1001 List

Everyone is by now very familiar with the1001 Books to Read before you die list, which can be found here (this is mostly for future reference for myself). I'm going to note here which of the few from the list I've read so far. As lists always are, this one is skewed to the compilers' tastes, and some are widely divergent from mine. Still, there are more than ten unread titles which appeal to me.

The 1% Challenge based on this list has been tempting me, but with the ongoing Russian Reading challenge and the Canadian Book Challenge, both of which I'm loving, I don't really want any more 'scheduled' reading in my future. Danielle has mentioned how attractive this challenge is, however, and has made a list of possible reads even if she isn't officially signing up. I like that idea!

So my hope is to read 10 of the multitudinous books on this list that I haven't cracked open as yet. I may still sign up officially if I ever feel capable of participating, but for now I'm just going to list 10 possibles (and a couple of alternates) from the list that I hope to read in the next 10 months. We'll just see how it goes.

Already Read:

The Double – José Saramago
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Silk – Alessandro Baricco
Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
Possession – A.S. Byatt
Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
The Waves – Virginia Woolf
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
Summer – Edith Wharton
The Golden Bowl – Henry James
The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Woodlanders – Thomas HardyThe Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane AustenMansfield Park – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Candide – Voltaire
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
Metamorphoses – Ovid
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

Thinking of Reading Soon:

The Golden Notebook / Doris Lessing (also up for Annie's What's in a name Challenge)

The Master & Margarita / Bulgakov (one I'd like to read for the Russian Reading Challenge)

Dead Souls / Gogol (ditto)

The Go-Between / L.P. Hartley (I've been planning to read this FOR EVER)

Nights at the Circus / Angela Carter (great writer)

Anagrams / Lorrie Moore (I'm continually being told to read her, already!)

Miss Pettigrew lives for a day / Winifred Watson (charming book & movie, or so I've heard)

The Last September / Elizabeth Bowen (since reading The House in Paris for the Outmoded Authors challenge, I've wanted to read more, especially this book)

Embers / Sandor Marai (my husband loves this one)

We / Yevgeny Zamyatin (I have to read this dystopian classic this year of reading Russian)

and then maybe just for fun:

The Riddle of the Sands / Erskine Childers

She / Rider Haggard

The Third Man / Graham Greene (I adore the film)

That's 93 read, or around 9%. Not too bad, I guess, but there are many more to tackle. To feel more well-read, perhaps I should be looking at this book -- even if I have read fewer of her suggestions.