Eloquation

When I was young, my father used to chastize me for not looking up from my book while crossing the street. Calling me a “bookworm” was an apt metaphor: when I picked up a book, I crawled inside it and very rarely broke free to see the light of day until I was done.

These days, I don’t read as many books as I did back then — partly because of the fact that I’m a big magazine and periodical reader now. I certainly don’t read as much fiction, as my literary diet now consists of almost solely non-fiction works.

So when Jason Kottke posted a link to this list of 1001 fiction books everyone must read before they die, I was a bit nervous to take a poll of how many on that list I had already consumed.

Turns out, I wasn’t doing too badly. Out of the 1001, I have already read 204 and have added quite a few of the rest to my library hold list.

I’ve posted a list of all the 204 I have read below and highlighted my favorites with an (*) asterisk. I’d definitely love your input on what I should read next if you have some tips and suggestions.

1. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
2. Saturday – Ian McEwan (*)
3. Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
4. The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
5. The Light of Day – Graham Swift
6. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon (*)
7. Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
8. The Double – José Saramago
9. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
10. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
11. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
12. Youth – J.M. Coetzee (*)
13. Gabriel’s Gift – Hanif Kureishi
14. Atonement – Ian McEwan
15. Fury – Salman Rushdie (*)
16. Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
17. Life of Pi – Yann Martel (*)
18. The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
19. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
20. City of God – E.L. Doctorow
21. The Human Stain – Philip Roth
22. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
23. Timbuktu – Paul Auster
24. The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
25. Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee (*)
26. Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
27. Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
28. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
29. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy (*)
30. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
31. Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
32. Underworld – Don DeLillo
33. Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
34. Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
35. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
36. The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
37. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry (*)
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39. The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
40. Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
41. On Love – Alain de Botton (*)
42. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
43. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
44. Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
45. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
46. Vertigo – W.G. Sebald
47. The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
48. Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (*)
49. Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
50. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
51. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
52. Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
53. The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
54. Beloved – Toni Morrison
55. Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
56. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
57. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
58. Contact – Carl Sagan
59. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
60. Neuromancer – William Gibson
61. Shame – Salman Rushdie
62. The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee
63. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
64. Broken April – Ismail Kadare
65. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
66. A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
67. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (*)
68. The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
69. In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
70. The Shining – Stephen King
71. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
72. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
73. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
74. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson (*)
75. The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
76. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
77. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
78. The Godfather – Mario Puzo
79. Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
80. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
81. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick (*)
82. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
83. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
84. The Magus – John Fowles
85. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
86. The Graduate – Charles Webb
87. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
88. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
89. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
90. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger (*)
91. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
92. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
93. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
94. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
95. The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham (*)
96. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
97. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
98. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
99. The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
100. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (*)
101. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
102. The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
103. Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
104. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
105. Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
106. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway (*)
107. Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
108. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (*)
109. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
110. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
111. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell (*)
112. Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
113. The Plague – Albert Camus
114. Animal Farm – George Orwell
115. The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham
116. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (*)
117. The Outsider – Albert Camus
118. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
119. The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
120. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
121. Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
122. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
123. Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
124. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
125. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
126. Out of Africa – Isak Dineson
127. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
128. Burmese Days – George Orwell
129. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (*)
130. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
131. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
132. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
133. Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
134. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
135. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway (*)
136. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
137. The Trial – Franz Kafka
138. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
139. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
140. Ulysses – James Joyce
141. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
142. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce (*)
143. Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
144. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
145. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
146. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
147. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
148. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (*)
149. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
150. Kim – Rudyard Kipling
151. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
152. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
153. The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
154. Dracula – Bram Stoker
155. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
156. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
157. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
158. La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola
159. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
160. Germinal – Émile Zola
161. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
162. Nana – Émile Zola
163. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
164. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
165. Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
166. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
167. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
168. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
169. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
170. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
171. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
172. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo (*)
173. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
174. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
175. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
176. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
177. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
178. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
179. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
180. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
181. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dum
182. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
183. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
184. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
185. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe (*)
186. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
187. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
188. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
189. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
190. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
191. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
192. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
193. Justine – Marquis de Sade
194. Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
195. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
196. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
197. Candide – Voltaire (*)
198. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
199. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
200. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
201. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
202. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous (*)
203. Metamorphoses – Ovid
204. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

Not as extensive as I would like, so it looks like I have a whole lot more reading to go before I die.

How many of the 1001 have you read? Are there any I missed that you consider a must-read? Let me know.