Moved this post to my bookie website.
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). So I’ll keep track of books in the list that I’ve read, or sometimes, which I’m planning to soonish.
Read
9 out of 1001 (0.89%)
2000s
49) Life of Pi – Yann Martel
1900s
78) Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
90) Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
93) Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
125) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami *newest* (done 12/10/07)
496) Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (Sort of. I was halfway through the book and didn’t continue because it’s too difficult. Maybe I’ll pick it up again when it’s time.)
574) The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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
-
Pre-1700
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.)
Planning to read soonish
1) Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
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!)
19) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
28) Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
33) Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides (I own this! But I left it my parents’ home in Sydney :()
64) After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
67) House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
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
310) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (This is like the Shakespeare work for the geeks, so I reckon I will read it one time or another)
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)
794) Dracula – Bram Stoker
931) Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Number 786 and so on has books from the 1800s and older. For some of them I’ve been savoring the stories so much from various movies, references, comic books, games, plays, etc, that I doubt I should spend more time reading them. Books like Little Women, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Les Miserables, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, and tons others. Even Dracula and Frankenstein. What do you think?
frankenstein is worth reading, i find that the movies can not recaptured the way the book tells the story. plus they always change the story, for all you know, maybe the story u know is not the same as the original haha!
Comment by gatchaman — 26 Aug 2007 @ 12:55 pm
You’re right. For Frankenstein, I haven’t actually watched the movie too. I forget where I knew the story from (I know it, roughly anyway). Somehow I’d like to read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, even though I’ve watched the Disney version of it tons of times ;)
Talking about modified story, you should read the original Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. I read it before I watched the all-happy-and-cheery Disney version of Little Mermaid. Couldn’t believe how much they altered the whole story… The original Little Mermaid is one of the saddest fairy tales I’ve ever read.
I’ve also read some part of the original Peter Pan. Also quite sad in my opinion.
Comment by mee — 29 Aug 2007 @ 10:14 pm
If you are really going to go through that whole list, there are a few others I can recommend (I just counted 102 that I have read, so I am a bit ahead of you but would still have a long and pleasant way to go….
I won’t mention some of the obvious classics, allthough I believe that (as mentioned above about Frankenstein and Hans Christian Andersen) reading the book is (almost) always worth it. Even if, maybe I should say especially if, you have already seen the movie. They are in some way complementary, but the books give you the opportunity to use your own imagination to “translate” the writers thoughts, rather than that of the producer and director of the movie. In movies, too often things are removed, altered, rewritten etc. to please a large and probably “average” audience; they are after all paying for it and movies are big business.
Anyway, the ones that immediately caught my eye and that you should read are all the books by Primo Levi (233, 270, 556 + whatever book didn’t make the list, e.g. the Periodic Table). He was an Italian chemist, who as a Jew and resistance fighter in WWII was arrested and sent to a concentration camp; he survived because his background as a chemist helped him to get a job outside the camp. Sounds depressing perhaps, but he writes beautifully about his relations with others in the camp and later on his way back to Italy after being freed by the Russians.
Secondly, a book I cannot recommend to too many people: “To kill a mocking bird” by Harper Lee (456). Such a shame she wrote only this one book. I always wondered why so many good books have come out of the American South?
By the way, this is one of the books where the movie is just as good, go and see Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch again as well :) !
Finally, since you mention being born in Indonesia, have you read the Max Havelaar (882)? I didn’t even know it was translated (I read it in Dutch since it is one of our classics, written in 1860), and I wondered what an Indonesian would think about it. However, I checked on Wikipedia and found that it was already translated into English in 1868 (but only in Bahasa Indonesia in 1972), and that an Indonesian novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, argued in The New York Times Magazine that this is “the book that killed colonialism”.[1]
Comment by Helanren — 18 Nov 2007 @ 8:29 am
Wow thanks for all the tips! No I haven’t read any of the books you mentioned. Will keep an eye on them. I have about 20 books on the 1001 list now waiting to be read on my bookshelf, including To Kill a Mockingbird. Can’t wait to savor all of them! ;)
Comment by mee — 18 Nov 2007 @ 5:44 pm