Customer Reviews

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

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4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The title implies that many types of "books" will be chosen, not just works of fiction. When you consider the many forms of literature that have appeared as books, the willful omission of this in the title is deceptive marketing. No treatises, no plays, no essays, no philosophy, no history, no biography. If I am going to have a reading list of 1001 books that I must read, I'm not going to spend my time on novels picked by strangers who have an infatuation with justifiably obscure works.

Because, in an effort to appear knowledgeable and insightful, the authors and their cohorts have selected works from the more remote niches of literature and passed over works with greater import. When the author (or the publisher's marketing department) puts "BOOKS YOU MUST READ BEFORE YOU DIE" in the title, then the works had better well be literary touchstones.

But the selection process is so uneven and so vested with the reviewers' personal favorites that you will be only halfway enlightened when you finish. Is a reader's time really better spent -- and thus bringing the reader incrementally closer to a more contented death -- reading Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" over Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina"? Both are in the book. Yet the arguments for Dirk's inclusion are slim, and the literary and cultural impacts nonexistent.

(And I don't need to go into much detail about whole genres that are absent or only given lip service. For a book that presents such lofty claims, it is not worthy of the expansive-sounding title.)

The only recommendation I have for this book is to use it as a springboard for your own list of novels to read. Better yet, go chat with your local librarian about your likes and interests. You will get a far more satisfying list of books to read AND you will improve your knowledge of key works of literature.

A very interesting exercise, but I have some comments, most of which have probably been brought up by others.

First, it might be more accurate to say that this is a list of 1001 extended prose works of fiction, not "books," as there are (with one curious exception, discussed below) no works originally written in verse--no Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid or Paradise Lost. That's fine. Dr. Boxall is perfectly within his rights to set his list as he likes, but he should be more clear about it.

What is more inexplicable are the exceptions. Why is Ovid's Metamorphoses the only work written in verse on the list? Is it because some translations are rendered in prose? That seems inadequate as a reason. The entry says one reason is because it incorporates dialogue within a narrative. Well, so does Paradise Lost. I don't get it. What's the difference?

And what's Swift's Modest Proposal doing on a list of fictional works? It is a satirical essay, not imaginative narrative, at least not in the sense the other entries are.

Finally, almost everything on this list is an extended narrative except for a couple of short stories by Poe. Why? Surely, the author cannot mean to imply that Poe was the only master of the short story to deserve mention on this list--and with multiple entries at that! What about Chekov, or Maupassant, or Hawthorne. Surely, some (in fact, many) of their short stories are at least as good as "The Pit and the Pendulum." Yet, everyone else is limited to novels or novellas except Poe. Strange.

Finally, we get to quibbles about what is on the list and what is not. Of course, everyone has their favorites, and Dr. Boxall is entitled to his. Still, there are some very strange omissions, books (and authors) that by any consensus measure should be on a list of such breadth and self-declared comprehensiveness. Indeed, the advantage of having such a long list is that it gives the author room to include both the accepted canon and also his own personal favorites. But that canonical part has some mighty strange holes. Just for example, how can you possibly not include the Pickwick Papers by Dickens? I know Dickens is well represented already, but this is a landmark work by any measure, plus a lot more fun to read than many works that were included.

The list is skewed toward the 20th century, and I have no problem with that. This is obviously a list for the modern reader, so an emphasis on works that will tend to have more relavence to such a reader's life and experience is entirely appropriate. But that being said, I have to say that there are strange gaps in the 20th century selections. Just to start, where's Willa Cather? Cather is generally accepted as being on the next-to-short list of great 20th century American novelists, so surely one of her works (My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop) could have squeezed in.

Other 20th-century omissions I found particularly puzzling: Deliverance (James Dickey), the Studs Lonigan trilogy (James Farrell), This Side of Paradise and The Last Tycoon (F. Scott Fitzgerald), Point Counter Point (Aldous Huxley), From Here to Eternity (James Jones), Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers), The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer), The Fixer (Bernard Malamud), Appointment in Samarra, (John O'Hara), Sophie's Choice (Wiliam Styron), The Magnificent Ambersons (Booth Tarkington), All the King's Men (Robert Penn Warren), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder), and Look Homeward Angel and You Can't Go Home Again (Thomas Wolfe). Is Dr. Boxall really trying to say that Tarzan of the Apes, which he includes, should be read before all of these (don't get me wrong, I like Tarzan, but c'mon...).

