Sunday, December 12, 2010

1,001 Books to Read Before You Die Challenge

Today, I finished reading Junky by William S. Burroughs. I did not realize when I started reading it that this book is on the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Most book bloggers are probably familiar with the infamous: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. I picked up a copy of this compilation a few years ago, and I have been plugging away at the list ever since. As I am getting close to scratching off my first set of "100 completed," I thought I would compile and post my list in an easily accessible place. Each time I scratch out another 100 books, starting with this first 100, I will offer up a Giveaway - deal?!

Also, a lot of these books are great, obviously, and could be interesting conversation starters. Is anyone else out there battling their way through this massive list? Thoughts/ideas? How is your own progress - and how do you keep track of it? I have tried to keep these books in roughly the order they appear in the book (by century).

My List (Progress: 118 of 1,001)

2000s
19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
33. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
49. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
54. White Teeth – Zadie Smith

1900s
87. Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
97. Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
116. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
180. The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
183. Possession – A.S. Byatt
195. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
201. The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
242. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
246. Queer - William S. Burroughs
254. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
256. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
271. A Boy’s Own Story – Edmund White
276. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
288. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
301. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
303. The World According to Garp – John Irving
335. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
340. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
360. The Wild Boys – William S. Burroughs
375. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
411. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
413. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
427. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
433. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
436. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
437. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
445. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
452. The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
456. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
461. Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs
469. Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
477. The Once and Future King – T.H. White
484. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
515. Junkie – William S. Burroughs
516. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
521. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
529. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
563. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
564. Animal Farm – George Orwell
574. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
587. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
589. The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
592. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
608. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
609. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
610. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
619. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
623. At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
629. The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
636. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
638. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
643. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
663. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
667. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
671. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
673. Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe
686. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
689. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
741. Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
750. Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
752. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
768. Young Törless – Robert Musil
780. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
784. Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser

1800s
788. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
790. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
794. Dracula - Bram Stoker
801. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
804. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
809. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
820. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
821. The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
829. The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
840. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
846. Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
857. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
861. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
868. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
876. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
879. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
880. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
883. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
889. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
894. The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
896. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
897. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
902. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
904. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
905. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
911. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
913. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
916. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
932. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

1700s
959. The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
970. Candide – Voltaire
987. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

Pre-1700
994. Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly