Wednesday, July 02, 2008

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2008)

{Updated on 2nd July 2008 with more irrelevant commentaries}

On the heels of Alison Bechdel's Compulsory Reading, where we argue against reading the classics just because we think we should - I follow up with this list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die - the revised 2008 edition! Because I'm just a bag of contradictions. :D

(I cut-and-pasted the list from Random Field Notes. Thank you for doing the spadework.)

You know what? Sorting through lists like these gives me pleasure.

Red indicates books I have actually finished reading. Then there are those books, like Little Women, Great Expectations and Robinson Crusoe that I vaguely recall reading when I was very young, but I can't be sure if I read the abridged versions or the full thing. So I left them out. Titles like American Psycho - that I have started but never finished, I left them unmarked also. It's embarrassing to see how many books I have actually left unfinished. Bad reader.

Of course, this is just a way of justifying why I don't seem to have read much from this list of 1001 titles! ;p

I'm actually glad this revised version is more aware of global literature. Romance of the Three Kingdoms definitely needs to be included because it is THE great war epic of Chinese literature. I'm not putting it down as read though, because I always stopped somewhere towards the end, after Guan Yu dies. Everything just goes downhill and depressing from there onwards.


Now, for The List:

* new to the list


: Pre 1800 :
0001 : The Thousand and One Nights . Anonymous
0002 : The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter . Anonymous *
0003 : The Tale of Genji . Murasaki Shikibu *
0004 : Romance of the Three Kingdoms . Luó Guànzhong * (Never finished. *sigh*)
0005 : The Water Margin . Shi Nai'an & Luó Guànzhong *
0006 : The Golden Ass . Lucius Apuleius
0007 : Tirant lo Blanc . Joanot Martorell *
0008 : La Celestina . Fernando de Rojas *
0009 : Amadis of Gaul . Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo *
0010 : The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes . Anonymous *
0011 : Gargantua and Pantagruel . François Rabelais
0012 : The Lusiad . Luís Vaz de Camões *
0013 : Monkey: A Journey to the West . Wú Chéng'en *
0014 : Unfortunate Traveller . Thomas Nashe
0015 : Thomas of Reading . Thomas Deloney *
0016 : Don Quixote . Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
0017 : The Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda . Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra *
0018 : The Conquest of New Spain . Bernal Díaz del Castillo *
0019 : The Adventurous Simplicissimus . Hans von Grimmelshausen *
0020 : The Princess of Clèves . Comtesse de La Fayette
0021 : Oroonoko . Alphra Behn
0022 : Robinson Crusoe . Daniel Defoe (I remember reading the part with the footprint - but I can't recall if it's an abridged version or not. *sigh*)
0023 : Love in Excess . Eliza Haywood
0024 : Moll Flanders . Daniel Defoe
0025 : Gulliver's Travels . Jonathan Swift
0026 : A Modest Proposal . Jonathan Swift
0027 : Joseph Andrews . Henry Fielding
0028 : Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus . Arbuthnot, Gay, Parnell, Pope, Swift
0029 : Pamela . Samuel Richardson
0030 : Clarissa . Samuel Richardson (You have to be kidding. Life is too short, and that book too long)
0031 : Tom Jones . Henry Fielding
0032 : Fanny Hill . John Cleland (Yes, I read it for the sexy bits. It was fun. Classic porn)
0033 : Peregrine Pickle . Tobias George Smollett
0034 : The Female Quixote . Charlotte Lennox
0035 : Candide . Voltaire
0036 : Rasselas . Samuel Johnson
0037 : Julie; or The New Eloise . Jean-Jacques Rousseau
0038 : Émile; or, On Education . Jean-Jacques Rousseau
0039 : The Castle of Otranto . Horace Walpole
0040 : The Vicar of Wakefield . Oliver Goldsmith
0041 : Tristam Shandy . Laurence Sterne
0042 : A Sentimental Journey . Laurence Sterne
0043 : The Man of Feeling . Henry Mackenzie
0044 : Humphry Clinker . Tobias George Smollett
0045 : The Sorrows of Young Werther . Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
0046 : Evelina . Fanny Burney
0047 : Reveries of a Solitary Walker . Jean-Jacques Rousseau
0048 : Dangerous Liasons . Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
0049 : Confessions . Jean-Jacques Rousseau
0050 : The 120 Days of Sodom . Marquis de Sade (Tried reading. Was bored to tears)
0051 : Anton Reiser . Karl Philipp Moritz *
0052 : Vathek . William Beckford
0053 : Justine . Marquis de Sade (See comments for The 120 Days of Sodom)
0054 : A Dream of Red Mansions . Cao Xueqin *
0055 : The Adventures of Caleb Willams . William Godwin
0056 : The Interesting Narrative . Olaudah Equiano
0057 : The Mysteries of Udolpho . Ann Radcliffe (Why is it I never read any Ann Radcliffe?)
0058 : Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship . Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
0059 : The Monk . M.G. Lewis
0060 : Camilla . Fanny Burney
0061 : Jacques the Fatalist . Denis Diderot *
0062 : The Nun . Denis Diderot
0063 : Hyperion . Friedrich Hölderlin

