1001 Books: I’ve Read About 32

October 20th, 2006

Here’s a list of 1001 books that are recommended everyone should read before they die, taken from a book by Martin Seymour-Smith. Here are the titles I’ve definitely read:

Beloved, Contact, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dispatches, Fear of Flying, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Bell Jar, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, A Clockwork Orange, Naked Lunch, The Lord of the Rings, Lolita, Lord of the Flies, Foundation, The Catcher in the Rye, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Little Prince, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Hobbit, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Great Gatsby, Sister Carrie, The War of the Worlds, Around the World in Eighty Days, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Madame Bovary, Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Aesop’s Fables.

I didn’t include any titles that are fuzzy, for example I’m pretty sure I read The Sun Also Rises in highschool but I can’t exactly recall, so I didn’t include it in the paragraph above. I think there were about ten additional titles that I may have read (but if I can’t remember what they were about, I might as well read them again).

I have to admit, my reading taste leans towards non-fiction, history, or technical books. Pretty much everything on this list is fiction, which leads to many omissions of some great books. I’d say a book like Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” is way more interesting and important than “Contact” for example.

Anyhow, I like the list thing and it would be a fun experiment to consider this list a benchmark and plow ahead reading the books on this list, and then devoting a blog post to said book. You’d certainly never be at a loss for something to blog about. I once had a mission to watch (and own) all the AFI 100 American Films, but petered out at about 50.

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  • Well, I can't say I did much better. I had 28. But I only "picked up" a lot of titles towards the end of the list. Can't say I've read many of the recent items.

    I feel so unlearned :-)

    They did have one comic book in there..."The Watchmen", woot! Not much scifi except for Asimov, HG Wells and a Neal Stephenson book.
  • Also, a fair number of the books on my "read" list were ones that I was forced to read for highschool or college courses... so if left to my own choosing I would have read even fewer.
  • DBK
    I have about 94, but I am disappointed that so many great books didn't make it onto the list. You could put any of Ray Chandler's other novels on there with the two or three that made it. Frankly, I thought The Ladi in the Lake was terrific.

    I was hoping to break 100. My usual golf score and my reading score are synched.
  • Wow DBK, that's pretty awesome. More than 3 times my list.

    What books would you recommend me to read? Maybe I'll start with Raymond Chandler.

    I also noticed quite a few movies I enjoyed were on there too (The English Patient, Howard's End, Breakfast at Tiffany's) ... maybe that would be an easy entry for me into reading fiction again.
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