31 - Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavi?
32 - Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
33 - Neuromancer – William Gibson
34 - Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
35 - Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
36 - Broken April – Ismail Kadare
37 - Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
38 - Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
39 - The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
40 - Smiley’s People – John Le Carré
41 - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
42 - The Shining – Stephen King
43 - High Rise – J.G. Ballard
44 - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
45 - Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
46 - Crash – J.G. Ballard
47 - The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
48 - Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
49 - 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
50 - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
51 - One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
52 - The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
53 - The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
54 - God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
55 - Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
56 - A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
57 - The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
58 - Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
59 - Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
60 - Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
61 - To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
62 - Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
63 - The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
64 - On the Road – Jack Kerouac
65 - The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
66 - Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
67 - Lord of the Flies – William Golding
68 - Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
69 - The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
70 - Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
71 - Foundation – Isaac Asimov
72 - The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
73 - The Third Man – Graham Greene
74 - I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
75 - Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
76 - If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
77 - The Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andric
78 - Animal Farm – George Orwell
79 - Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
80 - The Poor Mouth – Flann O’Brien
81 - For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
82 - The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
83 - At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
84 - The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
85 - Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
86 - The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
87 - Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
88 - Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
89 - Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
90 - Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
91 - Amerika – Franz Kafka
92 - The Castle – Franz Kafka
93 - The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
94 - The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
95 - The Trial – Franz Kafka
96 - Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
97 - The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
98 - Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
99 - Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
100 - The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
101 - The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
102 - The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
103 - Dracula – Bram Stoker
104 - The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
105 - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
106 - King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
107 - Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenso
108 - Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
109 - Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
110 - Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
111 - The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
112 - Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
113 - A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
114 - Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus


I have also started, and failed to finish, because they were too heavy going for me:

Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra


I have also started, but failed to finish because it was stolen from my tent at Glastonbury:

The Plague – Albert Camus


I have also started, and am about 60% of the way through:

War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy


And I have on my bookshelf next:

Independent People – Halldór Laxness

[happyanddandy]

FA, L and V those are impressive figures!

oh dear I have only read 8-10 - some of them so long ago I can't remember if I have or not - I have copied the list into a document in order to keep a record. I don't think I will make it before I die!! :mrgreen:

[Icecream]

I have read 17, again, some a long time ago. Some I have on my shelves, some i want to get, some I have seen the films of, and some are even titles of pieces of music I have played..

[Purple Poppy]

I have just used the spreadsheet (fantastic...thank you Arukiyoma). I have read 124, definitly, albeit quite a while back, and ppossibly another ten or fifteen. There are a few on my bookshelves waiting ti be read, and quite a few I have on wish list. I am ashamed though at the number of books and authors I had never heard of.
Apparently I have to read 32 books a year (for how many years??)

Thanks Kylie and Arukiyoma:friends0:


Oh...huge omissions, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, all the poets. It does say books, not fiction!

Pp

[Kell]

Apparently I have to read 32 books a year (for how many years??)For the rest of your natural, apparently! I think it calculates the number using the average lifespan of males and females (women have more time to read them as we tend to live longer). I have to read at a very reasonable rate of 19 per year. I think that's do-able!

Oh...huge omissions, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, all the poets. It does say books, not fiction!There have been quite a few comments to that effect on LT - it really should be called 1001 novels you should read before you die. I lament the lack of dramatic representation, but not the poetry - I never would have got round to reading them...

[Freewheeling Andy]

It's not just novels, though. There are a few non-fiction books in there - like Primo Levi's If This Is A Man.

I can understand omitting Shakespeare, as those are really plays not books, written for the stage. And poetry is rarely originally written in book form, rather it's normally written as individual poems which later get collated. The lack of Chaucer and Milton (although I have struggled with the tiny fractions I've read of both) is a more serious omission.

[~V~]

FA, L and V those are impressive figures!



I'm not sure mine is a very impressive figure. And I'm very old so have had heaps of time :mrgreen:

[carm]

those are very impressive numbers fa l and v!!! i've read 26 that i remember reading- there are others that im sure i read but i just cant remember:blush:

[Polka Dot Rock]

Finally managed to do this :) Surprisingly, I've read 70!! Or 6.99% to be precise :lol: And being 22, to complete the list, I'd have to read 16 a year. Which isn't too bad, is it?

[Icecream]

It goes up very slowly. I'm 22, and have only read 17, but still only have to read 17 year (one up from you having read 70)..