: 1800s :
0064 : Castle Rackrent . Maria Edgeworth
0065 : Henry of Ofterdingen . Novalis *
0066 : Rameau's Nephew . Denis Diderot *
0067 : Elective Affinities . Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
0068 : Michael Kohlhaas . Heinrich von Kleist *
0069 : Sense and Sensibility . Jane Austen
0070 : Pride and Prejudice . Jane Austen
0071 : Mansfield Park . Jane Austen
0072 : Emma . Jane Austen
0073 : Rob Roy . Sir Walter Scott
0074 : Frankenstein . Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
0075 : Ivanhoe . Sir Walter Scott
0076 : Melmoth the Wanderer . Charles Robert Maturin
0077 : The Life and the Opinions of the Tombcat Murr . E.T.A. Hoffmann *
0078 : The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner . James Hogg
0079 : The Life of a Good-for-Nothing . Joseph von Eichendorff *
0080 : Last of the Mohicans . James Fenimore Cooper
0081 : The Betrothed . Alessandro Manzoni
0082 : The Red and the Black . Stendhal (Trying to get to Stendhal soon)
0083 : The Hunchback of Notre Dame . Victor Hugo
0084 : Eugene Onegin . Alexander Pushkin *
0085 : Eugénie Grandet . Honoré de Balzac
0086 : La Père Goriot . Honoré de Balzac
0087 : The Nose . Nikolay Gogol
0088 : Oliver Twist . Charles Dickens
0089 : The Lion of Flanders . Hendrick Conscience *
0090 : The Charterhouse of Parma . Stendhal
0091 : The Fall of the House of Usher . Edgar Allan Poe
0092 : Camera Obscura . Hildebrand *
0093 : A Hero of Our Times . Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov *
0094 : Dead Souls . Nikolay Gogol
0095 : Lost Illusions . Honoré de Balzac
0096 : The Pit and the Pendulum . Edgar Allan Poe
0097 : The Three Musketeers . Alexandre Dumas (Again, the question: Did I read an abridged version or the full thing?)
0098 : Facundo . Domingo Faustino Sarmiento *
0099 : The Devil's Pool . George Sand *
0100 : The Count of Monte Cristo . Alexandre Dumas (I read an abridged version, I think)
0101 : Jane Eyre . Charlotte Brontë (Yes, I know - how could I not have read Jane Eyre - I'm an English major, for gawd's sake!)
0102 : Vanity Fair . William Makepeace Thackeray
0103 : Wuthering Heights . Emily Brontë
0104 : The Tenant of Wildfell Hall . Anne Brontë
0105 : David Copperfield . Charles Dickins
0106 : The Scarlet Letter . Nathaniel Hawthorne
0107 : Moby-Dick . Herman Melville (NEVER!)
0108 : The House of the Seven Gables . Nathaniel Hawthorne
0109 : Uncle Tom's Cabin . Harriet Beecher Stowe
0110 : Cranford . Elizabeth Gaskell
0111 : Bleak House . Charles Dickens (I have a version at home with Gillian Anderson on the cover)
0112 : Walden . Henry David Thoreau
0113 : Green Henry . Gottfried Keller *
0114 : North and South . Elizabeth Gaskell
0115 : Madame Bovary . Gustave Flaubert
0116 : Indian Summer . Adalbert Stifter *
0117 : Adam Bede . George Eliot
0118 : Oblomov . Ivan Goncharov
0119 : The Woman in White . Wilkie Collins
0120 : The Mill on the Floss . George Eliot
0121 : Max Havelaar . Multatuli
0122 : Great Expectations . Charles Dickens (I remember the chapter with the wedding cake. But pretty sure it's an abridged version)
0123 : Silas Marner . George Eliot (Never finished. Maybe because it was on the syllabus for the module taught by the prick, Dr D.)
0124 : Fathers and Sons . Ivan Turgenev
0125 : Les Misérables . Victor Hugo
0126 : The Water-Babies . Charles Kingsley
0127 : Notes from the Underground . Fyodor Dostoevsky
0128 : Uncle Silas . Sheridan Le Fanu
0129 : Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . Lewis Carroll
0130 : Journey to the Center of the Earth . Jules Verne
0131 : Crime and Punishment . Fyodor Dostoevsky
0132 : Last Chronicle of Barset . Anthony Trollope *
0133 : Thérèse Raquin . Émile Zola
0134 : The Moonstone . Wilkie Collins
0135 : Little Women . Louisa May Alcott
0136 : The Idiot . Fyodor Dostoevsky (never finished)
0137 : Maldoror . Comte de Lautréamont
0138 : Phineas Finn . Anthony Trollope
0139 : Sentimental Education . Gustave Flaubert
0140 : War and Peace . Leo Tolstoy
0141 : King Lear of the Steppes . Ivan Turgenev
0142 : Alice Through the Looking Glass . Lewis Carroll
0143 : Middlemarch . George Eliot
0144 : Spring Torrents . Ivan Turgenev
0145 : Erewhon . Samuel Butler
0146 : The Devils . Fyodor Dostoevsky
0147 : In a Glass Darkly . Sheridan Le Fanu
0148 : Around the World in Eighty Days . Jules Verne
0149 : The Enchanted Wanderer . Nicolai Leskov *
0150 : Far from the Maddening Crowd . Thomas Hardy
0151 : Pepita Jimenéz . Juan Valera *
0152 : The Crime of Father Amado . José Maria Eça de Queirós *
0153 : Drunkard . Émile Zola
0154 : Anna Karenina . Leo Tolstoy
0155 : Martín Fierro . José Hernández *
0156 : The Red Room . August Strindberg
0157 : Ben-Hur . Lew Wallace
0158 : Nana . Émile Zola
0159 : The Portrait of a Lady . Henry James
0160 : The House by the Medlar Tree . Giovanni Verga
0161 : The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas . Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
0162 : Bouvard and Pécuchet . Gustave Flaubert
0163 : Treasure Island . Robert Louis Stevenson
0164 : A Woman's Life . Guy de Maupassant
0165 : The Death of Ivan Ilyich . Leo Tolstoy
0166 : Against the Grain . Joris-Karl Huysmans
0167 : The Regent's Wife . Clarín Leopoldo Alas *
0168 : Bel-Ami . Guy de Maupassant
0169 : Marius the Epicurean . Walter Pater
0170 : The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Mark Twain
0171 : Germinal . Émile Zola
0172 : King Solomon's Mines . H. Rider Haggard
0173 : The Quest . Frederik van Eeden *
0174 : The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . Robert Louis Stevenson
0175 : The Manors of Ulloa . Emilia Pardo Bazán *
0176 : The People of Hemsö . August Strindberg
0177 : Pierre and Jean . Guy de Maupassant
0178 : Under the Yoke . Ivan Vazov *
0179 : The Child of Pleasure . Gabriele D'Annunzio *
0180 : Eline Vere . Louis Couperus *
0181 : Hunger . Knut Hamsun
0182 : By the Open Sea . August Strindberg
0183 : La Bête Humaine . Émile Zola
0184 : Thaïs . Anatole France *
0185 : The Kreutzer Sonata . Leo Tolstoy
0186 : The Picture of Dorian Gray . Oscar Wilde
0187 : Down There . Joris-Karl Huysmans *
0188 : Tess of the D'Ubervilles . Thomas Hardy
0189 : Gösta Berling's Saga . Selma Lagerlöf
0190 : New Grub Street . George Gissig
0191 : News from Nowhere . William Morris
0192 : The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes . Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
0193 : The Diary of a Nobody . George & Weedon Grossmith
0194 : The Viceroys . Federico De Roberto *
0195 : Jude the Obscure . Thomas Hardy
0196 : Effi Briest . Theodor Fontane
0197 : The Time Machine . H.G. Wells
0198 : The Island of Dr. Moreau . H.G. Wells
0199 : Quo Vadis . Henryk Sienkiewicz
0200 : Dracula . Bram Stoker
0201 : What Maisie Knew . Henry James
0202 : Compassion . Benito Pérez Galdós *
0203 : Pharaoh . Boleslaw Prus *
0204 : Fruits of the Earth . André Gide
0205 : The War of the Worlds . H.G. Wells
0206 : As a Man Grows Older . Italo Svevo *
0207 : Dom Casmurro . Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis *
0208 : The Awakening . Kate Chopin
0209 : The Stechlin . Theodor Fontane
0210 : Eclipse of the Crescent Moon . Géza Gárdonyi *
0211 : Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. . Somerville and Ross

