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1001 books you must read before you die

Posted on November 6, 2006. Filed under: Books |

I was inspired by ragdoll to see how many of the 1001 books you must read before you die I had read. babygotbooks even created a handy spreadsheet for your use.

Sadly, I’m only at 49. But, I ask, does it count if you own more than half of the list, with the intention of reading them some day? This must be my new mission — to at least count down what I would consider to be classics on this list.

Here’s what I’ve read so far.

• 2000s
• On Beauty – Zadie Smith
• White Teeth – Zadie Smith
• The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood

• 1900s
• Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
• Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
• Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
• Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
• Regeneration – Pat Barker
• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
• Shame – Salman Rushdie
• Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
• Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
• The Bell – Iris Murdoch
• Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
• The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
• Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
• Animal Farm – George Orwell
• Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
• Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
• Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
• The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
• To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
• The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
• Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
• The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
• The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad

• 1800s
• The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
• Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
• Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
• Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
• The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
• The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

• 1700s
• Evelina – Fanny Burney
• The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
• Candide – Voltaire
• Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
• Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
• A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift

• Pre-1700
• Oroonoko – Aphra Behn

At least the 1900s are well represented… How many have you read to date? I’ll have to check in next year and see if I’ve improved.

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