• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

1001 books you must read before you die.

This is all that I've read from that list...

301. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
311. Delta of Venus - Anais Nin
312. The Shining - Stephen King
320. Interview with a Vampire - Anne Rice
437. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
456. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien (Actually, I've only read the first: Fellowship)
496. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
506. The Story of O – Pauline Réage
508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
608. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
609. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
794. Dracula – Bram Stoker
853. Middlemarch – George Eliot
868. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
873. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
876. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
900. Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
902. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
904. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
905. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
909. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
911. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
916. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
956. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
983. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
996. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
 
I can count 120 that I have read and, by eliminating authors whom I have never heard of, have whittled the list down to 300. But even 300 all in one place is still an overwhelming looking pile of books. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned I now have only 180 to go, which is still a little on the high side of too many. :sad:
 
I have a section on my blog for this list and, as I review the books I put a link on the list to the review. I'm in no hurry to read them all, but just thought it would be cool to have the list there. I've read more than I've reviewed, but I'm in no hurry to actually count them.
 
I seem to have read more from the 19th rather than the 20th century according to that list (though a lot of the 20th century books I've read a different book by the same author rather than that particular book)
 
Oh I love this book. I give it as a gift to my English major friends. The contemporary stuff is on the week side, but the classics are pretty good. And in his defense many "great readers” only read the best of the best, and we shouldn't be so picky. Genre writing is a reflection of contemporary society.
 
I have this book and I love it. It's a fairly good list, in my opinion. I mark off a book once I've read it. I'll have to go through later and see how many I've read.

The illustrations and synopsis for each book is fantastic as well.
 
Sounds like the list my parents kept of books for our homeschool reading. This is how many I've read so far...and I own about fifty more that are in my TBR stack.



Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
A Maggot – John Fowles
Contact – Carl Sagan
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Shining – Stephen King
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
Emma – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Candide – Voltaire
Fanny Hill – John Cleland
Pamela – Samuel Richardson
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus
 
Oklahoma said:
Sounds like the list my parents kept of books for our homeschool reading. This is how many I've read so far...and I own about fifty more that are in my TBR stack.



Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
A Maggot – John Fowles
Contact – Carl Sagan
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Shining – Stephen King
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
Emma – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Candide – Voltaire
Fanny Hill – John Cleland
Pamela – Samuel Richardson
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus
Click to expand...

wow those are a lot of books!!! my parents never forced us to read, nor did they read much. i dont know how i got my habit, my mom was telling me how she had to snatch away my English book for school in 1st grade. i had read the book so many times the pages started to wear out. i read under covers in a flash light, in candle light, inside a dark room under a little glimpse of the street light, always got punished for it, and still do for carrying a book everywhere, but its totally worth it!!
 
I haven't read that much from that list, but I don't really care. I'll just continue reading whatever - trash included. ;)
 
disconnected said:
wow those are a lot of books!!! my parents never forced us to read, nor did they read much. i dont know how i got my habit, my mom was telling me how she had to snatch away my English book for school in 1st grade. i had read the book so many times the pages started to wear out. i read under covers in a flash light, in candle light, inside a dark room under a little glimpse of the street light, always got punished for it, and still do for carrying a book everywhere, but its totally worth it!!
Click to expand...

Luckily we were never forced to read...these were simply many of the books available on our shelves. Well, the more modern ones are recent reads I have picked out for myself, usually without even knowing they were considered important reading.

I can't imagine being punished for carrying a book! :sad: I like the image though of a first grader reading under the covers until the book wore out...that's charming. I'm glad you kept your habit!
 
Oklahoma said:
Luckily we were never forced to read...these were simply many of the books available on our shelves. Well, the more modern ones are recent reads I have picked out for myself, usually without even knowing they were considered important reading.

I can't imagine being punished for carrying a book! :sad: I like the image though of a first grader reading under the covers until the book wore out...that's charming. I'm glad you kept your habit!
Click to expand...

oh yea, my family is always yelling at me, i have a habit of carrying post its with ym book for words i dont understand or a topic i hit which i want to research later, and my journal and pencil case. those things are always in my bag regardless of where i am going and what i am doing. i am glad i did too!! its the best thing ever and reading has actually kept me sane through many a hard times. :D i have been called a geek/nerd/freak/weirdo/ all complements gladly accepted :cool:
 
So many books, so little memory. I think I have read 254 of them, but did I really read The Last of the Mohicans, or did I only see the movie?

Like all lists I find some things I like and some I don't. He included Raymond Chandler and John LeCarre, who would not have made it on some lists. Surely The Pit and the Pendulum is a short story, not a novel or "book", but maybe there is a collection of Poe's stories with that name.

My strength is in the 19th century.
 
Addendum. I have just read Peder's Pond blog and find I worked from the earlier version of the list. I certainly get out of date fast.
 
silverseason said:
Addendum. I have just read Peder's Pond blog and find I worked from the earlier version of the list. I certainly get out of date fast.
Click to expand...

We only think the list ages faster than we do. :sad: I really could have used a few more years with the old list before they reshuffled the deck. But the ones I have read are still the one's I have read, and nobody is dropping them off any list I have. :angry:
I am loyal to the books I have read. :)
 
Irishclover bought me this book for graduation and I really love it. Even if you don't stick to the list, it gives a great synopsis of all the books that are suggested so you can get a better idea of what they're about if you've always heard of a book but have no clue what it is about. I've read maybe 80 from the list, which is kind of depressing considering I have a bachelors and masters in English :lol:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top