My edition of the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is a 2009 reprint by Harper Collins Australia with a Preface by Australian journalist and book lover, Jennifer Byrne. Back in February 2016, I spent one ghastly heatwave weekend, going through this book and compiling my read and to-be -read lists with the idea that I would constantly refer back to it and update it.
Guess what?
Neither of those things happened.
I’m not even sure what I hope will happen now, by revisiting both the read and TBR lists!
Except, I love lists.
I love the idea of ticking things off a list.
I love seeing that list of things completed and what is still to be accomplished.
It makes me feel organised and like I’m making progress.
Maybe that’s the key word here – progress.
There has been a lot of standing still, treading water, waiting around, and biding my time this year. You all know why. Most of us are experiencing a similar thing.
I’ve always read several books at once, but since Covid, I have taken this habit to the extreme! As a result, I’m not getting that lovely, satisfied feeling one gets, when a good book is finished. I’m curiously delaying this pleasure, by waylaying it with that other glorious book pleasure of starting a new book!
Which is also making it hard for me to blog regularly as I have less book reviews in the wings. Therefore, a list.
On my current TBR pile I have these books from the list of 1001 to look forward to:
- Tale of the Genji
- The Princess of Cleves
- Oroonoko (ebook)
- Robinson Crusoe
- Moll Flanders
- Pamela
- Clarissa
- The Female Quixote (ebook)
- Candide (ebook)
- Dream of the Red Chamber
- Camilla (ebook)
- Rob Roy (ebook)
- Ivanhoe
- Last of the Mohicans (ebook)
- The Betrothed
- The Red and the Black
- Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Eugene Onegin (ebook)
- Le Pere Goriot
- Oliver Twist
- Lost Illusions (ebook)
- The Three Musketeers (ebook)
- The Scarlet Letter (ebook)
- Cranford
- Walden
- Adam Bede
- Fathers and Sons
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (can’t believe I got through my childhood without reading this, but have seen many movie versions)
- Journey to the Centre of the Earth (ebook)
- Last Chronicle of Barset
- Therese Raquin
- Alice Through the Looking Glass
- Around the World in Eighty Days (ebook)
- L’Assommoir
- Treasure Island (ebook)
- Une Vie (ebook)
- The Death of Ivan Illyich
- Bel-Ami
- La Bete Humaine
- Picture of Dorian Gray
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- Diary of a Nobody
- The Time Machine
- Dracula
- What Maisie Knew
- The War of the Worlds
- The Awakening
- Buddenbrooks
- The Hound of the Baskervilles
- Heart of Darkness
- The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
- Death in Venice
- Kokoro
- The Good Soldier
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- The Return of the Soldier
- Ulysses
- Siddharta
- Kristin Lavransdatter
- The Magic Mountain
- The Professor’s House
- The Trial (ebook)
- Mrs Dalloway
- The Good Soldier Svejk
- To the Lighthouse
- Remembrance of Things Past
- Steppenwolf
- Some Prefer Nettles
- Parade’s End
- Orlando
- Passing
- The Maltese Falcon (movie version only)
- The Waves
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
- Tender is the Night
- Independent People
- Nightwood
- Nausea (ebook)
- Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
- The Big Sleep (movie version only)
- Goodbye to Berlin
- The Outsider | Albert Camus
- Pippi Longstocking
- The Heat of the Day
- The Rebel
- Invisible Man
- The Tree of Man
- The Talented Mr Ripley
- Voss
- Cider with Rosie
- The Tin Drum
- The Golden Notebook
- A Clockwork Orange (movie only. Not sure I will ever, ever read it!)