Though they form only a small part of the overall list, I find the early entries forced, as if Dr. Boxall felt he had to have some pre-18th century prose works in here, even though extended prose fiction was not this era's strength, to say the least (with the exception of Don Quixote, the one pre-18th century novel that definitely belongs here). It seems to me that you can live a very full intellectual life without ever having read Euphues or Aithiopika or The Unfortunate Traveller. They are interesting from an academic standpoint as early experiments in prose fiction, but surely no more than that for the modern reader, unless he/she is a specialist. To appreciate pre-18th century literature, you're much better off going to the drama and verse works.

Ultimately, this would be a much more useful list if it incorporated more modern masterpieces while limiting the earlier stuff.

I don't know why, but I've always been attracted to book lists. I've kept record of every book I've read since I was in the ninth grade, and I can waste full days surfing through Amazon's Listmania. So when 1001 Books to Read Before You Die, edited by Peter Boxall, came out, I knew I had to read it. It was a beautiful book and long. It promised hours of pleasure, and that was generally what I got. If I were ever to make a list of booklists books, this one would be fairly high up there on it.

I guess people find pleasure from booklists for two reasons. There's the chance of coming across new titles that will enrich your life. Second, and probably more significantly, there's the affirmation of finding books that you've loved listed and knowing that you're not alone in cherishing them.

This book is focused on fulfilling that first goal. It's heavily weighted, as others have noted, toward contemporary literary novels. It's particularly fond of experimental novels. As a result, I thinks there's a whole lot on here that most casual readers would not have gotten to (I doubt whether academics have gotten to many of these either). Since the list is so high-brow, I think that most readers won't want to get most of them, but I did find a good thirty or so that seemed very interesting (which I think is a high number). I've already confirmed that discovering The Green Man by Kingsley Amis alone was well worth reading Boxall's list.

On the second goal, this book was a bit frustrating (though I have read about a fifth of them). No Canterbury Tales. No Darkness at Noon. No Light in August. No Cormac McCarthy. No Malamud. Nothing by Walker Percy (there was a perceptible anti-religious bias in the choices, I thought). No Ismael Reed or Wallace Stegner. No Isaac Bashevis Singer. Neither of Marilynne Robinson's wonderful books. No Westerns (Lonesome Dove?). Weak science fiction choices, and only one fantasy novel chosen (and a weak choice at that--David Gemmel's Legend is good but hardly the single must-read of the genre). Why all the single short stories? Why "A Modest Proposal" at all? Why are the pre-twentieth century selections so often obscure ones that the reviewers even warn are nearly unreadable? Why did virtually every Ian McEwan and Paul Auster and J.G. Ballard warrant inclusion? Three Elmore Leonard's?

I guess that's a third way of finding pleasure from such a book. Disagreement is the other part of the fun; no booklist book will ever deserve five stars. This one's flawed, of course, but I enjoyed it. I wouldn't mind a sequel.

Ok. The title wasn't my quote. I believe I stole it from someone deader and infinitely more famous than myself - possibly Dorothy Parker. Anyway, I LOVE books, all books. Books, books, books. I have many books that list out other books, and I was glad to make this addition to my library when I saw it in a Travel Bookstore in Seattle. Until I read it. GAHHH!!!! 1000 books you have to read before you die. It lists multiple works by the Marquis de Sade, but none by Shakespeare? REALLY?!?! No holy works, by any religion. REALLY?!?! Erg.

As many of the other reviewers have said, the selection is (ok, this is my word) *whack*. If you must get a book of lists, try Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason. You can buy that book AND Book Lust Journal or its sequel, More Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason for the same price as this horrid paperweight. Book Lust is possibly not the very best selection-wise - although infinitely better than this one - but at least it's a fun read. And it doesn't make me wretch like this book. They should re-title this book 'Books We Think You Should Read Because We Are All Professors of 20th Century English Literature, Much of Which Is Terribly Depressing and Boring.' The re-titled book would not have sold as well, but it would certainly be more of an honest depiction of what one was buying.

I collect this genre of books. This is the ultimate collector's volume. The listings are broad-ranging, the descriptions are succinct and to the point, and the list covers the ancient to the contemporary. It is the best compendium of fiction writing in my collection.

The first thing to understand about this massive brick of a book is that the title is meant to catch one's attention and that like the contents, it must be taken with a very large grain of salt. Dial it down to "1001 Books You Might Like to Read at Some Point" and you're more on target. The second thing to understand is that for editorial purposes, "book" generally means "adult novel" for the most part, so there's no non-fiction or poetry or plays or essays or or children's books or short stories (with one or two unexplained exceptions). The third thing to understand is that the book originated in Britain, and as such, has a rather British emphasis and a rather decidedly modern tilt. (The editor teaches at the University of Sussex, and a disproportionate number of the contributors either teach there with him or are current or former doctoral students there.) With these points understood, most fiction-lovers will find this to be a really fun coffee-table or bathroom book to have around for years.

