Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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153 of 165 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My new favorite book about books, March 17, 2006
I read a lot of books. I have often looked at the various "books about books" and been disappointed. They are usually geared toward the casual reader, and they never prove very useful to me.
This book is different. First of all, it's gorgeous. I am not thrilled with the cover, but the inside illustrations and pictures are all terrific and good quality. Almost every page contains either an author photo, or full color picture of the book cover.
The books listed all have wonderful no-spoiler, intelligent summaries. I find myself learning things about novels I've already read, and I have been reshuffling my "to read next" pile as I go along.
This is an eclectic selection, even though admittedly it's Western oriented. I don't know if any reference book can have everyone's favorites - there are a lot of novels out there. Yet this one is very comprehensive and satisfying.
Highly, highly recommended.
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281 of 317 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Just 1001 Books Some Prof Likes, September 30, 2006
Like so many bad, bad movies, this book is a beautiful production. It features slick, heavy paper; a million color pictures; attractive, readable typeface; witty contributors. Its proportions seem just right for its weight.
But unless you just love grazing on hors d'oeuvres (and many do), you're likely to be disappointed by this beautiful but cynical exercise in marketing to the culturally insecure. As somebody has already noted: No Iliad. No Odyssey. No Aeschylus. No Euripides. No Boccaccio. No Chaucer. No Dante. No Machiavelli. No Shakespeare. No Marlowe.
No Old or New Testament. No Q'uran. No Lao-tse, Confucius, Bhagavda-Gita (really short and really good). No Beowulf. No Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
In fact, only 13 works from before 1700 make the cut - and lest you think fun is the criterion, one of them is John Lyly's Euphues long regarded as one of the most unreadable and, shall we say, "affected" works in English literature. You get John Lyly instead of John Milton.
On the other hand, you do get 69 titles of books that have appeared since 2000. That's a lot of "classics" in record time. How did they pick these? And there's another 700 - out of 1001, if you can dig it, "you must read before you die" written in the 20th Century.
The 19th Century is well represented, I'll grant. Huck Finn is here - but not Twain's more complicated Letters from the Earth, The Mysterious Stranger, A Connecticut Yankee, or Pudd'nhead Wilson.
They also felt it necessary to fill out the list with a few short stories like Lovecraft's "The Mountains of Madness" and Gogol's "The Nose." Great stories, but two actual books had to go to make room for them. Books like The Red Badge of Courage, for example.
Or maybe The Red Badge got crowded out by Justine or American Psycho.
This is a book for people who like to read about books in snappy reviews, and look at color pictures of books. You'll find some titles worth pursuing, but you could do better, for starters, just by getting a list of Cliff's Notes titles and going on from there.
You can do that for free.
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122 of 135 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
19 and one quarter years and then some, June 10, 2006
This is a splendid and much needed guide - the beautiful illustrations are worth the price. It should be stacked on your shelf next to "The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction" and "The salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors" which are also recommended and which take completely different approaches. "1001 Books" presents you with The Really Great Stuff . Which is where the fun starts - this is a book all readers will want to argue passionately with. Almost at the same time as I'm finding authors I'd never heard of and making "must buy" lists, I'm shouting at the editors - "what's this? You've got three in here by Douglas Adams, and NONE by Roddy Doyle? What's all that about??" I mean, Douglas Adams is good for one, but not three... And if Douglas Adams, then Garrison Keillor...
Each book gets about 300 words which editor Peter Boxall describes like this : "What each entry does is to respond, with the cramped urgency of a deathbed confession, to what makes each novel compelling, to what it is about each novel that makes one absolutely need to read it." 1001 books - it's a lot. If you had the time and money to read every one at a rate of one per week, you'd need 19 and a quarter years, so you better get going. But seriously, you aren't going to do that. The pre-1700 section, in particular, is strictly for students of literature - I stick my neck out and say that very few will be reading "Euphues : The Anatomy of Wit" by John Lyly or "Aithiopika" by Heliodorus for fun. And then the dogged reader will be coming up against the rarely-scaled Everests of literature such as Dorothy Richardson's "Pilgrimage" (13 vols, thousands of pages) or Proust (likewise) or "Infinite Jest" (one volume, 1100 pages). Each of which are going to take you 6 months solid.
Odd things abound in this mighty guide. "Like Life" by Lorrie Moore is included - a collection of short stories, not a novel. So okay - why no Raymond Carver, America's greatest short story writer? And sometimes it's hard to see that the reviewer even likes the book in question - "The Secret History" is described as "quality trash for highbrows"! Or take this: "As with his other writing `The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' raises questions about the representation of female characters, and invites accusations of latent misogyny. These are valid objections that may engender fruitful considerations of this novel as a historical document as much as a work of experimental fiction." Well, that's hardly an enthusiastic endorsement. (And while on the subject of misogyny, I'm sad to see the loathsome `American Psycho' in here - the reviewer (and editor) has fallen for the old "it's ironic, it's not actually a book that revels in descriptions of butchering women" line. It may be ironic, but I'm sorry to say that Mr Ellis does, in fact, revel in vile descriptions of butchering women. So it is - extremely - misogynistic.)
Some authors are wildly over-represented, such as J M Coatzee, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster, all of which have more titles in here than Henry James. It's interesting to check if the Booker Prizewinners are included - 20 are out of 37 and there are some strange omissions - no room for "Vernon God Little" or "The True History of the Kelly Gang", "Sacred Hunger" (nothing at all by Barry Unsworth in fact - what's wrong with him?), "The Famished Road" or "Hotel du Lac".
So you can see this is a guide with enough in it to annoy everyone - tremendous fun for everyone, but particularly those who have just been sentenced to a long stretch of solitary confinement.
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