hdc versus 1001 books, part 2

This is a continuation of the topic hdc versus 1001 books (2008).

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hdc versus 1001 books, part 2

1hdcanis
Mar 13, 2016, 11:39 am

Ok, starting a new thread after the first 200 books.
Here are the books read so far:

1. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
28 a. The Successor – Ismail Kadare
42 a. I’m Not Scared – Niccolo Ammaniti
75. Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
76. The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
78. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
98. The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
101. Silk – Alessandro Baricco
126. Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi

153. The Crow Road – Iain Banks
159. Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
178 a. The Last World – Christopher Ransmayr
183 a. Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto
190. Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
200. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
203. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
210. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
223 a. The Young Man – Botho Strauss
227. Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons

230. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
254. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
258. Neuromancer – William Gibson
259. Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
266. The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee
274. A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
293. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
299. The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll
300. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
300 a. The Engineer of Human Souls – Josef Skvorecky

301. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
302 a. Almost Transparent Blue – Ryu Murakami
304. Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec
310. The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
311. Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
312. The Shining – Stephen King
316. The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
318 a. The Year of the Hare – Arto Paasilinna
320. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
335 a. The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty

338. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
350. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
352. The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
355. House Mother Normal – B.S. Johnson
357 a. Heartbreak Tango – Manuel Puig
358 a. Moscow Stations – Venedikt Yerofeev
359. Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
363. The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark
364. The Ogre – Michael Tournier
375. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

383. Eva Trout – Elizabeth Bowen
384. Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
390. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
393. In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
399. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
400. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
400 a. Silence – Shusaku Endo
401 a. Death and the Dervish – Mesa Selimovic
404. The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
405 a. Garden, Ashes – Danilo Kis

411. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
413. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
418. Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
431. The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
433 a. Time of Silence – Luis Martin-Santos
437. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
439 a. No One Writes to the Colonel – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
441. Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
443. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
448. Solaris – Stanislaw Lem

448 a. Bebo’s Girl – Carlo Cassola
449. Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
450. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
452. The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
454. Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
459. Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee
465. Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
466. Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Böll
467. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
468. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

469. Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
472. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
474 a. The Birds – Tarjei Vesaas
477. The Once and Future King – T.H. White
481 a. The Manila Rope – Veijo Meri
494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
495. The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
497. A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
503. Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
504 a. The Sound of Waves – Yukio Mishima

507. A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
521. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
522. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
522 a. A Thousand Cranes – Yasunari Kawabata
523 a. Excellent Women – Barbara Pym
529. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
538 a. Barabbas – Par Lagerkvist
540. The Moon and the Bonfires – Cesare Pavese
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

2hdcanis
Mar 13, 2016, 11:39 am

555. Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
556. If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
558. The Path to the Nest of Spiders – Italo Calvino
564. Animal Farm – George Orwell
569. Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
572. Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
574. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
577. Embers – Sandor Marai
579. The Outsider – Albert Camus
580. In Sicily – Elio Vittorini

585 a. Pippi Longstocking – Astrid Lindgren
589. The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
590. The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
592 a. Chess Story – Stefan Zweig
601. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
608. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
610. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
614 a. Alamut – Vladimir Bartol
623. At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
628. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy

629. The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
632. The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
632 a. War with the Newts – Karel Capek
637. A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
641. Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
642. Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
642 a. The Bells of Basel – Louis Aragon
649. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
650. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
651. To the North – Elizabeth Bowen

652. The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
655. The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
658 a. Vipers’ Tangle – Francois Mauriac
660. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
664. Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
669. The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen
672. Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
679. Quartet – Jean Rhys
680. Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
688 a. Some Prefer Nettles – Junichiro Tanizaki

695. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
709. The Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet
738. Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
743. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
744. Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
747. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
752 a. Platero and I – Juan Ramon Jiminez
758. Strait is the Gate – André Gide
771. Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann

778. The Immoralist – André Gide
780. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
789. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
795. Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
796 a. As a Man Grows Older – Italo Svevo
803. Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
809. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
817. The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg
820. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
840. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

845. The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
847. The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
848. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
855. King Lear of the Steppes – Ivan Turgenev
863. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
867. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
876. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
886. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
892. Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell

904. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
906. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
909. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
909 a. A Hero of Our Times – Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov
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
918 a. Eugene Onegin – Alexander Pushkin
919. The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
921. Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac

923 a. The Life of a Good-for-Nothing – Joseph von Eichendorff
926. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
930. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
932. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
933. Persuasion – Jane Austen
936. Emma – Jane Austen
937. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
940. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

956. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
959. The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
974. Fanny Hill – John Cleland
982. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
991. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
992. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
992 a. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes – Anonymous
996. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
999. Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton
1001. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

3hdcanis
Edited: Jul 3, 2023, 4:41 pm

Language breakdown (missing the books from the last update, but I haven't read any of them anyway)