: 1900s :
0212 : Sandokan: The Tigers of Mompracem . Emilio Salgari *
0213 : Sister Carrie . Theodore Dreiser
0214 : None but the Brave . Arthur Schnitzler *
0215 : Kim . Rudyard Kipling (I actually rather enjoyed it)
0216 : Buddenbrooks . Thomas Mann
0217 : The Hound of the Baskervilles . Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (A legacy of my misspent youth)
0218 : Heart of Darkness . Joseph Conrad (*yawn*)
0219 : The Wings of the Dove . Henry James
0220 : The Immoralist . André Gide
0221 : The Ambassadors . Henry James
0222 : The Riddle of the Sands . Erskine Childers
0223 : The Call of the Wild . Jack London *
0224 : Memoirs of my Nervous Illness . Daniel P. Schreber *
0225 : The Way of All Flesh . Samuel Butler *
0226 : Hadrian the Seventh . Frederick Rolfe
0227 : Nostromo . Joseph Conrad
0228 : The House of Mirth . Edith Wharton
0229 : Professor Unrat . Heinrich Mann
0230 : Solitude . Víctor Català *
0231 : Young Törless . Robert Musil
0232 : The Forsyte Saga . John Galsworthy
0233 : The Jungle . Upton Sinclair
0234 : The Secret Agent . Joseph Conrad
0235 : Mother . Maxim Gorky
0236 : The House on the Borderland . William Hope Hodgson
0237 : The Old Wives' Tale . Arnold Bennett
0238 : The Inferno . Henri Barbusse
0239 : A Room with a View . E.M. Forster
0240 : Strait is the Gate . André Gide
0241 : The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . Rainer Maria Rilke *
0242 : Howards End . E.M. Forster
0243 : Impressions of Africa . Raymond Roussel
0244 : Fantômas . Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre
0245 : Ethan Frome . Edith Wharton
0246 : The Charwoman's Daughter . James Stephens
0247 : Death in Venice . Thomas Mann
0248 : Sons and Lovers . D.H. Lawrence
0249 : The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists . Robert Tressell
0250 : Platero and I . Juan Ramón Jiménez *
0251 : Tarzan of the Apes . Edgar Rice Burroughs
0252 : Locus Solas . Raymond Roussell
0253 : Kokoro . Natsume Soseki
0254 : The Thirty-Nine Steps . John Buchan
0255 : The Rainbow . D.H. Lawrence
0256 : Of Human Bondage . William Somerset Maugham (Since reading The Painted Veil, I've come to admire Maugham. Will get to it soon)
0257 : The Good Soldier . Ford Madox Ford
0258 : Rashomon . Akutagawa Ryunosuke *
0259 : Under Fire . Henri Barbusse
0260 : A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . James Joyce (I was reading the hellfire and brimstone chapter while standing in the queue in a bank. It was the most surreal and intense banking experience ever)
0261 : The Underdogs . Mariano Azuela *
0262 : Pallieter . Felix Timmermans *
0263 : Home and the World . Rabindranath Tagore *
0264 : Growth of the Soil . Knut Hamsun
0265 : The Return of the Soldier . Rebecca West
0266 : Tarr . Wyndham Lewis
0267 : The Storm of Steel . Ernst Jünger *
0268 : Women in Love . D.H. Lawrence
0269 : Main Street . Sinclair Lewis
0270 : The Age of Innocence . Edith Wharton
0271 : Chrome Yellow . Aldous Huxley
0272 : Life of Christ . Giovanni Papini *
0273 : Ulysses . James Joyce (My Penguin copy sits very impressively on my bookshelf)
0274 : Babbitt . Sinclair Lewis
0275 : Claudine's House . Colette * (Read all the Claudine novels. Loved that saucy girl)
0276 : Life and Death of Harriett Frean . May Sinclair
0277 : The Forest of the Hanged . Liviu Rebreanu *
0278 : Siddhartha . Hermann Hesse (I really don't think it's that great. Or all that spiritual - but that's just me)
0279 : The Enormous Room . e.e. cummings
0280 : Kristin Lavransdatter . Sigrid Undset
0281 : Amok . Stefan Zweig
0282 : The Devil in the Flesh . Raymond Radiguet
0283 : Zeno's Conscience . Italo Svevo (Getting there)
0284 : A Passage to India . E.M. Forster
0285 : We . Yevgeny Zamyatin
0286 : The Magic Mountain . Thomas Mann
0287 : The Green Hat . Michael Arlen
0288 : The New World . Heruy Wäldä-Sellassé *
0289 : The Professor's House . Willa Cather
0290 : The Artamonov Business . Maxim Gorky
0291 : The Trial . Franz Kafka
0292 : The Counterfeiters . André Gide
0293 : The Great Gatsby . F. Scott Fitzgerald
0294 : Mrs. Dalloway . Virginia Woolf
0295 : Chaka the Zulu . Thomas Mofolo *
0296 : The Making of Americans . Gertrude Stein
0297 : The Murder of Roger Ackroyd . Agatha Christie
0298 : One, None and a Hundred Thousand . Luigi Pirandello
0299 : Under Satan's Sun . Geroges Bernanos *
0300 : The Good Soldier's Svejk . Jaroslav Hasek
0301 : Alberta and Jacob . Cora Sandel *
0302 : The Castle . Franz Kafka
0303 : Blindness . Henry Green
0304 : The Sun Also Rises . Ernest Hemingway
0305 : Amerika . Franz Kafka
0306 : The Case of Sergeant Grischa . Arnold Zweig *
0307 : Tarka the Otter . Henry Williamson
0308 : To the Lighthouse . Virginia Woolf
0309 : Remembrance of Things Past . Marcel Proust (GETTING THERE!)
0310 : Steppenwolf . Hermann Hesse
0311 : Nadja . André Breton
0312 : Quicksand . Nella Larsen
0313 : Decline and Fall . Evelyn Waugh
0314 : Some Prefer Nettles : Junichiro Tanizaki *
0315 : Parade's End . Ford Madox Ford
0316 : The Well of Loneliness . Radclyffe Hall (It's more than old-school. It's an institution - sort of like prison. Hence, the avoidance)
0317 : Lady Chatterley's Lover . D.H. Lawrence (Yes, I read it for the sexy bits when I was in school)
0318 : Orlando . Virginia Woolf (One day. Because of Tilda Swinton)
0319 : Story of the Eye . Geroges Bataille
0320 : Retreat Without Song . Shahan Shahnoor
0321 : Les Enfants Terribles . Jean Cocteau
0322 : Berlin Alexanderplatz . Alfred Döblin
0323 : All Quiet on the Western Front . Erich Maria Remarque
0324 : The Time of Indifference . Alberto Moravia
0325 : Living . Henry Green
0326 : I Thought of Daisy . Edmund Wilson *
0327 : Farewell to Arms . Ernest Hemingway
0328 : Passing . Nellas Larsen
0329 : Look Homeward, Angel . Thomas Wolfe *
0330 : The Maltese Falcon . Dashiell Hammett
0331 : Her Privates We . Frederic Manning
0332 : The Apes of God . Wyndham Lewis
0333 : Monica . Saunders Lewis *
0334 : Insatiability . Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz *
0335 : The Waves . Virginia Woolf
0336 : To the North . Elizabeth Bowen
0337 : The Thin Man . Dashiell Hammett
0338 : Journey to the End of the Night . Louis-Ferdinand Céline
0339 : The Return of Philip Latinowicz . Miroslav Krleza *
0340 : The Radetzky March . Joseph Roth
0341 : The Forbidden Realm . J.J. Slauerhoff *
0342 : Cold Comfort Farm . Stella Gibbons (I need to read this one, because it looks really funny)
0343 : Brave New World . Aldous Huxley
0344 : Vipers' Tangle . François Mauriac *
0345 : The Man Without Qualities . Robert Musil
0346 : Cheese . Willem Elsschot *
0347 : Man's Fate . André Malraux *
0348 : A Day Off . Storm Jameson
0349 : Testament of Youth . Vera Brittain
0350 : The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . Gertrude Stein (Only if I'm marooned on an island with nothing else)
0351 : Murder Must Advertise . Dorothy L. Sayers
0352 : Miss Lonelyhearts . Nathanael West
0353 : Call It Sleep . Henry Roth
0354 : The Street of Crocodiles . Bruno Schulz
0355 : Thank You, Jeeves . P.G. Wodehouse
0356 : Tender is the Night . F. Scott Fitzgerald
0357 : Tropic of Cancer . Henry Miller
0358 : The Postman Always Rings Twice . James M. Cain
0359 : On the Heights of Despair . Emil Cioran *
0360 : The Bells of Basel . Louis Aragon *
0361 : The Nine Taylors . Dorothy L. Sayers
0362 : Auto-da-Fé . Elias Canetti
0363 : They Shoot Horses, Don't They? . Horace McCoy
0364 : The Last of Mr. Norris . Christopher Isherwood
0365 : Untouchable . Mulk Raj Anand
0366 : Independent People . Halldór Laxness
0367 : Nightwood . Djuna Barnes (yes, I said I would read it, but life has a way of interfering with plans)
0368 : At the Mountains of Madness . H.P. Lovecraft
0369 : Absalom, Absalom! . William Faulkner
0370 : War with the Newts . Karel Capek *
0371 : Keep the Aspidistra Flying . George Orwell
0372 : Gone with the Wind . Margaret Mitchell
0373 : The Thinking Reed . Rebecca West
0374 : Eyeless in Gaza . Aldous Huxley
0375 : Summer Will Show . Sylvia Townsend Warner
0376 : Rickshaw Boy . Lao She * (I've read it in Chinese, so it counts.)
0377 : Out of Africa . Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
0378 : In Parenthesis . David Jones
0379 : Ferdydurke . Witold Gombrowicz *
0380 : The Blind Owl . Sadegh Hedayat *
0381 : The Hobbit . J.R.R. Tolkien
0382 : Their Eyes Were Watching God . Zora Neale Hurston
0383 : Of Mice and Men . John Steinbeck
0384 : Murphy . Samuel Beckett
0385 : U.S.A. . John Dos Passos
0386 : Brighton Rock . Graham Greene (My first Graham Greene, which I didn't enjoy)
0387 : Cause for Alarm . Eric Ambler
0388 : Alamut . Vladimir Bartol *
0389 : Rebecca . Daphne du Maurier
0390 : Nausea . Jean-Paul Sartre
0391 : Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day . Winifred Watson