Each of the 1001 books is given roughly 300 words in which to "respond...to what makes each novel compelling, to what it is about each novel that makes one absolutely need to read it." However, with around 100 contributors, the style of these varies wildly: some focus on the book's prose style, some its context, many are mere plot summaries, and unfortunately very few are genuinely inspirational. Arranged chronologically by date of original publication, the book grants roughly 80 pages to the years leading up to 1800, 140 pages to the 1800s, 650 pages to the 1900s, and 65 pages to the relatively recent 2000s. Aside from the 300 words and some basic bibliographic information, almost each selection is accompanied by some kind of artwork (jacket art, author photos, stills from film adaptations, etc.), making the book vivid and gorgeous throughout. Of course, the real fun in a book like this is the arguments it provokes, and the general hue and outcry about omissions or disproportional representation. Before I get into my own pet peeve, here's a little context:

-- The most heavily represented authors are J.M. Coetzee and Charles Dickens with 11 entries each, Samuel Beckett with 10, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf with 9, Paul Auster, J.G. Ballard, and Ian McEwan with 8, and Saul Bellow, Dom DeLillo, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Philip Roth, and Salman Rushdie with 7. This does not include instances where trilogies have been lumped together into a lone entry, as is done several times. And I'll admit this is based on a quick run through the index, rather than a careful parsing, so I may have missed one or two people or miscounted slightly.

-- Despite the above, many prominent writers are completely missing, such as the following: William Boyd (Any Human Heart), Ray Bradberry (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451), Willa Cather (Death Comes For the Archbishop), Roddy Doyle (Barrytown Trilogy), Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Naguib Mahfouz (Cairo Trilogy), Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead), Bernard Malamud (The Fixer), Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, No Country For Old Men), George McDonald Fraser (Flashman series), John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra), Orhan Pamuk (My Name is Red), Walker Percy (The Moviegoer), Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged), J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter series), Jane Smiley, Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety), William Styron (Sophie's Choice), Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist). Again, I'll admit the above list is largely compiled from other reviewers' mentions.

-- Although you would think a book like this would give a token nod to the established critical orthodoxy, only about half of Booker Prize winners appear, and only about 2/3 of Nobel Prize winners who were known for their novels appear. That's not to say that every prize-winning book is a must read, but when they come at the expense of decent, but entirely unremarkable, selections such as Zadie Smith's "On Beauty" or Ardal O'Hanlon's "The Talk of the Town," one has to wonder...

-- Genre fiction gets very short shrift. Crime and science fiction are represented by the most obvious of choices (Chandler, Christie, Hammett, Asimov, and Clarke for example, although there are three Elmore Leonards). Horror gets a brief look-in with Dracula, Frankenstein, a Lovecraft short story and a Stephen King book. Aside from the obvious Tolkein, there's a lone fantasy title. Adventure tales are represented by H. Rider Haggard. And there are no westerns whatsoever. It's as if there was an editorial decision made that genre selections must be included and somewhat was assigned the task of rounding up the usual suspects. Oh yes, it's worth pointing out that a token graphic novel (Watchmen) was included, so that's nice.

My own personal bone to pick is with the Eurocentrism of the selections. I did a quick and dirty tabulation and found that roughly 70% of the selections were from Western Europe, roughly 25% from the U.S., and roughly 5% the rest of the world. The world's most populous country, China (currently 1 in 5 humans is Chinese), is represented by exactly zero entries. Ditto for the entire Arab-speaking/reading world. Don't even get me started on Africa -- entries authored by white African authors outnumber those by non-white African authors by a 2:1 ratio. And not coincidentally, all the non-white African writers represented all wrote in English. It's not that hard to find excellent fiction in translation, and as an example, I would point to the omission of Nobel laureates like Mahfouz, Pamuk, and pretty much every other non-Western winner. Anyway, that's just my own pet peeve, and most others probably don't care.

Ultimately, it's a fun book to have lying around to dip into from now and then or as a provocation to oneself or others.

I almost didn't buy this book. I have an inherent mistrust of books with 'must' in the title: I prefer to be invited rather than told. Still, my curiosity ('which books were chosen, and why?')tipped the balance.

Many of the books listed are books I have read and enjoyed. Some of them are books I've chosen not to read (or at least, not yet) while a few are books that I've not heard of. A number of my favourites are not included, which is what I would expect in the idiosyncratic world of reading preferences.

Still, I like to examine the reading lists prepared by others to see what common ground we might share and what new reading paths I might like to explore. I enjoyed this book on that basis.

The book has some wonderful illustrations and photographs, and is great for an idle browse or for a few quick facts about an included author or book.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith