William
Grimes wrote in the New York Times last Friday about the 2006 book 1001
Books You Must Read Before You Die (Universe). He offers a realistic
take on said
list, pointing out its merits while acknowledging that any such catalog
should be taken with several grains of salt (perhaps sea salt of the Moby Dick
variety?).
Here, without further ado or embarrassment, are the books (from that list) I’ve read from start to finish:
1) The Body Artist, Don DeLillo
2) The Human Stain,
Philip Roth
3) The Hours, Michael
Cunningham
4) Memoirs of a Geisha, Arther Golden
5) Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
6) Possession, AS Byatt
7) Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood
8) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
9) The Color Purple, Alice Walker *
10) Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison *
11) Surfacing, Margaret Atwood
12) The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
13) In Cold
Blood, Truman Capote
14) The Collector,
John Fowles
15) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
16) Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
17) To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee *
18) The Once and Future King, TH White *
19) On the Road, Jack Kerouac
20) Lord of the Flies, William Golding *
21) The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
22) The Catcher in the Rye,
JD Salinger *
23) The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
24) Animal Farm, George Orwell *
25) The Power and the
Glory, Graham Greene
26) Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
27) Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston *
28) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley *
29) All Quiet on the Western Front,
Erich Maria Remarque *
30) Steppenwolf, Hermen Hesse
31) The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
32) Mrs. Dalloway,
Virginia Woolf
33) The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald *
34) Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
35) A Portait of the Artist
as a Young Man *
36) Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
37) Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad *
38) Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
39) The Awakening, Kate Chopin
40) The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
41) Jude the Obscure,
Thomas Hardy
42) The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
43) The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
44) The Portrait of a Lady,
Henry James
45) Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
46) Middlemarch, George Eliot
47) Little Woman, Louisa May Alcott
48) Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
49) Silas Marner, George Eliot
50) Madame Bovary, Gustave
Flaubert
51) The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
52) Wuthering
Heights, Emily Bronte
53) Jane Eyre, Charlotte
Bronte
54) Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley *
55) Emma, Jane Austen
56) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
57) Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
58) Foundation, Isaac Asimov **
59) The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck * **
* Read as part of a high school or college class
** The list is presented chronologically from most
recent-oldest; Foundation and The Grapes of Wrath are out of order because I
saw them the second time I read through it.
If you combine those 59 with the handful that I’ve started
and know I won’t finish (including The Handmaid’s Tale and *gasp* White Noise),
I’ve dispensed with a mere 6.59 percent of the list, according to the handy Excel spreadsheet
available here.
Just 93-ish percent to go before death! That’s encouraging,
especially considering all the books on my mental To-Read list that aren’t
included on this one. Sigh. I began The
Brothers K last night, so that’s a start. And I recently discovered Lydia
Davis, so her 2004 novel, The End
of the Story, might come next.
-- Deirdre Fulton
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