0392 : On the Edge of Reason . Miroslav Krleza *
0393 : The Big Sleep . Raymond Chandler
0394 : Goodbye to Berlin . Christopher Isherwood
0395 : The Grapes of Wrath . John Steinbeck
0396 : Good Morning, Midnight . Jean Rhys
0397 : At Swim-Two-Birds . Flann O'Brien
0398 : Finnegans Wake . James Joyce
0399 : Native Son . Richard Wright
0400 : The Tarter Steppe . Dino Buzzati
0401 : The Power and the Glory . Graham Greene
0402 : For Whom the Bell Tolls . Ernest Hemingway
0403 : The Man Who Loved Children . Christina Steed *
0404 : Broad and Alien is the World . Ciro Alegría *
0405 : The Living and the Dead . Patrick White
0406 : The Harvesters . Cesare Pavese *
0407 : Conversations in Sicily . Elio Vittorini
0408 : The Outsider . Albert Camus
0409 : Embers . Sándor Márai
0410 : Chess Story . Stefan Zweig *
0411 : The Glass Bead Game . Hermann Hesse
0412 : Joseph and His Brothers . Thomas Mann *
0413 : The Little Prince . Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
0414 : Dangling Man . Saul Bellow
0415 : The Razor's Edge . William Somerset Maugham (I like it, but I preferred The Painted Veil)
0416 : Transit . Anna Seghers
0417 : Pippi Longstocking . Astrid Lindgren *
0418 : Loving . Henry Green
0419 : Animal Farm . George Orwell ("Four legs good, two legs bad...")
0420 : The Bridge on the Drina . Ivo Andric
0421 : Christ Stopped at Eboli . Carlo Levi
0422 : Arcanum 17 . André Breton
0423 : Brideshead Revisited . Evelyn Waugh
0424 : Bosnian Chronicle . Ivo Andric *
0425 : The Tin Flute . Gabrielle Roy *
0426 : Andrea . Carmen Laforet *
0427 : The Death of Virgil . Hermann Broch *
0428 : Titus Groan . Mervyn Peake
0429 : Zorba the Greek . Nikos Kazantzakis *
0430 : Back . Henry Green
0431 : House in the Uplands . Erskine Caldwell *
0432 : The Path to the Nest of Spiders . Italo Calvino
0433 : Under the Volcano . Malcolm Lowry
0434 : If This Is a Man . Primo Levi
0435 : Exercises in Style . Raymond Queneau
0436 : The Plague . Albert Camus
0437 : Doctor Faustus . Thomas Mann
0438 : Midaq Alley . Naguib Mahfouz *
0439 : Froth on the Daydream . Boris Vian *
0440 : Journey to the Alcarria . Camilo José Cela *
0441 : Ashes and Diamonds . Jerzy Andrzejewski *
0442 : Disobedience . Alberto Moravia
0443 : All About H. Hatterr . G.V. Desani
0444 : Cry, the Beloved Country . Alan Paton
0445 : In the Heart of the Seas . Shmuel Yosef Agnon *
0446 : This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman . Tadeusz Borowski *
0447 : Death Sentence . Maurice Blanchot
0448 : Nineteen Eighty-Four . George Orwell
0449 : The Man with the Golden Arm . Nelson Algren
0450 : Kingdom of this World . Alejo Carpentier
0451 : The Heat of the Day . Elizabeth Bowen
0452 : Love in a Cold Climate . Nancy Mitford (Our local library do not have a copy! How dare they!)
0453 : The Case of Comrade Tulayev . Victor Serge
0454 : The Garden Where the Brass Band Played . Simon Vestdijk
0455 : I, Robot . Isaac Asimov (Did I read it or not? Or was that another novel with the robots?)
0456 : The Grass is Singing . Doris Lessing
0457 : A Town Like Alice . Nevil Shute *
0458 : The Moon and the Bonfires . Cesare Pavese
0459 : Gormenghast . Mervyn Peake (Tried to, but the language was heady and droned in my head)
0460 : The 13 Clocks . James Thurber
0461 : The Labyrinth of Solitude . Octavio Paz
0462 : The Abbott C . Georges Bataille
0463 : The Guiltless . Hermann Broch *
0464 : Barabbas . Pär Lagerkvist *
0465 : The End of the Affair . Graham Greene (My second Graham Greene, and one of the few books that made me cry - it confirmed me as a Greene fan)
0466 : Molloy . Samuel Beckett
0467 : The Rebel . Albert Camus
0468 : The Catcher in the Rye . J.D. Salinger (I do not identify with Holden Caulfield at all. I think he's a whiny, self-indulgent kid who needs to grow up)
0469 : The Opposing Shore . Julien Gracq
0470 : Foundation . Isaac Asimov (I read all the Foundation books by Asimov)
0471 : Malone Dies . Samuel Beckett
0472 : Day of the Triffids . John Wyndham
0473 : Memoirs of Hadrian . Marguerite Yourcenar
0474 : The Hive . Camilo José Cela *
0475 : Wise Blood . Flannery O'Connor
0476 : The Old Man and the Sea . Ernest Hemingway
0477 : Invisible Man . Ralph Ellison
0478 : The Judge and His Hangman . Friedrich Dürrenmatt
0479 : Excellent Women . Barbara Pym *
0480 : A Thousand Cranes . Yasunari Kawabata *
0481 : Go Tell It on the Mountain . James Baldwin
0482 : Casino Royale . Ian Fleming
0483 : Junkie . William Burroughs
0484 : Lucky Jim . Kingsley Amis
0485 : The Lost Steps . Alejo Carpentier *
0486 : The Hothouse . Wolfgang Koeppen *
0487 : The Long Good-Bye . Raymond Chandler
0488 : The Go-Between . L.P. Hartley
0489 : The Dark Child . Camara Laye *
0490 : A Day in Spring . Ciril Kosmac *
0491 : A Ghost at Noon . Alberto Moravia
0492 : The Story of O . Pauline Réage (I tried reading it, but was bored. S&M bores me, because my own life is more interesting)
0493 : Under the Net . Iris Murdoch
0494 : Lord of the Flies . William Golding
0495 : The Mandarins . Simone de Beauvoir *
0496 : Bonjour Tristesse . Françoise Sagan
0497 : Death in Rome . Wolfgang Koeppen *
0498 : The Sound of Waves . Yukio Mishima *
0499 : The Unknown Soldier . Väinö Linna *
0500 : I'm Not Stiller . Max Frisch
0501 : The Ragazzi . Pier Paolo Pasolini
0502 : The Recognitions . William Gaddis
0503 : The Burning Plain . Juan Rulfo *
0504 : The Quiet American . Graham Greene (I think this might actually be my favourite Greene novel, because it is so re-readable)
0505 : The Trusting and the Maimed . James Plunkett
0506 : The Tree of Man . Patrick White *
0507 : The Last Temptation of Christ . Nikos Kazantzákis
0508 : The Devil to Pay in the Backlands . João Guimarães Rosa *
0509 : Lolita . Vladimir Nabokov
0510 : The Talented Mr. Ripley . Patricia Highsmith
0511 : The Lord of the Rings . J.R.R. Tolkien (Read it before the movie. Didn't like the happy, singing Hobbit bits)
0512 : The Lonely Londoners . Sam Selvon
0513 : The Roots of Heaven . Romain Gary
0514 : The Floating Opera . John Barth
0515 : Giovanni's Room . James Baldwin
0516 : Justine . Lawrence Durrell
0517 : The Glass Bees . Ernst Jünger *
0518 : Doctor Zhivago . Boris Pasternak
0519 : Pnin . Vladimir Nabokov
0520 : On the Road . Jack Kerouac (Didn't finish)
0521 : The Manila Rope . Veijo Meri *
0522 : The Deadbeats . Ward Ruyslinck *
0523 : Homo Faber . Max Frisch
0524 : Blue of Noon . Geroges Bataille
0525 : The Midwich Cuckoos . John Wyndham
0526 : Voss . Patrick White
0527 : Jealousy . Alain Robbe-Grillet
0528 : The Birds . Tarjei Vesaas *
0529 : The Once and Future King . T.H. White
0530 : The Bell . Iris Murdoch
0531 : Borstal Boy . Brendan Behan
0532 : Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon . Jorge Amado *
0533 : Saturday Night and Sunday Morning . Alan Sillitoe
0534 : Things Fall Apart . Chinua Achebe
0535 : The Bitter Glass . Eilís Dillon
0536 : The Guide . R.K. Narayan *
0537 : The Leopard . Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (I want to read this before I die)
0538 : Deep Rivers . José María Arguedas *
0539 : Breakfast at Tiffany's . Truman Capote
0540 : Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring . Kenzaburo Oe
0541 : Billiards at Half-Past Nine . Heinrich Böll
0542 : Down Second Avenue . Ezekiel Mphahlele *
0543 : Cider With Rosie . Laurie Lee
0544 : The Tin Drum . Günter Grass
0545 : The Naked Lunch . William Burroughs
0546 : Billy Liar . Keith Waterhouse
0547 : Absolute Beginners . Colin MacInnes
0548 : Promise at Dawn . Romain Gary
0549 : Rabbit, Run . John Updike
0550 : To Kill a Mockingbird . Harper Lee (Still my favourite book)
0551 : The Magician of Lublin . Isaac Bashevis Singer *
0552 : Halftime . Martin Walser *
0553 : The Country Girls . Edna O'Brien
0554 : Bebo's Girl . Carlo Cassola *
0555 : God's Bit of Wood . Ousmane Sembène *
0556 : The Shipyard . Juan Carlos Onetti *
0557 : Catch-22 . Joseph Heller
0558 : Solaris . Stanislaw Lem
0559 : Cat and Mouse . G¨nter Grass
0560 : The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . Muriel Spark
0561 : A Severed Head . Iris Murdoch
0562 : Franny and Zooey . J.D. Salinger
0563 : No One Writes to the Colonel . Gabriel García Márquez *
0564 : Faces in the Water . Janet Frame
0565 : Memoirs of a Peasant Boy . Xosé Neira Vilas *
0566 : Stranger in a Strange Land . Robert Heinlein (I enjoyed Friday more)
0567 : Labyrinths . Jorge Luis Borges
0568 : The Golden Notebook . Doris Lessing
0569 : Time of Silence . Luis Martín-Santos *
0570 : Pale Fire . Vladimir Nabokov (I think Nabokov is just a smart-ass)
0571 : A Clockwork Orange . Anthony Burgess
0572 : One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest . Ken Kesey
0573 : Girl With Green Eyes . Edna O'Brien
0574 : The Death of Artemio Cruz . Carlos Fuentes *
