Tuesday, December 14, 2010

1001 Books You Must Read...but I probably won't

There's a challenge going around based on the book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die* and first of all I want to commend everyone that is taking on this challenge because it is daunting.  And I know you're not supposed to read all 1001 books in a year but it still seems like a hefty challenge nonetheless.  I'm not going to take part in the actual challenge because anytime I'm told to do anything (even if I'm the one doing the telling) I tend to do the opposite.  So I think if I said I would do this challenge I would not read any books and suddenly become a big Jersey Shore fan and no one wants that. (Jersey Shore is the opposite of reading books right?)  But I don't want to be left out of the fun of lists(!) so I figured I'd go through this list and tell you the ones I've read already.  A couple people have already done this (Lit Musings** and Dead End Follies) and their lists intimidate me, which is probably another reason I won't be participating.  Mostly the pressure thing though.

2000s
1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Wow that is pathetic.  1 from the 2000s.  I have The Corrections sitting on my shelf, but I got distracted by the collection of books a friend send me.  I'll get to it soon.  Soon-ish.

1900s
2. Jazz by Toni Morrison
3. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
4. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
5. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
6. Beloved by Toni Morrison
7. Watchmen by Alan Moore & David Gibbons
8. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
9. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
10. If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino
11. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
12. The Shining by Stephen King
13. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
14. Sula by Toni Morrison
15. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
16. Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
17. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
18. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
19. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
20. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
21. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
22. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
23. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
24. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
25. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
26. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (I practically made it through the full thing and this list is making me sad, so go with it)
27. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Animal Farm by George Orwell
30. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
31. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
32. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
33. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
34. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Alright, I got 33 here.  Better showing but I'm afraid that will be my best category.

1800s
35. Dracula by Bram Stoker
36. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
37. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
38. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
39. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
40. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
41. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
42. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
43. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
44. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe
45. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
46. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe
47. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
48. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
49. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
14 here.  I guess that sounds about right

1700s
50. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
51. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
2 and it's still better than the 2000s

pre-1700s
52. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
53. Aesop's Fables by Aesopus
Even my pre-1700s score beats the 2000s.

So there you go.  53 down.  I don't know how many to go.  I'd need to go through the list and pick out the ones I would like to read.  Let's just say x to go.  (Check out my use of math.  I'm getting ready for that Physics book.)

*You can sort the list of books by author lifespan.  It's what it defaults to.  That seemed kind of messed up to me.

**If you check out Brenna's post and read the comments, you'll notice without even considering the challenge myself I'm trying to convince her to cheat and count the books she reads in multiple challenges.  Just another reason why I'm not taking on these challenges.