1001 Books

How could someone compile a list called 1001 Books to Read Before You Die and not have his head completely explode?

Here is a list of the complete 1001 books.

I've read 89 of those books! Actually, I've read more, but I limited myself to only the books I remember the plot of, so anything I read in fifth grade and can't remember didn't make the list.

# indicates books I listened to on tape.
* indicates books I read more than once.

My one caveat - I included Infinite Jest, even though I only read about half of it, because dude! That thing is 1088 pages - so my reasoning is that those 500 pages I read will NOT go to waste! So you could say I read 88.5 books on the list.

# On Beauty – Zadie Smith
# The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
# Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
# The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
# White Teeth – Zadie Smith
*The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
*The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
attempted - Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
#The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
*The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
*The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
*The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
Jazz – Toni Morrison
*The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
*The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
*Like Life – Lorrie Moore
# Possession – A.S. Byatt
Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
Beloved – Toni Morrison
* Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
*Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel
# The Cider House Rules – John Irving
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
*The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
*The Color Purple – Alice Walker
*The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
Sula – Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
# I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
*The Godfather – Mario Puzo
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
*Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
*To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
*The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
*The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
*Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
*To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
*The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
*Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
*The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
*The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
*Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
*Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
*Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
*Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
*Emma – Jane Austen
*Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
*Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
*Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus


I know, only a nerd would do this.