[Freewheeling Andy]

I think my numbers are heavily skewed by my late-teens reading through the canon of SF, and also by a lot of the 20th century Eastern European stuff.

[Polka Dot Rock]

It goes up very slowly. I'm 22, and have only read 17, but still only have to read 17 year (one up from you having read 70)..

Also, I did literature at Uni. And was an amazingly pretentious teenager (hello Camus etc!) :)

I think it should consider lifestyle factors, like health insurance: Do you smoke, drink a lot alcohol, only eat fried foods etc. :lol: It could even combine with that How Long Are You Going To Live For site. Although that would be terrifying...

I think my numbers are heavily skewed by my late-teens reading through the canon of SF, and also by a lot of the 20th century Eastern European stuff.

Yeah, yeah, Andy. We know you're a well-read boffin :roll: No need for false modesty ;) (You know I don't really mean it Andy! :D)

[Freewheeling Andy]

Well, of course I'm a well-read boffin.

It's just that I seem better read than I actually am thanks to teenage years of going through the Asimov and Heinlein and Dick and Vonnegut, and reading the entire oeuvre of JG Ballard, and probably having read more Andric and Kadare and Bulgakov and Hasek and Kafka and Pavic and so on than any normal person would.

[Polka Dot Rock]

Well, of course I'm a well-read boffin.

*Bows* Well, of course sir! :mrgreen:

It's just that I seem better read than I actually am thanks to teenage years of going through the Asimov and Heinlein and Dick and Vonnegut...

I was like that as a teenager. I was obsessed with the Manics so would prance around with lots of beat writers, existential novels, 'challenging' poetry etc. My best mate even lugged The Torture Garden around school for weeks! :lol: Ah, happy days...

[Freewheeling Andy]

Thinking of beat writers, how can there be all that Burroughs, Kerouac, and even two Brautigan novels, yet no Sombrero Fallout?

[Polka Dot Rock]

It'd be nice if we could somehow do a Top 100 Books list according to this forum. My maths is beyond terrible, but would it be something like everyone on the forum offering up what their Top 10 recommendations would be? I'd like to see that :)

[Purple Poppy]

Andy said
think my numbers are heavily skewed by my late-teens reading through the canon of SF, and also by a lot of the 20th century Eastern European stuff.

Me too! Thats the thing about teens in the sixties! Unfortunately i then had an almost bookfree next twenty years!
Pp

[Freewheeling Andy]

It'd be nice if we could somehow do a Top 100 Books list according to this forum. My maths is beyond terrible, but would it be something like everyone on the forum offering up what their Top 10 recommendations would be? I'd like to see that :)

I think we've done something similar. The trouble is that often it becomes a popularity contest, and this isn't really about which are the most popular books; rather it's more about the ones most highly recommended.

There are a lot of "My favourite book" type polls out there, and they'd never include 90% of the books on this list. In the past when I saw those kinds of list they'd always have two or three Jeffrey Archer novels on there. Now, I'm sure, they'd have 6 Harry Potter books on. In a way I'm happy with someone else doing the editorial on this, advising us of books that would be worth our while reading, rather than having a straight popularity contest.

[Kell]

It'd be nice if we could somehow do a Top 100 Books list according to this forum. I'm sure we did a Top 100 favourites at one point. I'll have a look around and see if I can find the thread...

Aha! Now, we actually did a Top 10, but the full list ran like this:
These were the books that got more than 1 mention:

1st
Kelley Armstrong - Bitten / Stolen
2nd
A A Milne - The House At Pooh Corner (Winnie The Pooh)
Joint 3rd
C S Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia
Mark Hadden - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Philippa Gregory - The Other Boleyn Girl

In addition, these authors recieved more than one mention, although for different books each time:

Stephen King
Juliet Marillier
Charlaine Harris
Dean Koontz
James Herbert
Martina Cole
Terry Pratchett

This was the full list:

