Vanity

kottke points us to A list of 1001 (fiction) Books That You Must Read Before You Die. This is my 202 read books. It sort of shows that I have been less avid with my reading recently. At least I’ll know what to read when I get into the groove again… Anyways:

1. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
2. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
3. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
4. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
5. Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
6. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
7. What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe
8. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
9. Jazz – Toni Morrison
10. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
11. Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
12. Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
13. Arcadia – Jim Crace
14. Wild Swans – Jung Chang
15. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
16. Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
17. Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
18. The Music of Chance – Paul Auster
19. Possession – A.S. Byatt
20. The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
21. Moon Palace – Paul Auster
22. Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
23. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
24. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
25. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
26. Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
27. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
28. The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
29. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
30. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
31. The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
32. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
34. Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
35. Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavi?
36. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
37. Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
38. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
39. Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
40. La Brava – Elmore Leonard
41. The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee
42. If Not Now, When? – Primo Levi
43. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
44. Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
45. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
46. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
47. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
48. Smiley’s People – John Le Carré
49. A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
50. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
51. The World According to Garp – John Irving
52. In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
53. Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
54. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
55. The Left-Handed Woman – Peter Handke
56. Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
57. High Rise – J.G. Ballard
58. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
59. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
60. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
61. Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
62. The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G. Farrell
63. The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene
64. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
65. G – John Berger
66. In A Free State – V.S. Naipaul
67. The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
68. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
69. Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
70. Troubles – J.G. Farrell
71. The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
72. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
73. The Godfather – Mario Puzo
74. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
75. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
76. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
77. The Magus – John Fowles
78. Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
79. Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
80. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
81. The Collector – John Fowles
82. Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
83. Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
84. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
85. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
86. The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
87. Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes
88. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
89. Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
90. Homo Faber – Max Frisch
91. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
92. Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
93. Justine – Lawrence Durrell
94. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
95. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
96. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
97. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
98. The Judge and His Hangman – Friedrich Dürrenmatt
99. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
100. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
101. Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
102. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
103. The Third Man – Graham Greene
104. Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
105. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
106. If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
107. Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
108. Animal Farm – George Orwell
109. Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
110. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
111. The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
112. The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
113. Party Going – Henry Green
114. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
115. Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
116. Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
117. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
118. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
119. Independent People – Halldór Laxness
120. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
121. The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
122. The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
123. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
124. Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
125. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
126. Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
127. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
128. Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
129. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
130. The Castle – Franz Kafka
131. The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
132. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
133. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
134. The Trial – Franz Kafka
135. Zeno’s Conscience – Italo Svevo
136. Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
137. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
138. Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
139. The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
140. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
141. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
142. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
143. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
144. Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
145. Kim – Rudyard Kipling
146. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
147. Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
148. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
149. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
150. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
151. Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
152. King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
153. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
154. Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
155. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
156. Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
157. Nana – Émile Zola
158. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
159. The Red Room – August Strindberg
160. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
161. The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
162. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
163. Middlemarch – George Eliot
164. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
165. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
166. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
167. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
168. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
169. Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
170. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
171. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
172. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
173. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
174. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
175. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
176. Hard Times – Charles Dickens
177. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
178. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
179. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
180. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
181. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
182. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
183. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
184. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
185. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
186. Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
187. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
188. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
189. Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
190. Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac
191. The Red and the Black – Stendhal
192. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
193. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
194. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
195. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
196. The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
197. Elective Affinities – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
198. The Monk – M.G. Lewis
199. Candide – Voltaire
200. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
201. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
202. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

A to Z

Although nobody has seen fit to tag me for this particular meme making the rounds, here is my list:

• Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
• J. G. Ballard: Empire of the Sun
• Italo Calvino: If on a winter’s night a traveller
• Don DeLillo: Underworld
• Bret Easton Ellis: Less Than Zero
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
• Neil Gaiman: American Gods
• Knut Hamsun: Hunger
• Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Franz Kafka: The Trial
• Jonathan Lethem: The Fortress of Solitude
• Hector Malot: Nobody’s Boy
• Vladimir Nabokov: Pnin
• Michael Ondaatje: In the Skin of a Lion
• Thomas Pynchon: Vineland
• Raymond Queneau: Zazie in the Metro
• J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
• J. D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
• Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
• Leon Uris: Exodus
• Jules Verne: Journey to the Center of the Earth
• P. G. Wodehouse: # Carry on, Jeeves
• X…. no, I have to pass this one
• Marguerite Yourcenar: Memoirs of Hadrian
• Emile Zola: Nana

Make your own, if you so desire.