On Reading 1001 Books

I myself am a long way from this target, though it is a good one. I've been keeping a count for a while now and I'm only a handful of books away from the 300 mark - and that's forgetting all the old Star Trek and Star Wars books that filled my youth.

No, this is a reference to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, a crazy compendium of literature that one perhaps should think twice about trying to compete with. I doubt I'll ever read all that has been suggested - and looking at some of the titles I doubt I'd want to. But here are the ones I've read so far, so I can get an idea of how much work would be left ahead of me:

1. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro


2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon


3. The Body Artist, Don DeLillo


4. Life of Pi, Yann Martel


5. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje


6. American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis


7. Mao II, Don DeLillo


8. Regeneration, Pat Barker


9. London Fields, Martin Amis


10. Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey


11. The Afternoon of a Writer, Peter Handke


12. The Pigeon, Patrick Suskind


13. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe


14. The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster


15. Contact, Carl Sagan


16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood


17. White Noise, Don DeLillo


18. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks


19. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera


20. Money, A Suicide Note


21. The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan


22. The Shining, Stephen King


23. Dispatches, Michael Herr


24. The Left-Handed Woman, Peter Handke


25. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson


26. Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


27. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth


28. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke


29. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick


30. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys


31. The Graduate, Charles Webb


32. The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark


33. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Alexander Solzhenitsyn


34. The Collector, John Fowles


35. Solaris, Stanislaw Lem


36. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark


37. Catch-22, Joseph Heller


38. Memento Mori, Muriel Spark


39. Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote


40. The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham


41. On The Road, Jack Kerouac


42. The Quiet American, Graham Greene


43. Casino Royale, Ian Fleming


44. The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway


45. Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham


46. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger


47. 1984, George Orwell


48. The Plague, Albert Camus


49. Animal Farm, George Orwell


50. The Razor's Edge, W. Somerset Maugham


51. The Outsider, Albert Camus


52. For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway


53. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck


54. To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway


55. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald


56. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley


57. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway


58. Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett


59. Amerika, Franz Kafka


60. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway


61. The Castle, Franz Kafka


62. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald


63. The Trial, Franz Kafka


64. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin


65. Siddhartha, Herman Hesse


66. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce


67. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham


68. The 39 Steps, John Buchan


69. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton


70. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad


71. The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells


72. The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells


73. Dracula, Bram Stoker


74. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells


75. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde


76. King Solomon's Mines, H. Rider Haggard


77. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy


78. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy


79. Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne


80. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy


81. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky


82. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens


83. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens


84. Moby Dick, Herman Melville


85. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte


86. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas


87. Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper


88. Candide, Voltaire


89. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift


90. Don Quixote, Cervantes

Which brings me to a grand total of 90 books so far; so roughly a third of the books I've read are actually on the list - a very neat coincidence. I'd concentrate on reading more to suit the list if my library wasn't more scattered - I've a lot to get through if I'm ever to read what I've bought.