- The Bell Jar
- The Graduate (movie only)
- Silence
- The Master and Margarita
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (the movie was enough)
- Slaughterhouse Five
- G
- The Siege of Krishnapur
- A Dance to the Music of Time
- Quartet in Autumn
- Delta of Venus
- The Beggars Maid
- The Singapore Grip
- The Virgin in the Garden
- The Name of the Rose
- On the Black Hill
- Waterland
- Flaubert’s Parrot
- The Cider House Rules (movie only)
- Love in the Time of Cholera
- An Artist of the Floating World
- Beloved
- Regeneration (started many years ago, but never finished)
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
- A Fine Balance
- The Unconsoled
- The Life of Pi (movie only, found the book hard to get into)
- The Corrections (tedious, did not finish)
- Cloud Atlas
- The Master
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog
- The Reluctant Fundamentalist
I have now read all of these:
- Don Quixote (once will be more than enough with this one)
- The Sorrows of Young Werther (ugh! hard work. Read during my pre-blogging days)
- Dangerous Liaisons (book & movie several times)
- Sense and Sensibility (book & movie oodles of times)
- Pride and Prejudice (lost count of how many rereads I’ve had. No movie or tv series has even come close to capturing this story to date imo)
- Mansfield Park (book only)
- Emma (book & movie)
- Frankenstein
- Eugenie Grandet
- The Count of Monte Cristo (book & old tv movie starring Richard Chamberlain)
- Jane Eyre (numerous rereads & movies)
- Vanity Fair (didn’t finish the book, but watched the 1998 BBC production instead)
- Wuthering Heights (ugh! Probably should reread)
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
- David Copperfield (probably my favourite Dickens to date)
- Moby-Dick (I am now one of those Moby-Dick fanatics)
- Bleak House
- North and South (great readalong book that introduced me to Gaskell)
- Madame Bovary (another ugh! Not sure I finished it either. Read during my pre-blogging days)
- The Woman in White (book and the old B&W movie)
- The Mill on the Floss (read a long time ago – can’t remember much about it)
- Les Miserables (my first year-long chapter-a-day readalong book)
- The Moonstone (the book that turned me onto Wilkie Collins many moons ago)
- Little Women (numerous rereads and viewings)
- War and Peace (rereading this year a chapter-a-day)
- Middlemarch (read so long ago & I feel it’s due for a reread sooner rather than later)
- Far From the Madding Crowd
- Anna Karenina
- Nana
- Portrait of a Lady (book & movie)
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (surprised myself by how much I enjoyed this book)
- Germinal (my favourite Zola to date)
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (underwhelmed)
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles (makes me angry every time I read it)
- Jude the Obscure
- The Wings of the Dove (movie and book)
- The Ambassadors (watched the tv series way back when)
- The House of Mirth
- The Forsyte Saga (books and BBC series)
- A Room With a View (numerous reads and viewings of the Ivory Merchant movie)
- Howards End (movie and book)
- Ethan Frome
- Sons and Lovers (made to read this at school! Scarred me for life!)
- The Thirty Nine Steps (book & movie, both a long time ago)
- The Home and the World
- Women in Love (made to read this at school!)
- The Age of Innocence (several times, book and movie)
- A Passage to India (movie and book)
- The Great Gatsby (movie and book)
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (read during my Agatha Christie binge in Yr 7-8)
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover (all the various versions of it plus a live outdoor performance)
- Cold Comfort Farm (didn’t see what all the fuss was about)
- Brave New World (a favourite of Mr Books that he made me read 30 yrs ago)
- Testament of Youth (love, love, love)
- Gone With the Wind (relationship status: complicated)
- Out of Africa (underwhelmed. The movie was better)
- The Hobbit (just the book. Tried to watch the first movie but just couldn’t)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (thank you to the Classics Club for introducing this booka nd author to me)
- Of Mice and Men (book and movies)
- Rebecca (preferred My Cousin Rachel)
- The Grapes of Wrath (underwhelmed)
- The Little Prince
- Animal Farm
- Brideshead Revisited (three times plus numerous viewings of the BBC series)
- If This is a Man
- The Plague
- 1984 (book and theatre production)
- Love in a Cold Climate
- A Town Like Alice (book and TV series)
- The End of the Affair (book & movie)
- Day of the Triffids (book and m0vie)
- Excellent Women
- The Story of O
- Under the Net
- Lord of the Flies (ugh!)
- The Quiet American (twice plus movie)
- The Lord of the Rings (book and movies)
- Doctor Zhivago (book & movie, of course!)
- The Midwich Cuckoos
- The Leopard
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s (movie, of course, and book)
- To Kill a Mockingbird (several rereads & movie)
- Catch 22 (don’t get me started!)
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- One Hundred Years of Solitude (twice)
- The Godfather (movie and book)
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman (book & movie several times)
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- Surfacing (read during my Atwood phase in the mid 90’s but I remember very little about this one)
- The Summer Book (interesting)
- The Commandant (loved, a lot)
- The Shining (book & movie)
- The Sea, The Sea
- Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ( a hoot)
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
- Midnight’s Children (an all-time favourite)
- Schindler’s Ark (book & movie)
- The Color Purple (movie then book, sans the ‘u’ both times!)
- If Not Now, When?
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- The Handmaid’s Tale
- Perfume (loved in a perverse kind of way. If you’ve read the book, you’ll understand this comment)
- Contact (book & movie)
- The Drowned and the Saved
- The New York Trilogy (not sure if I will ever be brave enough to read this again)
- Kitchen
- Oscar and Lucinda (all I can remember is the glass church floating down the Bellinger River)
- Like Water For Chocolate (book & movie several times)
- The Remains of the Day (movie & book)
- Wild Swans
- Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (book & movie)
- Written on the Body
- The English Patient (movie & book)
- Possessing the Secret of Joy
- The Secret History
- Remembering Babylon
- A Suitable Boy (quite possibly my all-time favourite book ever, although it will need a reread to confirm this status)
- The Shipping News (book & movie)
- Felicia’s Journey
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
- The Reader
- Alias Grace (my favourite Atwood to date)
- Fugitive Pieces
- The God of Small Things
- Enduring Love
- The Hours (movie & book)
- Atonement (book & movie)
- Kafka on the Shore (read in Japan 🙂
- The Namesake
- What I Loved
- Suite Francaise
- The Inheritance of Loss
- The Gathering
I have now read 133 of 1001 books!