A A Milne - The House At Pooh Corner
A A Milne - Winnie the Pooh
Anne Bishop - Daughter of the Blood
Anne Rice - Interview With A Vampire
Arnold Lobel - The Frog and Toad series
Arthur C Clarke - Rama Series
Ben Elton - Popcorn
Bret Easton Ellis - Less Than Zero
C S Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia
Caiseal Mor - The Circle & The Cross
Charlaine Harris - Dead To The World
Charlaine Harris - Dead Until Dark
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
Christopher Brookmyre - The Sacred Art of Stealing
CJ Sansom - Dissolution
Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca
Dave Gorman and Danny Wallace - Are you Dave Gorman?
Dean Koontz - Life Expectancy
Dean Koontz - Odd Thomas
Dr. Seuss - Green Eggs and Ham
Enid Blyton - St Claire's series
Evelyn Waugh - Scoop
Fitzroy Maclean - Eastern Approaches
Graham Masterton - Devil In Grey
H.G.Wells - Time machine
Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird
Ian Pears - An Instance of the Fingerpost
Ivo Andric - The Bridge Over The Drina
J D Robb - In Death Series
J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye -- by
J.K.Rowling - Harry Potter series
Jacqueline Carey - Kushiel's Dart
James Herbert - Fluke
James Herbert - The Magic Cottage
Jean M Auel - Clan of the Cave Bear
Jeannette Walls - The Glass Castle : A Memoir
Jeffrey Steingarten - The Man Who Ate Everything
John Julius Norwich - Byzantium
John Lanchester - The Debt to Pleasure
Juliet Marillier - Daughter of the Forest
Juliet Marillier - The Sevenwaters Triology
Juliet Marillier - Wolfskin
Kate Forsyth - Witches of Eilanan
Kelley Armstrong - Bitten
Kelley Armstrong - Bitten/Stolen
Kelley Armstrong - DimeStore Magic
Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
Laurell K Hamilton - Blue Moon
Linda Fairstein - Entombed
Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
Marion Zimmer Bradley - Mists of Avalon
Mark Hadden - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Martina Cole - Faceless
Martina Cole - Two Women
Matt Ridley - Genome
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Minette Walters - The Sculptress
Monica Dickens - One pair of feet
Nicholas Evans - The Horse Whisperer
P C Cast - Goddess By Mistake
PD James - Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
Peter - James Host
Philippa Gregory - The Other Boleyn Girl
Primo Levi - If This Is A Man
Richard Adams - Watership Down
Richard Laymon - Body Rides
Simon Scarrow - Books 1-4 of the Eagles series
Sophie Kinsella - Can You Keep A Secret
Spike Milligan - The Book of Milligananimals
Stephen King - IT
Stephen King - Needful Things
Stephen King - The Green Mile
Stephen King - The Long Walk
Stephen King - The Shining
Stephen King - The Stand
Steve Harris - Adventureland
Sue Townsend - The Queen and I
Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising series
Tami Hoag - A Thin Dark Line
Terry Practchett - The City Watch series
Terry Pratchett - Death Trilogy
Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy - Tess of the Durbevilles
Tom Sharpe - Riotous Assembly
Trudi Canavan - The Black Magicians Triology
Wilbur Smith - River God
William Golding - Lord Of The Flies
William Goldman - The Princess Bride

The thread got moved to the archives a while back as it was done ages ago. It's a very different list from Peter Boxall's one and I wonder how different it would be if we tried it again now...

We also run the annual awards, which is why keeping a note of the books you read throughout the year is so handy. They get run in January for the previous year's books.

[Polka Dot Rock]

Hey! I missed some! I've actually read 75 :lol: And I did a column for To Be Read and I have 42... Eek!

[Liz]

I've just gone through the list and I've read 28 of them.

[Kell]

I'm onto my 46th book on the list, so I'm fairly cracking on - that's 6 more than I had when I first looked at the list on 12th May, so little over a month. Pretty good going, methinks!

[Icecream]

Very good Kell! OH has just exclaimed how slow I am at reading because I have only read 3 chapters of 1984 ( I did remind him I have a baby:lol:). Maybe it is time I read faster again.

[Paul]

Has anyone actually read Jude the Obscure?
Does anyone plan on actually doing it?
Does anyone know why it is on the list?
Just asking.

[Kell]

Has anyone actually read Jude the Obscure?
Does anyone plan on actually doing it?
I've not read it, but I have it waiting on my shelf. my sister (who is a non-reader) read it twice for Higher English and says she really enjoyed it. As i say, I've not read it yet, but I definitely plan to. :readingtwo:

[Paul]

I've not read it, but I have it waiting on my shelf. my sister (who is a non-reader) read it twice for Higher English and says she really enjoyed it. As i say, I've not read it yet, but I definitely plan to. :readingtwo:

Well, then, that counts as a recommendation!
I've always been intrigued by its obscurity. :roll:
Some day, we'll compare notes.