0575 : The Time of the Hero . Mario Vargas Llosa *
0576 : The Garden of the Finzi-Continis . Giorgio Bassani *
0577 : One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich . Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
0578 : The Third Wedding . Costas Taktsis *
0579 : Dog Years . Günter Grass *
0580 : The Bell Jar . Sylvia Plath
0581 : Inside Mr. Enderby . Anthony Burgess
0582 : The Girls of Slender Means . Muriel Spark
0583 : The Spy Who Came in From the Cold . John Le Carré
0584 : Manon des Sources . Marcel Pagnol
0585 : The Graduate . Charles Webb
0586 : Cat's Cradle . Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
0587 : V. . Thomas Pynchon
0588 : Herzog . Saul Bellow
0589 : The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein . Marguerite Duras
0590 : Arrow of God . Chinua Achebe
0591 : Three Trapped Tigers . Guillermo Cabrera Infante *
0592 : Sometimes a Great Notion . Ken Kesey
0593 : The Passion According to G.H. . Clarice Lispector
0594 : Back to Oegstgeest . Jan Wolkers *
0595 : Closely Watched Trains . Bohumil Hrabal *
0596 : The River Between . Ngugi wa Thiong'o
0597 : Garden, Ashes . Danilo Kis *
0598 : Everything That Rises Must Converge . Flannery O'Connor
0599 : Things . Georges Perec
0600 : In Cold Blood . Truman Capote
0601 : Death and the Dervish . Mesa Selimovic * (Never finished)
0602 : Silence . Shusaku Endo *
0603 : To Each His Own . Leonardo Sciascia *
0604 : The Crying of Lot 49 . Thomas Pynchon (No way! I hated Vineland)
0605 : Giles Goat-Boy . John Barth
0606 : Marks of Identity . Juan Goytisolo *
0607 : The Vice-Consul . Marguerite Duras
0608 : The Magus . John Fowles
0609 : The Master and Margarita . Mikhail Bulgakov
0610 : Wide Sargasso Sea . Jean Rhys (It was so depressing and bleak)
0611 : The Third Policeman . Flann O'Brien
0612 : Miramar . Naguib Mahfouz *
0613 : Z . Vassilis Vassilikos *
0614 : Pilgrimage . Dorothy Richardson
0615 : The Manor . Isaac Bashevis Singer *
0616 : One Hundred Years of Solitude . Gabriel García Márquez (Never finished)
0617 : No Laughing Matter . Angus Wilson
0618 : Days of the Dolphin . Robert Merle *
0619 : The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test . Tom Wolfe
0620 : Eva Trout . Elizabeth Bowen
0621 : The Cathedral . Oles Honchar *
0622 : A Kestral for a Knave . Barry Hines
0623 : In Watermelon Sugar . Richard Brautigan
0624 : The German Lesson . Siegfried Lenz
0625 : The Quest for Christa T. . Christa Wolf
0626 : Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? . Philip K. Dick
0627 : 2001: A Space Odyssey . Arthur C. Clarke
0628 : Belle du Seigneur . Albert Cohen
0629 : Cancer Ward . Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
0630 : Myra Breckinridge . Gore Vidal
0631 : The First Circle . Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
0632 : A Void/Avoid . Georges Perec
0633 : Them . Joyce Carol Oates
0634 : Ada . Vladimir Nabokov
0635 : The Godfather . Mario Puzo
0636 : Portnoy's Complaint . Philip Roth
0637 : Jacob the Liar . Jurek Becker *
0638 : The French Lieutenant's Woman . John Fowles
0639 : Slaughterhouse-five . Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
0640 : Blind Man With a Pistol . Chester Himes
0641 : Pricksongs and Descants . Robert Coover
0642 : Tent of Miracles . Jorge Armado
0643 : The Case Worker . György Konrád *
0644 : Moscow Stations . Venedikt Yerofeev *
0645 : Heartbreak Tango . Manuel Puig *
0646 : Seasons of Migrations to the North . Tayeb Salih *
0647 : Here's to You, Jesusa! . Elena Poniatowska *
0648 : Fifth Business . Robertson Davies * (I could argue for Rebel Angels instead...)
0649 : Play It As It Lays . Joan Didion *
0650 : Jahrestage . Uwe Johnson
0651 : A World for Julius . Alfredo Bryce Echenique *
0652 : I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings . Maya Angelou
0653 : The Bluest Eyes . Toni Morrison
0654 : The Sea of Fertility . Yukio Mishima
0655 : Rabbit Redux . John Updike
0656 : Cataract . Mykhaylo Osadchyl *
0657 : Group Portrait With Lady . Heinrich Böll
0658 : Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . Hunter S. Thompson
0659 : The Book of Daniel . E.L. Doctorow
0660 : Lives of Girls & Women . Alice Munro *
0661 : House Mother Normal . B.S. Johnson
0662 : In a Free State . V.S. Naipal
0663 : Surfacing . Margaret Atwood
0664 : G . John Berger
0665 : The Summer Book . Tove Jansson
0666 : The Twilight Years . Sawako Ariyoshi *
0667 : The Optimist's Daughter . Eudora Welty *
0668 : Invisible Cities . Italo Calvino
0669 : Gravity's Rainbow . Thomas Pynchon
0670 : The Honorary Consul . Graham Greene
0671 : Crash . J.G. Ballard
0672 : The Castle of Crossed Destinies . Italo Calvino
0673 : The Siege of Krishnapur . J.G. Farrell
0674 : A Question of Power . Bessie Head
0675 : Fear of Flying . Erica Jong
0676 : The Dispossessed . Ursula K. Le Guin *
0677 : The Diviners . Margaret Laurence *
0678 : The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum . Heinrich Böll
0679 : Dusklands . J.M. Coetzee
0680 : The Fan Man . William Kotzwinkle
0681 : The Port . Antun Soljan *
0682 : Ragtime . E.L. Doctorow
0683 : The Commandant . Jessica Anderson *
0684 : The Year of the Hare . Arto Paasilinna *
0685 : Humboldt's Gift . Saul Bellow
0686 : Woman at Point Zero . Nawal El Saadawi *
0687 : Willard and His Bowling Trophies . Richard Brautigan
0688 : Fateless . Imre Kertész
0689 : The Dead Father . Donald Barthelme
0690 : Correction . Thomas Bernhard
0691 : A Dance to the Music of Time . Anthony Powell
0692 : W, or the Memory of Childhood . Georges Perec
0693 : Autumn of the Patriarch . Gabriel García Márquez
0694 : Patterns of Childhood . Christa Wolf
0695 : Blaming . Elizabeth Taylor *
0696 : Cutter and Bone . Newton Thornburg
0697 : Interview With the Vampire . Anne Rice
0698 : The Left-Handed Woman . Peter Handke
0699 : Kiss of the Spider Woman . Manuel Puig *
0700 : Almost Transparent Blue . Ryu Murakami *
0701 : In the Heart of the Country . J.M. Coetzee
0702 : The Engineer of the Human Soul . Josef Skvorecky *
0703 : Quartet in Autumn . Barbara Pym *
0704 : The Hour of the Star . Clarice Lispector
0705 : Song of Solomon . Toni Morrison
0706 : The Wars . Timothy Findley *
0707 : Dispatches . Michael Herr
0708 : The Shining . Stephen King
0709 : Delta of Venus . Anaïs Nin (Don't judge me)
0710 : The Beggar Maid . Alice Munro *
0711 : Requiem for a Dream . Hubert Selby Jr. *
0712 : The Singapore Grip . J.G. Farrell
0713 : The Sea, The Sea . Iris Murdoch
0714 : Life: A User's Manual . Georges Perec
0715 : The Back Room . Carmen Martín Gaite *
0716 : The Virgin in the Garden . A.S. Byatt
0717 : The Cement Garden . Ian McEwan
0718 : Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy . Douglas Adams
0719 : If on a Winter's Night a Traveler . Italo Calvino
0720 : So Long a Letter . Mariama Bâ *
0721 : Burger's Daughter . Nadine Gordimer
0722 : A Bend in the River . V.S. Naipaul
0723 : A Dry White Season . André Brink *
0724 : The Book of Laughter and Forgetting . Milan Kundera
0725 : Fool's Gold . Maro Douka *
0726 : Smiley's People . John Le Carré
0727 : Southern Seas . Manuel Vásquez Montalbán *
0728 : The Name of the Rose . Umberto Eco
0729 : Clear Light of Day . Anita Desai *
0730 : Confederacy of Dunces . John Kennedy Toole
0731 : Rituals . Cees Nooteboom
0732 : Smell of Sadness . Alfred Kossmann *
0733 : Broken April . Ismail Kadare *
0734 : Midnight's Children . Salman Rushdie (Many false starts. Never finished it though)
0735 : Waiting for Barbarians . J.M. Coetzee
0736 : Summer in Baden-Baden . Leonid Tsypkin (I tried, but the "swimming" metaphor for sex was just ridiculous. Susan Sontag loved it. She's a different kettle of fish altogether)
0737 : The House with the Blind Glass Windows . Herbjørg Wassmo *
0738 : Leaden Wings . Zhang Jie *
0739 : The War at the End of the World . Mario Vargas Llosa *
0740 : Lanark: A Life in Four Books . Alasdair Gray
0741 : Rabbit is Rich . John Updike
0742 : Couples, Passerby . Botho Strauss *
0743 : July's People . Nadine Gordimer
0744 : On the Black Hill . Bruce Chatwin
0745 : The House of the Spirits . Isabel Allende
0746 : Schindler's Ark . Thomas Keneally
0747 : A Pale View of Hills . Kazuo Ishiguro
0748 : Wittgenstein's Nephew . Thomas Bernhard
0749 : The Color Purple . Alice Walker (I loved it)
0750 : A Boy's Own Story . Edmund White
0751 : If Not Now, When? . Primo Levi
0752 : The Book of Disquiet . Fernando Pessoa *
0753 : Baltasar and Blimunda . José Saramago *
0754 : The Sorrow of Belgium . Hugo Claus
0755 : The Piano Teacher . Elfriede Jelinek (I think the book is unreadable)
0756 : The Life and Times of Michael K . J.M. Coetzee
0757 : Waterland . Graham Swift
0758 : LaBrava . Elmore Leonard
0759 : The Christmas Oratorio . Göran Tunström *
0760 : Fado Alexandrino . António Lobo Antunes *
