As so many other bloggers and readers, I’ve jumped 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die band wagon. And well, there has been three updated versions so far (and I’m guessing there might be one more this year), so the list doesn’t contain only 1001 books anymore. Now it’s 1305. Now, I haven’t dropped everything else in order to read the list. I’m hoping to get through it but I’m going a bit slow. I use it as inspiration as to which novels have been important and influential throughout the history of the novel and even though I like crossing books off the list, I’m not putting a lot of focus on this. Slow and steady is my motto for this list.
Here’s my list of the ones I’ve read so far – with links to the ones, I’ve written reviews of on the blog. (The other reviews (most of them at least) can be found on my Goodreads profile – username: Christina Stind Rosendahl).
- Franz Kafka: The Trial
- Yann Martel: Life of Pi
- Truman Capote: In Cold Blood
- Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
- Georges Perec: Life – A User’s Manual
- Paulo Coelho: Veronika Decides to Die
- Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five
- Junot Diaz: The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao
- Will Self: How the Dead Live
- Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- John Irving: The World According to Garp
- Gabriel Garcia Márquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
- Haruki Murakami: Kafka on the Shore
- Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- Anthony Burgess: Clockwork Orange
- Douglas Adam: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
- Douglas Adams: The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul
- Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
- Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
- Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
- Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
- Anne Rice: Interview with the Vampire
- Haruki Murakami: Sputnik Sweetheart
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca
- Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace
- H.P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness
- Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenia
- Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex
- Elisabeth Bowen: The House in Paris
- Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale
- John Cleland: Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
- E.L. Doctorow: City of God
- Alan Moore: Watchmen
- Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel Novel and Three Stories
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Half of a Yellow Sun
- Martin Amis: Dead Babies
- Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
- John Steinbeck: Cannery Row
- Joseph Heller: Catch-22
- Henry Williamson: Tarka the Otter
- Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
- John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
- Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility
- George Eliot: Middlemarch
- Irvine Welsh: Trainspotting
- Jane Austen: Emma
- Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible
- Flannery O’Connor: Everything That Rises Must Converge
- John Fowles: The Magus
- Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
- Louisa May Alcott: Little Women
- Bernhard Schlink: The Reader
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Little Prince
- Marina Lewycka: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
- Harry Mulisch: The Discovery of Heaven
- Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar
- Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
- Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
- John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany
- David Leavitt: The Lost Language of Cranes
- Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol
- A.S. Byatt: The Children’s Book
- Matthew Lewis: The Monk
- Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
- Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections
- Gustave Flaubert:Madame Bovary
- Orhan Pamuk: Snow
- Jung Chang: Wild Swans
- Donna Tartt: The Secret History
- Charles Dickens: Hard Times
- Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
- Don DeLillo: Falling Man
- Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders
- Samuel Richardson: Clarissa
- Victor Hugo: Les Misérables
- Jonathan Littell: The Kindly Ones
- Toni Morrison: Beloved
- Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything is Illuminated
- Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
- Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
- Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo
- Virginia Woolf: Orlando
- Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
- Jane Austen: Mansfield Park
- Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
- John Updike: Rabbit Run (The Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom series)
- A. S. Byatt: Possession