[Liz]

Has anyone actually read Jude the Obscure?
Does anyone plan on actually doing it?

My mother has read it (possibly twice) and recommended it to me. She really enjoyed it (even though it isn't exactly a rib-tickler of a book), so I think I will give it a go at some point.

[Paul]

Ah, my estimation is coming up.
Glad I asked. :D

[Angel]

It's one of my all time favourites - I must have read it 3 or 4 times. Be prepared for some emotional scenes!!

[JudyB]

Has anyone actually read Jude the Obscure?
Does anyone plan on actually doing it?
Does anyone know why it is on the list?
Just asking.


I've read Jude the Obscure - it's sad but good. My personal favourite is Far From the Madding Crowd.

[Echo]

Jude the Obscure is on my to-read list. Another one that I want to finish is Middlemarch. I started that about three years ago, but for some reason, I just couldn't finish it.

[JudyB]

Another one that I want to finish is Middlemarch. I started that about three years ago, but for some reason, I just couldn't finish it.

That's on my 'books I feel guilty about' list. I abandoned it during my degree (it was possible to do that with a couple of the books on the reading list) and declared it my nemisis. However years later, I used to help a retired vicar and he explained about Middlemarch to me (he had no idea that I'd once tried to read it, it was just coincidence) and then I felt instantly guilty about the novel - but it's sooo long and I've sooo many books to read . . .

[Echo]

That's on my 'books I feel guilty about' list. I abandoned it during my degree (it was possible to do that with a couple of the books on the reading list) and declared it my nemisis.

I'm entering my junior year this fall as an English Major, and two of the classes I'm taking are English Romantic Literature and The American Novel to 1900. My reading lists are so HUGE, I'm not going to be able to get to my own to-read list. I'm trying to cram as much as possible in this summer! Good luck with yours!

[Kell]

I'll be starting my 48th book from this list next - The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy - I've borrowed it from Purple Poppy (you're so kind, PP!).

[SteffieB]

Wow, have I really read 92 of these??:eek2: I think so, but I didn't count any Heinleins or Asimov, because I know I went through a phase way back somewhere in my later youth, but I couldn't remember which ones I really read, etc....anyway, somewhere around 92:), although my Doctor Faustus was the Marlowe version. Wow, this is a great list for reminding one what should be read and for patting oneself on the back for having read some seriously good books, even if I wasn't the biggest fan of The Secret History:blush:

[Esiotrot]

Great download thanks!
I am ashamed to say after having a quick scan I have only read a few of the books listed but have loads on my tbr pile so will set about increasing my number!
Kx

[Kell]

Just thought I'd update and say that when I picked up on this challenge on 12 May, I had read 39 books(and left a 40th unfinished). At this point, I've now read 52 books from the list, so I think I'm adding to my "read" pile at quite a fair pace, considering I'm doing this challenge along-side several others. I'd like to have finished another half a dozen by the end of the year - i think that's a fair expectation! :mrgreen::readingtwo:

[Kylie]

Three months ago I'd read 28 books, with 32 on my shelf to be read and a further 97 that I want to read.

As of today, I've read 35, with 56 on my shelf to be read (looks like I've been buying a lot of books!) and a further 130 that I would like to read.

Do you intend on completing the whole list one day Kell? I don't have any particular target in mind, although those figures above seem to add up to around 20%, and I'd be happy with that as a goal :mrgreen:

[ii]

I actually have the book "1001 Books", I got it as a christmas present once (then didn't take my nose out of it for the remaining holidays!) I haven't taken te toll yet as I'm feeling lazy, and not in the mood to wonder over translations. One of the downsides of reading on several different languages. Let's just let the record show that there's (embarrasingly) few books read, plenty on the TBR piles and even more on the "I can't possibly buy this 'cause I have just huge TBR piles already and no place for more books in my flat unless I do major renovations" -list. I'll get around my accurate numbers at some point, though.