0761 : The Witness . Juan José Saer *
0762 : Shame . Salman Rushdie
0763 : Money: A Suicide Note . Martin Amis
0764 : Flaubert's Parrot . Julian Barnes
0765 : Professor Martens' Departure . Jaan Kross *
0766 : Blood and Guts in High School . Kathy Acker
0767 : Larva: Midsummer Night's Babel . Julián Ríos *
0768 : Nights at the Circus . Angela Carter
0769 : Neuromancer . William Gibson (Read the entire cyberpunk series. Never again, will I read aWilliam Gibson title)
0770 : The Wasp Factory . Iain Banks
0771 : Democracy . Joan Didion *
0772 : The Lover . Marguerite Duras
0773 : The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis . José Saramago
0774 : Empire of the Sun . J.G. Ballard
0775 : The Busconductor Hines . James Kelman
0776 : Dictionary of the Khazars . Milorad Pavic
0777 : The Unbearable Lightness of Being . Milan Kundera
0778 : Legend . David Gemmell (How did this get here? It was epic, and so rich in human heroics and passions)
0779 : The Young Man . Botho Strauss *
0780 : Love Medicine . Louise Erdrich *
0781 : White Noise . Don DeLillo
0782 : Half of Man is Woman . Zhang Xianliang *
0783 : Reasons to Live . Amy Hempel
0784 : The Handmaid's Tale . Margaret Atwood
0785 : Hawksmoor . Peter Ackroyd
0786 : Perfume . Patrick Süskind
0787 : Blood Meridian . Cormac McCarthy *
0788 : Contact . Carl Sagan (Great book, and a pretty good film with Jodie Foster)
0789 : Simon and the Oaks . Marianne Fredriksson *
0790 : The Cider House Rules . John Irving
0791 : Annie John . Jamaica Kincaid *
0792 : The Parable of the Blind . Gert Hofmann
0793 : Love in the Time of Cholera . Gabriel García Márquez
0794 : Ancestral Voices . Etienne van Heerden *
0795 : The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman . Andrzej Szczypiorski *
0796 : The Drowned and the Saved . Primo Levi
0797 : Watchmen . Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
0798 : Extinction . Thomas Bernhard
0799 : An Artist of the Floating World . Kazuo Ishiguro
0800 : Memory of Fire . Eduardo Galeano *
0801 : The Old Devils . Kingley Amis
0802 : Matigari . Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
0803 : Anagrams . Lorrie Moore
0804 : Lost Language of Cranes . David Leavitt
0805 : The Taebak Mountains . Jo Jung-rae
0806 : Ballad for Georg Henig . Viktor Pasokov *
0807 : Enigma of Arrival . V.S. Naipaul
0808 : World's End . T. Coraghessan Boyle
0809 : The Pigeon . Patrick Süskind
0810 : Of Love and Shadows . Isabel Allende *
0811 : Beloved . Toni Morrison
0812 : All Souls . Javier Marías *
0813 : The New York Trilogy . Paul Auster
0814 : Black Box . Amos Oz *
0815 : The Bonfire of the Vanities . Tom Wolfe
0816 : The Black Dahlia . James Ellroy
0817 : The Afternoon of a Writer . Peter Handke
0818 : The Radiant Way . Margaret Drabble
0819 : Kitchen . Banana Yoshimoto *
0820 : Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency . Douglas Adams
0821 : Cigarettes . Harry Mathews
0822 : Nervous Conditions . Tsitsi Dangarembga
0823 : The First Garden . Anne Hébert *
0824 : The Last World . Christoph Ransmayr *
0825 : Oscar and Lucinda . Peter Carey
0826 : The Swimming-Pool Library . Alan Hollinghurst
0827 : The Satanic Verses . Salman Rushdie
0828 : Wittgenstein's Mistress . David Markson
0829 : Paradise of the Blind . Duong Thu Huong *
0830 : Foucault's Pendulum . Umberto Eco (It took me 2 years to finish, I think)
0831 : Gimmick! . Joost Zwagerman *
0832 : Obabakoak . Bernardo Atzaga *
0833 : Inland . Gerald Murnane *
0834 : A Prayer for Owen Meany . John Irving
0835 : Like Water for Chocolate . Laura Esquivel
0836 : The History of the Siege of Lisbon . José Saramago
0837 : The Trick is to Keep Breathing . Janice Galloway
0838 : The Great Indian Novel . Shashi Tharoor *
0839 : The Melancholy of Resistance . László Krasznahorkai
0840 : The Remains of the Day . Kazuo Ishiguro
0841 : London Fields . Martin Amis
0842 : Moon Palace . Paul Auster
0843 : Sexing the Cherry . Jeanette Winterson (I didn't understand it)
0844 : Like Life . Lorrie Moore
0845 : The Buddha of Suburbia . Hanif Kureishi
0846 : The Shadow Lines . Amitav Ghosh *
0847 : The Midnight Examiner . William Kotzwinkle
0848 : The Things They Carried . Tim O'Brien
0849 : The Music of Chance . Paul Auster
0850 : Stone Junction . Jim Dodge
0851 : Amongst Women . John McGahern
0852 : Get Shorty . Elmore Leonard
0853 : The Daughter . Pavlos Matesis *
0854 : Vertigo . W.G. Sebald
0855 : American Psycho . Bret Easton Ellis (Didn't finish)
0856 : The Laws . Connie Palman *
0857 : Faceless Killers . Henning Mankell *
0858 : Astradeni . Eugenia Fakinou *
0859 : Regeneration . Pat Barker
0860 : Typical . Padgett Powell
0861 : Mao II . Don DeLillo
0862 : Wild Swans . Jung Chang
0863 : Arcadia . Jim Crace
0864 : Hideous Kinky . Esther Freud
0865 : Memoirs of Rain . Sunetra Gupta *
0866 : Asphodel . H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
0867 : The Butcher Boy . Patrick McCabe
0868 : Smilla's Sense of Snow . Peter Høeg
0869 : The Dumas Club . Arturo Pérez-Reverte *
0870 : Written on the Body . Jeanette Winterson (one of my top 4 Winterson favs - but why is The Passion not on the list? Or Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit?)
0871 : The Crow Road . Iain Banks
0872 : Indigo . Marina Warner
0873 : The English Patient . Michael Ondaatje (One of the few books I re-read)
0874 : Posessing the Secret of Joy . Alice Walker
0875 : All the Pretty Horses . Cormac McCarthy *
0876 : The Triple Mirror of the Self . Zulfikar Ghose *
0877 : Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture . Apostolos Doxiadis *
0878 : The Discovery of Heaven . Harry Mulisch
0879 : Life is a Caravanserai . Emine Sevgi Özdamar
0880 : Before Night Falls . Reinaldo Arenas *
0881 : The Secret History . Donna Tartt
0882 : The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll . Álvaro Mutis *
0883 : Remembering Babylon . David Malouf *
0884 : The Holder of the World . Bharati Mukherjee *
0885 : The Virgin Suicides . Jeffrey Eugenides
0886 : The Stone Diaries . Carol Shields
0887 : A Suitable Boy . Vikram Seth
0888 : What a Carve Up! . Jonathan Coe
0889 : On Love . Alain de Botton
0890 : The Twins . Tessa de Loo *
0891 : Looking for the Possible Dance . A.L. Kennedy
0892 : Birdsong . Sebastian Faulks
0893 : The Shipping News . Annie Proulx
0894 : Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light . Ivan Klima *
0895 : The Invention of Curried Sausage . Uwe Timm
0896 : Disappearance . David Dabydeen
0897 : Deep River . Shusaku Endo *
0898 : Felicia's Journey . William Trevor
0899 : Captain Corelli's Mandolin . Louis de Bernières
0900 : How Late It Was, How Late . James Kelman
0901 : City Sister Silver . Jáchym Topol
0902 : Pereira Declares: A Testimony . Antonio Tabucchi
0903 : The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle . Haruki Murakami (My introduction to Murakami)
0904 : Our Lady of the Assassins . Fernando Vallejo *
0905 : Land . Park Kyong-ni
0906 : Whatever . Michel Houellebecq
0907 : Troubling Love . Elena Ferrante *
0908 : The Late-Night News . Petros Markaris *
0909 : The End of the Story . Lydia Davis
0910 : Love's Work . Gillian Rose
0911 : A Fine Balance . Rohinton Mistry
0912 : The Reader . Bernhard Schlink
0913 : Santa Evita . Tomás Martínez *
0914 : Morvern Caller . Alan Warner
0915 : The Unconsoled . Kazuo Ishiguro
0916 : Alias Grace . Margaret Atwood
0917 : The Clay Machine-Gun . Victor Pelevin
0918 : Infinite Jest . David Foster Wallace
0919 : Forever a Stranger . Hella Haasse
0920 : The Ghost Road . Pat Barker
0921 : Fugitive Pieces . Anne Michaels
0922 : Hallucinating Foucault . Patricia Duncker
0923 : A Light Comedy . Eduardo Mendoza *
0924 : Fall on Your Knees . Ann-Marie MacDonald * (I loved it. Sorry Bybee ;p)
0925 : Silk . Alessandro Baricco
0926 : The God of Small Things . Arundhati Roy
0927 : Margot and the Angels . Kristien Hemmerechts *
0928 : The Life of Insects . Victor Pelevin
0929 : Money to Burn . Ricardo Piglia *
0930 : Jack Maggs . Peter Carey
0931 : Underworld . Don DeLillo
0932 : Enduring Love . Ian McEwan
0933 : Crossfire . Miyabe Miyuki
0934 : The Poisonwood Bible . Barbara Kingsolver
0935 : Veronika Decides to Die . Paulo Coelho
0936 : The Hours . Michael Cunningham
0937 : All Souls Day . Cees Nooteboom
0938 : The Heretic . Miguel Deliber *
0939 : Elementary Particles . Michel Houellebecq
0940 : The Talk of the Town . Ardal O'Hanlon
0941 : Dirty Havana Trilogy . Pedro Juan Gutiérrez *
0942 : Savage Detectives . Roberto Bolaño *
0943 : Disgrace . J.M. Coetzee
0944 : As If I Am Not There . Slavenka Drakulic
0945 : Pavel's Letters . Monika Moron *
0946 : In Search of Klingsor . Jorge Volpi *
0947 : The Museum of Unconditional Surrender . Dubravka Ugresic *
0948 : Fear and Trembling . Amélie Nothomb (What is the big deal with Nothomb?)