In 2016 I had read 120, or 12%.
I am making progress, even if it is only 1% in four years!
Other editions of the 1001 series (as kindly compiled here) include even more books that I have read:
- Never Let Me Go (underwhelmed)
- Saturday
- The Children’s Book (loved a lot)
- The Gathering (read in the past four years & new to the list)
- What I Loved (read in the past four years & new to the list)
- The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night-Time
- The Blind Assassin
- Amsterdam
- Memoirs of a Geisha (read in the past four years & new to the list)
- The Robber Bride
- The Heather Blazing (read in the past four years & new to the list)
- Possession
- Cat’s Eye
- The Passion
- The Child in Time (read in the past four years & new to the list)
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
- The World According to Garp (movie and book)
- The Nice and the Good (read in the past four years & new to the list)
- Chocky
- Vile Bodies (ugh!)
- Summer
- Where Angels Fear to Tread
- Lord Jim (movie and book)
- Northanger Abbey (book and TV series)
- Persuasion (book and movies)
Now we’re up to the interactive part.
Which books on my TBR list should I prioritise?
Convince me!
1. Love in the Time of Cholera2. The Scarlet Letter3. Bel-Ami:)
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The Diary of a Nobody because it is funny and we all need light relief these days. Or Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day because it is heartwarming and we also need that. I am interested to hear how much you love A Suitable Boy. I pulled it off my shelf the other day and then put it back. Maybe I will go find it again.
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Those other Sherlock Holmes books! now that you've read Study in Scarlet. They get even better.There's a lot of big great classics on there, but I'll also plug for Siege of Krishnapur, which is awfully good I thought, funny and short.
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Given my pandemic reading phase atm, Love in the Time of Cholera is definitely on the cards!
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I don't know very much about either of those books, but I see that Miss Pettigrew is one of the lovely Persephone Books. If I ever get back to London, it's high on my list of places to visit.I read A Suitable Boy about 20 yrs ago.It's a commitment. But I adored every minute with it. I still think about Lata to this day.When I finally finished it, I declared to my book club at the time, that this is the book I want to buried with! Which was a BIG call considering how much and for how long I have loved P&P and Persuasion.However ASB has not yet passed the reread test and I would like to one day…especially before A Suitable Girl gets published. Given how long this second book is taking Seth to write it, I'm not feeling any pressure just yet 🙂
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I'm very keen to read more Sherlock….but I've decided that this weekend (a long weekend in NSW) is the weekend I will finish at least three of the books by my bed, before starting anything new!!
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I could write an essay in reply, but I'll try to be brief. I listened to Huck Finn yesterday and didn't enjoy it as much this time round – Twain trying to hard to make fun of ordinary people.The Scarlet Letter is one of my all-time favourites and not particularly long. Likewise Portrait of an Artist, which is a very good lead-in to Joyce. Ulysses is the best book ever written but takes commitment. Moll Flanders I read (and reviewed) recently and enjoyed. I must read Oronoko, but only for its historical importance. The Good Soldier Svejk is funny and definitely worth reading (if I remember, I might review it next Anzac Day). Read Delta of Venus if you're feeling horny. Ivanhoe is excellent, another I must review. And to finish, Walden is important, Flaubert's Parrot is tedious, Alice Through the Looking Glass is absolutely essential (try the audiobook). That should keep you going, Bill
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A few of us are doing a Review-along of Tender Is the Night soon if you were interested. All it means is we all post our reviews on the same day – 26th October, and pop round to the other blogs for a bit of chit-chat about it. A couple of the girls don't blog, so they leave their extended comments on my post. I'll be putting out a reminder about it on my TBR post on Thursday. No pressure, obviously, if it doesn't fit in with your plans! 😀
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Yours is the second vote for The Scarlet Letter, so that has certainly bumped it up high on the list.Many years ago, I watched a movie called Henry and June, which turned me onto the idea of reading Anais Nin…although all I did, in the end, was collect the books! They're all still waiting to be read.Thanks for your thoughts, now I have to check if my copy of The Scarlet Letter is a hardcopy or an ebook.
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You have so many good books on that TBR it's hard to recommend just a few. But since you loved Germinal, I'll put in a pitch for L'Assommoir. It's not as gritty but I thought it was such a sad tale about a woman who desperately wants to climb out of poverty.
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Thanks for thinking of me. As you can see by this late reply, though, October flew by before I had a chance to catch my breath! Hope you all enjoyed your Tender is the Night readalong. Will pop over for the reviews & comments over the weekend.
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Will definitely get to L’Assommoir. I tend to save my Zola’s for Zoladdiction month with Fanda 😊
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