[Kell]

Do you intend on completing the whole list one day Kell? I don't have any particular target in mind, although those figures above seem to add up to around 20%, and I'd be happy with that as a goal :mrgreen:
There are some I have no interest in whatsoever, and I've already decided that if I read one book by an author mentioned on the list and don't enjoy it, I shall not pressure myself to read the other books by the same author that might be there (personally, I find it weird that there are multiple entries for authors - although it would be difficult to narrow it down to just one in some cases, I agree!). I'd like to think I'll try most of them though, and I am trying to read at least one from the list each month, although if I can combine them with some of my other challenges (classics/modern classics/Olympic), it means I might get through more of them than otherwise. I'd like to read at least another 4 by the end of the year, and seeing as how I have almost 20 of them waiting already, that shouldn't prove too difficult! ;)

Let's just let the record show that there's (embarrasingly) few books read, plenty on the TBR piles and even more on the "I can't possibly buy this 'cause I have just huge TBR piles already and no place for more books in my flat unless I do major renovations" -list. I'll get around my accurate numbers at some point, though.
I think you'll find many of us here are in the same situation! :lol: My husband has effectively banned me from buying any more till I've whittled down my TBR pile a little, but it doesn't seem to stop me from acquiring books anyway! I think the only reason I get away with it as that I sell on, swap or pass on through mooches, many of the books I've read, so they don't end up staying in the flat and taking up more space (although they build up more quickly than I get rid of them, i'll admit!).

[proserpina]

I've got the 1001 list bookmarked but haven't bought the book, I'd rather spend the money on books to read.

I totted up the list a couple of weeks ago and I have read about 95 of the books on the list. I decided this year that I would try and read 25 books from the list, or more if I could manage it. I have read 16 so far and have 19 on my TBR list and I think that will be more than enough for 2007.

I'm not forcing myself to read all of them, there are some I know I would have to force myself to read but it has given me some great ideas for more modern literature to try.

[ii]

(although they build up more quickly than I get rid of them, i'll admit!).

They do! I think they reproduce. You look under the bed or behind the sofa and there's little book babies...

[ValenCina]

Here are the ones I've read:

1. Fury – Salman Rushdie
2. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
3. Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
4. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
5. Silk – Alessandro Baricco
6. Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
7. Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
8. Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
9. The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
10. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
11. Foe – J.M. Coetzee
12. Perfume – Patrick Süskind
13. Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
14. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
15. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
16. The Shining – Stephen King
17. High Rise – J.G. Ballard
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
19. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
20. Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
21. The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon
22. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
23. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
24. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
25. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
26. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
27. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
28. Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
29. If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
30. Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
31. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
32. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
33. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
34. The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
35. One, None and a Hundred Thousand – Luigi Pirandello
36. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
37. The Trial – Franz Kafka
38. Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
39. Zeno’s Conscience – Italo Svevo
40. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
41. The Shadow Line – Joseph Conrad
42. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
43. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
44. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
45. Dracula – Bram Stoker
46. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
47. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
48. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
49. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
50. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
51. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
52. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
53. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
54. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
55. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
56. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
57. The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
58. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
59. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
60. Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
61. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
62. Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee


There are lots more in the list that I would like to read, I stopped counting at about 50 ! I had never heard of this book before here in Italy, but it gives some very interesting suggestions.

[prospero]

If you don't mind me saying, ValenCina - you're very well read! You've read most of the novels that are on my to-be-read pile!

[prospero]

I have read the following:

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow – Peter Høeg (I refuse to call it by the American name, as if the population of the U.S. is too stupid to read it under Høeg's chosen title)
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy (Which volume? They're all published separately - I've only read Volume One: The Man of Property, In Chancery and To Let)
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
Emma – Jane Austen
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

Quite pathetic, really, isn't it? I also have the following on Mount TBR, but as Mark Twain said, "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd
The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Wild Swans – Jung Chang
Possession – A.S. Byatt
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
Perfume – Patrick Süskind
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Hard Times – Charles Dickens
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
Villette – Charlotte Brontë
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

I've got a lot of catching up to do!

[ValenCina]

If you don't mind me saying, ValenCina - you're very well read! You've read most of the novels that are on my to-be-read pile!

I don't mind at all, I'm very flattered actually! :blush:

[RedAlligator]

Heres my list. Have read more than I thought.