: 2000s :
0949 : Bartleby and Co. . Enrique Vila-Matas *
0950 : Celestial Harmonies . Péter Esterházy
0951 : Small Remedies . Shashi Deshpande
0952 : The Human Stain . Philip Roth
0953 : White Teeth . Zadie Smith
0954 : Under the Skin . Michel Faber
0955 : The Heart of Redness . Zakes Mda
0956 : Spring Flowers, Spring Frost . Ismail Kadare
0957 : The Devil and Miss Prym . Paulo Cohelo
0958 : The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay . Michael Chabon *
0959 : The Feast of the Goat . Mario Vargas Llosa
0960 : I'm Not Scared . Niccolò Ammaniti *
0961 : Soldiers of Salamis . Javier Cercas *
0962 : Atonement . Ian McEwan
0963 : Austerlitz . W.G. Sebald
0964 : Life of Pi . Yann Martel
0965 : The Corrections . Jonathan Franzen (I actually enjoyed it)
0966 : Platform . Michel Houellebecq
0967 : Snow . Orhan Pamuk *
0968 : Nowhere Man . Aleksandar Hemon
0969 : Everything is Illuminated . Jonathan Safran Foer
0970 : Kafka on the Shore . Haruki Murakami
0971 : Islands . Dan Sleigh
0972 : The Namesake . Jhumpa Lahiri *
0973 : Vernon God Little . DBC Pierre *
0974 : The Successor . Ismail Kadare *
0975 : Lady Number Thirteen . José Carlos Somoza *
0976 : What I Loved . Siri Hustvedt
0977 : The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time . Mark Haddon
0978 : A Tale of Love and Darkness . Amos Oz *
0979 : Your Face Tomorrow . Javier Marías *
0980 : Cloud Atlas . David Mitchell
0981 : The Swarm . Frank Schätzing *
0982 : Suite Française . Irène Némirovsky *
0983 : The Master . Colm Tóibín
0984 : The Plot Against America . Philip Roth
0985 : The Book about Blanche and Marie . Per Olov Enquist *
0986 : Small Island . Andrea Levy *
0987 : 2666 . Roberto Bolaño *
0988 : The Line of Beauty . Alan Hollinghurst *
0989 : The Accidental . Ali Smith *
0990 : The Sea . John Banville
0991 : A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian . Marina Lewycka *
0992 : Measuring the World . Daniel Kehlmann *
0993 : Mother's Milk . Edward S. Aubyn *
0994 : Carry Me Down . M.J. Hyland *
0995 : Against the Day . Thomas Pynchon *
0996 : The Inheritance of Loss . Kiran Desai *
0997 : The Kindly Ones . Jonathan Littell *
0998 : Half of a Yellow Sun . Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie *
0999 : The Reluctant Fundamentalist . Mohsin Hamid *
1000 : Falling Man . Don DeLillo *
1001 : Animal's People . Indra Sinha *

