1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is a book edited by a man called
Peter Boxall. It's basically a list of one thousand and one books that are supposed to be fantastic and that everyone should read. :-) The selection is clearly based only in part on quality; the impact the books have had on literature and on the world as a whole has obviously been at least as important.
You can see the complete list
here, or you can go
here to get an interactive checklist of all the books on the list.
A lot of BookCrossers are really into this list and have set themselves the challenge of reading everything on the list. I'm one of them. This is obviously what you'd call a 'lifetime challenge'. ;-)
These are the titles that I've read:
19.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
68. Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
73.
As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakulic
85.
Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
89.
The Hours - Michael Cunningham
90. Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
93.
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
101.
Silk – Alessandro Baricco
122. Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
143.
The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
166.
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
190.
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
195.
Like Water for Chocolate - Laura Esquivel
237.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
238. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
243.
Perfume – Patrick Süskind
252.
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
272. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
293. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
300. If On A Winter's Night A Traveller - Italo Calvino
301. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
302.
The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
312. The Shining – Stephen King
320.
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
329.
Fateless – Imre Kertész
335. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
338.
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
390. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
408.
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
413.
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
456.
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
473. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
475.
Borstal Boy - Brendan Behan
477. The Once and Future King – T.H. White
478. The Bell – Iris Murdoch
489.
Giovanni's Room – James Baldwin
494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
508. The Lord of the Flies – William Golding
521. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
526. The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
537.
Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
561.
Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
563.
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
564. Animal Farm – George Orwell
565.
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
579. The Outsider – Albert Camus
599.
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
603. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
619.
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
623. At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
650.
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
675. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
677.
The Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
734. Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsun
749. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
789.
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
791. The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
794. Dracula – Bram Stoker
797. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
808.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
809.
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
813.
Hunger - Knut Hamsun
820. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
831. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
848. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
879. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
893. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
898. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
902. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
905.
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
906.
The Count of Monte Christo – Alexandre Dumas
907.
La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
908.
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
913. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
918. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
922. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
932.
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
933.
Persuasion – Jane Austen
936.
Emma – Jane Austen
937.
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
938.
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
940.
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
987. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
996. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
This will be updated, naturally. ;-) I do plan to read the whole list. And I'll also be adding links to my BookCrossing shelf for some more of the books.
Watch this space ... :-)
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