Don Quixote - Cervantes
Candide - Voltaire
Danerous Liaisons - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Sense & Sensibility - Jane Austen
Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen
Mansfield Park - Jane A
Emma - Jane A
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Oliver Twist - Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby - Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit - Dickens
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Vanity Fair - William M. thackeray
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
David Copperfield - Dickens
Hard Times - Dickens
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
The Woman in white - Wilkie Collins
The Mill on the Floss - George Elliot
Great Expectations - Dickens
Silas Marner - George Elliot
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Uncle Silas - Sheridan le Fanu
alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Theresa Raquin - Emile Zola
Little Women - Louisa May alcott
the Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
Around the World in 80 days - Jules Verne
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Anna Karenina - tolstoy
Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
Nana - Emile Zola
the Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
The Woodlanders - Thomas Hardy
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - thomas Hardy
The Time Machne - H G Wells
The Forstye Saga - John Galsworthy
The Old Wives Tale - Arnold Bennett
A Room with a view - E M Forster
Howards End - E M Forster
Sons & Lovers - D H Lawrence
Of Human Bondage - Somerset Maugham
Women in Love - D H Lawrence
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
A Passage to India - E M Forster
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fiztgerald
Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Thank you Jeeves - P G Wodehouse
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
Gond with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Razors Edge - Somerset Maugham
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
1984 - George Orwell
Love in a Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford
The Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
The Lord of the Rings - Tolkein
The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndhamn
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - Alan Sillitoe
Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee
One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest - Ken Kesey
The Collector - John Fowles
In cold Blood - Truman Capote
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
100 years of solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The French Lieutenants Woman - John Fowles
The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
Schindlers Ark - Thomas Keneally
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Perfume - Patrick Suskind
The Handmails Tail - Margaret Atwood
Oranges are not the only fruit - Jeanette Winterson
Love in the time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
London Fields - Martin Amis
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
Like Water for Chocolate - Laura Esquivel
Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Possession - A S Byatt
Wild Swans - Jung Chang
Hideous Kinky - Esther Freud
The Crow Road - Iain banks
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwod
The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
The Shipping News - Annie Proulx
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
The Reader - Bernhard Schlink
The Unconsolved - Kazuo Ishiguro
American Pastorl - Philip Roth
Enduring Love - Ian McEwan
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The God of Small Thngs - Arundhati Roy
Veronika Decides to Die - Paulo Coelho
The Hours - Michael Cunningham
Amsterdam - Ian McEwan
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Under their Skin - Michael Faber
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
The Devil & Miss Prym - Paulo Coelho
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Dead Air - Iain Banks
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Unless - Carol Shields
Fingersmith - Sarah Walters
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time - Mark haddon
The Colour - Rose Tremain
On Beauty - Zadie Smith
Saturday - Ian McEwan
Never Let me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

[Kirstykat]

O'h my goodness! What horror!!! I thought that I was relatively well read (although I want to read more classics), but you all seem to have read so much more than me.....:ob_sad:

I am going to work out exactly how many of these that I have read and then start reading from the list. I know that quite of few of my TBR books at home will match up with the list of TBRs from this list.

I had better get a move on......:out:

[Echo]

Here's what I have read:

A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien (my favorite book in the world!!)
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Animal Farm – George Orwell
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
Howards End – E.M. Forster
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
Villette – Charlotte Brontë
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Emma – Jane Austen
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
54 Total

A lot of the rest are on my TBR pile, of course!

[supergran71]

I wont live long enough to read that lot!!!:blush:

[Kell]

Up till now, I've read (or at least tried to read) 78 and have a further 42 waiting on my shelf. You can check out which ones on my blog HERE (http://kellsmurthwaite.wordpress.com/mount-to-be-read/1001-reading-challenge/).

[Freewheeling Andy]

This is odd. I know I've read another 10 or so of these recently, and my list now shows 114. What is weird is that way back on about page 3 of this thread I claim to have read 114. I think I must have lost some in the mix somewhere.

- Ah, I've just done a check through and it had lost some from that list on P 3, and I'm up to 120.

[Janet]

O'h my goodness! What horror!!! I thought that I was relatively well read (although I want to read more classics), but you all seem to have read so much more than me.....:ob_sad:
I wouldn't worry - you aren't alone. I've not read many of them either. I'm also trying to read more classics, but it wouldn't be good if we were all the same. :)

[danscottgraham]

I've read a lot of books but few can change your feeling towards life as 'Wild Swans' does by Jung Chang. That was spectacular, but my favorite book of all time would be by Alexandre Dumas, 'The Count Of Monte Cristo' closely followed by any of the John Stienbeck books then 'Crime and Punishment' by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

[Kylie]

I've read 50 and have at least 69 more on my TBR pile.

