1001 Books to Read

Yesterday was my 30th birthday and I wanted to see how generally well read I am, so after some web surfing I came across a list of 1001 "must read" books on listology. Here's the link to the list. It's from a British book that I will leave the information for at the bottom of the post. It's not a definitive list by any means, so it is obviously subjective, but this is just for fun so no worries. Let's see how I do...


From before 1700 - 2 total


1000. Aesop's Fables - Aesupus
1001. Metamorphosis - Ovid


1700s: - 0
Absolutely nothing! How did that happen?


1800s: - 29
938. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austin 
937. Mansfield Park - Jane Austin
931. Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
915. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
913. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
905. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
904. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
903. Agnes Grey - Anne Bronte
902. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
899. Shirley - Charlotte Bronte
898. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
897. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorn
896. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
891. Villette - Charlotte Bronte
886. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
883. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
880. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
876. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
868. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol
867. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
848. Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
843. Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
835. Ben-Hur Lew Wallace
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
808. Tess of the D'urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
804. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
799. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
790. The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
789. The Turn of the Screw - Henry James


1900s: - 31
780. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
736. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
726. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
723. Ulysses - James Joyce
722. Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis
717. Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
699. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
671. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
667. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
663. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
610. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
592. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
564. Animal Farm - George Orwell
559. The Plague - Albert Camus
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
529. The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
521. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
508. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
494. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
484. One the Road - Jack Kerouac
456. To Kills a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
450. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
434. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
399. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
375. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
347. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
335. Ragtime - E. L. Doctorow
320. Interview with the Vampire - Anne Rice
312. The Shining - Stephen King
291. Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
92. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy


2000s: - 2
19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
8. The Plot Against America - Philip Roth


64 Total - so about 6% of the list. When you put it that way it feels pretty insignificant! I'm going to come back in a year, after my 31st birthday and see how much I have improved.


Question: How many books on this list have you read?


1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die: A Comprehensive Reference Source, Chronicling the History of the Novel
Preface by Peter Ackroyd, General Editor Peter Boxall
ISBN 1-84403-417-8