Saturday, May 24, 2008

881 books to read before I die

There's an article in the New York Times that discusses a book titled, "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die". Apparently you are an educated reader if you've made it through half of them. I am not an educated reader. With my paltry 120 books read, I fall into the "limp wrist" category. So, I've got another goal, on top of raising a child, baking good pies, succeeding in law school, and being a worthy partner - I now have to finish 881 books before I leave this earthly sphere for whatever awaits beyond. Interested to know where you fall? Click here to see the list.

Here's what I've read so far:
1. Saturday - Ian McEwan
2. The Sea - John Banville
3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
4. The Double - José Saramago
5. Unless - Carol Shields
6. Youth - J.M. Coetzee
7. Atonement - Ian McEwan
8. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
9. Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
10. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
11. The Hours - Michael Cunningham
12. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
13. The Reader - Bernhard Schlink
14. The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
15. Possession - A.S. Byatt
16. Beloved - Toni Morrison
17. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
18. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
19. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
20. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
21. Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
22. The World According to Garp - John Irving
23. The Shining - Stephen King
24. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
25. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
26. Slaughterhouse-five - Kurt Vonnegut
27. Them - Joyce Carol Oates
28. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
29. Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger
30. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
31. Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
32. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
33. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
34. The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
35. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
36. The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
37. The Outsider - Albert Camus
38. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
39. Animal Farm - George Orwell
40. Embers - Sandor Marai
41. Between the Acts - Virginia Woolf
42. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
43. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
44. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
45. The Years - Virginia Woolf
46. To Have and Have Not - Ernest Hemingway
47. Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
48. Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
49. Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
50. The Waves - Virginia Woolf
51. A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway
52. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
53. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
54. Orlando - Virginia Woolf
55. Lady Chatterly's Lover - D. H. Lawrence
56. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
57. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
58. Blindness - Henry Green
59. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
60. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
61. The Professor's House - Willa Cather
62. Jacob's Room - Virginia Woolf
63. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
64. Women in Love - D. H. Lawrence
65. Summer - Edith Wharton
66. The Good Soldier - Ford Maddox Ford
67. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
68. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
69. The Hound of Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
70. Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
71. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
72. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
73. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
74. A Woman's Life - Guy de Maupassant
75. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
76. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
77. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There - Lewis Carroll
78. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
79. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
80. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
81. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
82. Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
83. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
84. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
87. The House of Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
88. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
89. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
90. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
91. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
92. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
93. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
94. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
95. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
96. The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allan Poe
97. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens
98. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
99. Le Pere Goriot - Honore de Balzac
100. The Red and the Black - Stendhal
101. Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
102. Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
103. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
104. Persuasion - Jane Austen
105. Emma - Jane Austen
106. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
107. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
108. The Adventures of Caleb Williams - William Godwin
109. The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole
110. Emile, or, On Education - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
111. Candide - Voltaire
112. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
113. Pamela - Samuel Richardson
114. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
115. Moll Flanders - Daniel DeFoe
116. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel DeFoe
117. Oroonoko - Aphra Behn
118. The Princesse of Cleves - Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne
119. Metamorphoses - Ovid
120. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie*


*Out of chronological order

1 comment:

Dr. A said...

What about the books that haven't yet been written? Surely by the time we're 80 or so it'll be up to 1500?