Since I first counted about 11 months ago, I've read 22 books :mrgreen:

[supergran71]

I have just counted the ones I have read from that list and its 13. Long way to go!!

[kb.marsh]

I found this list on the net and put it on my site. Check it out and let me know what you think. The thread title states what it is. I can't believe how few I've read and how many I've not heard of.. :dog:

Here is the link:

http://www.freewebs.com/katieshideaway/1001books.htm

[prospero]

How spooky. I was just thinking about this very thread on the way home and how long it would take to get through the remaining ones I've still to read.

About 200 years, then.

[Tambo]

I had a look through and was quite shocked at my low score...

12.


I faired considerably better on the BBC Big Read, the nations top 100 books. I had over 30 of them and was feeling quite chuffed with myself.

Now I just feel stooooopid. Ah well, by the end of the year I hope to get up to the dizzy heights of 20.

[Michelle]

You see, that's why lists like this annoy me.. Tambo, why are you feeling stupid, just because you've chosen to read different books?!

[Freewheeling Andy]

It can make you feel stupid (the "Penguin Classics" giveaway made me feel fairly stupid - I was lucky in the book I got, but well over half of them would have been completely unreadable to me). But this list, the 1001 books, I think is a very good one as a list of suggestions of books that it's worth reading. A large percentage of the best books I've ever read are on that list, and the presence of books on the list has on occasion been the thing that's pushed me over the edge to buying them - and almost always they've been worthwhile. Some are rubbish, but very rarely do I feel that it's not been worth my while reading them.

Think of it as a pointer to books that you won't feel like you're wasting your time reading, rather than as a challenge to prove how well read you are.

(Of course, I could be biased because it might get people to read my favourite books that are now fairly obscure).

[Michelle]

That's fine Andy, I appreciate that it's meant to be a list of books worth taking a look at.. but it's not good if people feel stupid because they haven't read them. We've all individual, after all.

[Freewheeling Andy]

But if lists of recommended books do that to you then surely the BCF recommended list at the top of this forum would serve the same purpose and have the same reaction.

I think people treat these too much like challenges, as the reading equivalent of proving how large your manhood is. It shouldn't be an "I'm better than you because I've read 8 inches of these books, and you've only read 5 inches of them" kind of list.

It should be: "I've often thought I should read a book by J G Ballard - which ones are on this list because they're probably the best by him"; or "I'm fascinated by the Balkans - which books on this list are about the Balkans or by Balkan authors, because it's probably going to be the best entry point for me to learn about the literature". Rather than "Look at me! I've read 87 of these and you've only read 62, I've got a bigger willy!"

[Kylie]

(Of course, I could be biased because it might get people to read my favourite books that are now fairly obscure).

Ooh, which book is that?

[Freewheeling Andy]

Oh, there are loads on there. Things like Broken April by Ismael Kadare, or The Bridge Over The Drina by Ivo Andric, or the one I'm currently reading which is fantastic, Independent People by Halldor Laxness, or High Rise by JG Ballard, or At-Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, or The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. And slightly less obscure ones like The Good Soldier Schweijk by Jaroslav Hasek, or If This Is A Man by Primo Levi.

I'd probably say at least 7 or 8 of my favourite ten books of all time are in that list.

[Michelle]

But if lists of recommended books do that to you then surely the BCF recommended list at the top of this forum would serve the same purpose and have the same reaction.

That is kind of a 'if you can't beat 'em, join em'' thing, but it's more that I'm interested to see what the range of people on here come up with. From what I've seen so far, everyone is coming up with lots of different ideas.

I think people treat these too much like challenges, as the reading equivalent of proving how large your manhood is. It shouldn't be an "I'm better than you because I've read 8 inches of these books, and you've only read 5 inches of them" kind of list.

I guess that's what I'm getting at.. it's fine to have a list of 'recommended' books, but this is telling you that they're books that you should read, and it does get taken as a challenge.

[tbain]

I have a copy of this book and it does have some good suggestions. I have only read 22 of the books recommended .

[Tambo]

You see, that's why lists like this annoy me.. Tambo, why are you feeling stupid, just because you've chosen to read different books?!

I don't really feel stupid. I just found it amusing that I have read 30% of one list and 1% of another. Stephen King, JK Rowling, Rohald Dahl and Terry Pratchett seem to have made the difference. :)

To be fair to the 1,001 list, there are a great number there that I would like to read.

[ii]