16.Dec.2007 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die Challenge

This post is taken from my old post. Will update the list here from now on.

From the book published with that title, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list was handpicked by a team of international critics and literary luminaries (some 20+ of them). You can get the full list here.

I’m interested to (sort of) follow this list and see how far it could take me (literary-sense wise). Let’s just say it’s my personal lifetime challenge. So I’ll keep track of books in the list that I’ve read, or sometimes, which I’m planning to soonish.

Update 25/04/2010

Since the original list published in 2006, there have been updated 1001 list published in 2008 and 2010. Some books were left out and some added. The total combined list of all three is a whooping 1294 books. I’ve decided to count my total against the combined list, as I cannot make myself waive the ones that I have read from the original list and since then have been removed. Since it gets very tricky to both obtain and keep track of the lists, I’m using arukiyomi spreadsheet to help out. With a small donation you can get it too. For the sake of organization, I’ll update this page following the 2006 list and mention if the book is added in 2008 or 2010.

35 out of 1294 books (2.70%)

Read (2006 list)

33 out of 1001 books (3.30%)

2000s (6 books)
1) Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
19) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
28) Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
33) Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
42) Atonement – Ian McEwan
49) Life of Pi – Yann Martel

1900s (19 books)
77) Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
78) Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
80) Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
90) Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
93) Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
101) Silk — Alessandro Baricco
116) The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
117) A Fine Balance — Rohinton Mistry *
125) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
272) The Color Purple – Alice Walker
300) If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler — Italo Calvino
301) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
456) To Kill A Mockingbird — Harper Lee *
467) Breakfast at Tiffany’s — Truman Capote
496) Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
529) The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
574) The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
603) Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
699) The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (Read this as compulsory novel for my English literature class in college. Didn’t enjoy it though.)

1800s (7 books)
794) Dracula — Bram Stoker
801) The Yellow Wallpaper — Charlotte Perkins Gilman *
868) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll *
880) The Woman in White — Wilkie Collins
902) Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
913) A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
938) Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen *

Pre-1700s (1 book)
996) The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous (Read this when I was in primary school, in the form of many many thin books, in my mother tongue, Indonesian. I wonder if that counts? I’m not sure if I have really completed the whole series. I remember all the stories were really good that I couldn’t stop going to the library and reading.)

Read (2008 list addition)

1900s (1 book)
183) Kitchen — Banana Yohimoto

pre-1700s (1 book)
989) Monkey: Journey to the West — Wu Cheng’en (I devoured the Monkey King series since I was very little from countless medium: illustrated books, series, film adaptations, derivations, so I’m crossing this off my list)

* read this year

Planning to read soonish

13) Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell (Maybe. Justin has this book, ready to lend it to me. But it’s difficult, even for him who’s British!)
64) After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
92) The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
110) The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
143) The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
165) Wild Swans – Jung Chang (On my shelf)
190) Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
230) An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
236) Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
274) A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
320) Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice (I reckon I should also read Anne Rice’s books a couple of times in my life)
399) One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez (On my shelf)
494) The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien (I don’t know whether I will ever read this book or it will be in my to-read list forever)
610) The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien (same comment with The Lord of the Rings)
744) Kokoro – Natsume Soseki (Just picked it up from this list because I’ve been lately pulled by strange force to Japanese authors)
931) Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley