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

Curiosities of Literature by Isaac D’Israeli

Curiosities of Literature by Isaac D’Israeli: a magnanimous effort by misteraitch, scanning this.

García Márquez’s‘Total’Novel

García Márquez’s ‘Total’ Novel: “In my 40s, I’ve returned to García Márquez’s masterpiece. Now it seems to me that, like Cervantes’s Don Quixote, it decodes the DNA of Hispanic civilization. It’s a “total” novel, designed by a demiurge capable of creating a universe as comprehensive as ours. One Hundred Years of Solitude has done something astonishing: It has survived, accumulating disparate, at times conflicting, rereadings. Isn’t that what a classic is, a mirror in which readers see what they are looking for?”

Steampunk Star Trek

Steampunk Star Trek: a neat link at BoingBoing: “Steam Trek is a 1994 Star Trek fan video that recasts the voyages of the Enterprise as a late Victorian silent “moving picture” with great, Voyage to the Moon-style graphics and hilarious slates for dialog” — plus a ton of links to other “steam punk” stuff.

When we were young

For me, it coincided with a summer in France, that girl, the beach, the wine. It was perhaps the first real novel I read from end to end in French. Tobias Hill writes When we were young: a loving tribute to that book, “Le Grand Meaulnes.”

201 Stories by Anton Chekhov

201 Stories by Anton Chekhov: absolutely brillant (via.)

Fackel

Fackel — yes, indeed: Karl Kraus’. (via wood s lot, of course.)

Access The Great Books

A useful overview: Access The Great Books. As they say themselves: “From the ancient classics to the masterpieces of the 20th century, the Great Books are all the introduction you’ll ever need to the ideas, stories, and discoveries that have shaped modern civilization.”.

A Book Review, of sorts

So who am I to even say anything about Jonathan Lethem’s “The Fortress Of Solitude”? Me, just another whiteboy from almost lilywhite Denmark? Yet, again, the book provokes a number of different attitudes. To get that out of the way: McSweeney’s has a page devoted to Lethem – much to see there; Jacob Siegel’s review in New Partisan is stimulating, and outlines what is wrong with a number of other reviews; and, why not, seek out the horse’s mouth and see what Lethem says in this interview from The New Yorker.

I suppose we can all find our own way to the book, and into it (or not: some hate it. Nevermind.) My own way came by a couple of coincidences: a co-worker mentioned it, and I recalled hearing about it, wanting to read it; we actually were in that part of Brooklyn only a few weeks ago; and, yeah, the wifey hails from those parts: Brooklyn (albeit not Boerum Hill. Still.)

At one point Abigale Ponder asks Dylan Ebdus why he is so obsessed with his childhood. And that is exactly the point, for me: I never played stoopball, never had a spaldeen. Never was yoked, not like that – but close enough in some, other ways. So, somehow, Lethem connects to something about childhood that goes a lot deeper than the games that were being played.