776 English 128=16.5%
114 French 23=20.2%
91 German 15=16.5%
70 Spanish 11=15.7%
37 Italian 20=54.1%
33 Russian 10=30.3%
21 Dutch
19 Japanese 10=52.6%
17 Portuguese 1=5.9%
12 Greek 2=16.7%
11 Swedish 4=36.4%
10 Serbo-Croatian 3=30%
9 Czech 2=22.2%
9 Polish 2=22.2%
7 Chinese 1=14.3%
6 Hungarian 1=16.7%
6 Norwegian 1=16.7%
5 Arabic 2=40%
5 Yiddish
3 Albanian 1=33.3%
3 Finnish 2=66.7%
3 Hebrew
2 Afrikaans
2 Bulgarian
2 Korean
2 Latin 1=50%
2 Romanian
2 Slovenian 1=50%
2 Ukrainian
1 Armenian
1 Basque
1 Bengali 1=100%
1 Catalan
1 Danish
1 Estonian
1 Ethiopic
1 Gaelic
1 Galician
1 Icelandic
1 Kikuyu
1 Persian
1 Sesotho
1 Turkish
1 Vietnamese
1 Welsh

1294 total 242=18.7%

4hdcanis
May 28, 2016, 4:59 am

201. A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
been reading plenty of books, just not the list books...my first Murdoch, and a bit of mixed experience, it reminds me of Evelyn Waugh books I have read in that I recognize the skill but I just don't like them that much, the approach to comedy doesn't work for me.

5hdcanis
Jul 5, 2016, 3:02 am

202. The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
Nope.
The point of the book might have been distance, separation and lack of understanding of people and their experiences: if so, this reader fit right in.

6Simone2
Jul 6, 2016, 2:41 am

Exactly my thoughts! And such a boring book...

7hdcanis
Edited: Jul 6, 2016, 9:20 am

Yeah, I had read one Duras book before that was probably somewhat atypical for her, and quite liked it, but from what I have understood her main books are probably not for me.

8hdcanis
Jul 22, 2016, 9:16 am

203. Dracula by Bram Stoker
Yeah, I hadn't read Dracula before, even if the story was really familiar from movies and all...though the book did throw in some interesting (and delightfully macabre) details and actually expanded on couple of story points that I had thought were usually a bit unsatisfying in the films...

204. Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
There should be some better list for books like this, e.g. "1001 books to appreciate for existing without having to read them before you die".

9.Monkey.
Jul 22, 2016, 9:18 am

LOL! I agree re: Oroonoko. "Books that were significant in some way when written but really not intended for today's audience." xD

10Nickelini
Jul 22, 2016, 12:52 pm

>8 hdcanis:, >9 .Monkey.: I nominate Pilgrim's Progress to that list.

11hdcanis
Jul 23, 2016, 3:09 pm

Aww, I liked Pilgrim's Progress (though I seem to be in the minority and it surely requires a taste for allegories not pretending to be anything but and some blatant fire-and-brimstone).

12Nickelini
Jul 23, 2016, 3:19 pm

>11 hdcanis: I had enough fire and brimstone in my first 20 years to last several lifetimes.

13hdcanis
Edited: Sep 23, 2016, 11:46 am

205: The Judge and His Hangman by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

An interesting book twisting a detective novel format to more philosophical, darker directions...
The problem however was that this was third Dürrenmatt book I have read, and while good, I still find the other two (The Pledge and A Dangerous Game) even better and more worthy of inclusion.

14hdcanis
Nov 16, 2016, 2:54 am

206: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
No, I hadn't read this before, and actually I didn't even know that well what the story was about, except that there are pirates, treasure and some guy named Long John Silver, it seems I hadn't seen any adaptations of this either.

Well, there are pirates, treasure and a guy named Long John Silver, though it was a bit of surprise how little part treasure actually played here, it was more about the idea of treasure. And twists and turns in the story with lots of action.
Yeah, it was a fun read for what it was.

And I kept thinking that if they made a new film from this, to what part would they shoehorn the token woman: book itself doesn't allow for much.

15hdcanis
Dec 18, 2016, 1:34 pm

207: The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Again I have no idea if the entry refers to the short story or some specific collection, I read one collection with this as one.
And yes, it's good, reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe and MR James but from another perspective and societal subtext.

16hdcanis
Jun 16, 2017, 3:12 pm

208: The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius
Well, this was quite funny, reminded me (and probably influenced) those picaresque novels several centuries later. And despite fantasy bits, it still felt like a good touch of everyday life of the period...

17hdcanis
Jul 31, 2017, 1:03 pm

209: King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard

I wasn't really wowed, the ideas introduced here have served a number of followers better, while as an adventure romp I preferred The Treasure Island.

Credit where credit's due: this was notably less racist than I expected it to be.

18hdcanis
Aug 17, 2017, 1:32 am

210: The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazan

In late 19th century Galicia a young and naive priest is sent to the manor of Ulloa, an old and proud family which however is in decline, both economical and moral...
A hint of gothic but mainly this is naturalism (and apparently a classic of naturalism in Spanish literature). After the beginning it felt a bit formless, things happen and then other things happen and then other things happen which is not a bad reading experience but one that does not great novels make.
But in the end there were still some interesting insight covering the whole book.