Are you still here?

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

OK I think I have read 56 so far with a few more on my list for this year and nxt. I have read Anais Nin and don't judge you for having read it. I do however judge you for NOT having read Douglas Adams' Hitchikers Guide. Sort it out :p

Miss Kim said...

Personally I think the list is terrific and I've also posted it on my own blog. However I still have to go through it and pick out which I've already read- tht'll take some time!

darkorpheus said...

Rhinoa I cower in shame for the failure to read Douglas Adam...;p

Traveler One I've tried counting how many out of 1001 I've read - I keep losing count!

darkorpheus said...

Aart Hilal Thanks for the link.

SFP said...

> Moby-Dick . Herman Melville (NEVER!)


I read it twice! I would read it again!

Okay, there are a few chapts. where Ishmael's obsession with everything to do with whales is a bit much, but I'd read MOST of it again. ;)

darkorpheus said...

SFP You're hardcore, that's why. :)

Doc Martian said...

y00 ret teh clazzic comix vershun! LOL!

Cheers!
Doc

Anonymous said...

well, we can talk forever about this list... i will say two things though.

1. i'm glad you like "the corrections" too. i liked it very much indeed.

2. don't bother with "robinson crusoe". its full of religious ramblings over guilt, and sorry god that i'm a screw up and sorry i didn't listen to you and if you save me i promise i'll be better.

darkorpheus said...

Doc Yes! I am ashamed!

Actually, I'm not. Because I'm shameless. I was young, I was not more than 12 years old, I believe - and they were nice stories. In comic form.

JP That's perhaps one of the good thing about these lists - they at least offer a starting point for some sort of discussion - even if it's "Why have you not finished reading Moby Dick? OMG it's my favorite story! I can't date you anymore!"

I actually picked up The Corrections because of how Franzen disses Oprah. I wanted to see if he deserved that kind of snobbery. Well, don't think he has a right to be rude, but it was a good read.

Robinson Crusoe - another one of those books I will leave unread. I was so bored by Moll Flanders.