1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Via BookSlut, my own little meme-y thing. Of the list of 1001, how many have I read?

104. Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
109. Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
167. Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
174. Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
197. London Fields – Martin Amis
210. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
213. The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
227. Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
242. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
253. Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
254. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
258. Neuromancer – William Gibson
288. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
301. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
320. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
340. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
345. Crash – J.G. Ballard
375. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
389. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
390. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
417. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
430. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
436. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
437. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
439. The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
444. Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
496. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
521. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
527. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
529. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
539. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
564. Animal Farm – George Orwell
599. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
610. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
623. At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
635. The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
649. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
652. The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
660. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
736. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
743. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
790. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
792. What Maisie Knew – Henry James
794. Dracula – Bram Stoker
796. The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
797. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
804. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
808. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
814. The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
820. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
846. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
848. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
851. Erewhon – Samuel Butler
866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
867. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
871. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsk
876. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
883. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
879. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
911. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
916. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
983. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
987. Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe

No bad, all things considered. Certainly lots of lit courses over my school career helped pad a lot of the numbers here. As expected, genre is very poorly served by this list, most of the selections are either obvious or token. Mystery-wise, James Lee Burke, John D Macdonald & Ross McDonald are key ommissions as are Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl, Dan Simmons, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber and countless others on the f/sf side. Taking the easy way out, the lister chooses too many items by the same famous authors, leaving less room for truly interesting selections. For example, we probably don't need 10 Dickens selections, 5 Hemingway or even all the Wells that was chosen.

Of course, there are also many books I do hope to read off the list by Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Martin & Kinsley Amis. Iain Banks, William Kotzwinkle, Angela Carter, John Le Carré, Raymond Chandler and many others.