19hdcanis
Aug 19, 2017, 8:23 am

211: Heavy Wings by Zhang Jie

Ok, first things first: there is lots of talk about society, politics, ideology: if that does not sound appealing, this book will be dry as dust.
However, if it does have some appeal, it's actually pretty great, showing a snapshot of post-Cultural Revolution China in form of an ensemble of characters from different branches of society (most of them associated with the Ministry of Heavy Industries in Beijing) and giving the reader insight on a different times, places, lives, cultures and thoughts, and honestly isn't that the best a book can do?

20hdcanis
Dec 19, 2017, 10:04 am

212: Mariama Ba: So Long a Letter
I read this actually couple of months ago, just forgot to mention it here.
Interesting work, also because I happened to read a bit before this another north-African female author and both of these are a branch of feminism that do not actively rail against patriarchy but instead question the capability of men to fulfill the demands imposed by it (and when they don't, the result is injustice).

213: Elizabeth Bowen: The Heat of the Day
The sixth and final Bowen of the list. And the one I liked less than others: the common themes are there but the constrained scope is not, too many people and events made this harder to grasp...and the language is here heavy but not as amazing as in some of her later works.

21hdcanis
Apr 18, 2018, 9:55 am

214: Barbara Pym: Quartet in Autumn
Meanwhile, I have read almost all the other Barbara Pym books, after this I am missing one or two titles from her overall oeuvre...so yeah, I am a fan.
This is slightly different from other books though, it's a study of four people in the same office, all living alone and all on the brink of retirement (hence the autumn: the events of the book actually cover more than one year): there's even less "plot" than usual, and while it has moments of funny it is notably more melancholic book than the others (none of which are strangers to wistfulness).
But great of course.

22hdcanis
Edited: May 7, 2018, 4:03 am

215: Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Yeah, hadn't read this one before. A collection of unpleasant people being unpleasant to each other, most of them dying during the book but not soon enough.
I didn't really get how this was supposed to be a romantic book, more an argument against inbreeding, but admittedly I didn't want to quit this book at any point either so it must have had something going for it.

As a minor curiosity, now I notice I have read six books by female authors in a row (and all different authors too). And couple more waiting on the shelves...

23hdcanis
May 30, 2018, 12:25 pm

216: Djuna Barnes: Nightwood

Hmm. It's probably good in ways that are not entirely relevant to me.

24hdcanis
Jul 19, 2018, 2:33 am

217: J.G.Ballard: Crash

A book that doesn't try to be good in a conventional sense, the effect is the alienation via other people's pornography, and the result is potentially a dystopia in which we are already living. A fascinating if "proceed with caution" book.

25hdcanis
Aug 6, 2018, 12:29 pm

218: Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

In that odd realm of autofiction where it's not quite an autobiography but contains lots of that sort of material...and while I generally don't care about autofiction, I did like this, Angelou is a good writer and her meditations about the theme of racism interesting.
At the same time I must say the book was very American, having a bit of the success-through-hardships-inspirational-speaker tone that makes us jaded Europeans often scoff (and besides, our racism is different so this doesn't really hit so close to home) but as said, Angelou is a good writer so no scoffing.

26Nickelini
Aug 6, 2018, 12:50 pm

>20 hdcanis: Good to hear that Heat of the Day isn't Bowen's best. I really struggled with it. I've read three of her books and I feel like she's an author I could love, but so far I find her difficult and unrewarding. Maybe more boring than actually difficult. I will try again though.

>22 hdcanis: Wuthering Heights is one of my all time favourite books, but I'm from the camp that it is *not* a romance. I agree that it's undoubtedly an argument against inbreeding!

>25 hdcanis: the book was very American, having a bit of the success-through-hardships-inspirational-speaker tone that makes us jaded Europeans often scoff (and besides, our racism is different so this doesn't really hit so close to home) Interesting observation, and this Canadian often feels that too. Probably one of the reasons I've never read this author.

27amaryann21
Aug 6, 2018, 1:58 pm

>25 hdcanis: That's fascinating... I never thought about that! I love hearing about cultural differences in literature like this.

28hdcanis
Aug 30, 2018, 8:17 am

219: Ian McEwan: Cement Garden
Hmm, dunno, it felt like it should have been a short story or perhaps a longer, more developed book, the idea is interesting but I did not really care for how it was developed.

29hdcanis
Feb 9, 2019, 9:39 am

Been inactive here but some books have been read...

220: Jhumpa Lahiri: The Namesake
Kinda nice in kinda forgettable way.

221: Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles
I hadn't read any Holmes stories and I expected this to be horribly dated but whatdoyouknow, some of the descriptions were very effective. While the characters and the story were, indeed, dated (not just old, but in a way that others have developed the detective genre since in more interesting direction)

222: E.L. Doctorow: Ragtime
This was fun, Doctorow shows the birth of modern America in multiple crossing plotlines...

30hdcanis
Edited: Dec 5, 2019, 3:05 am

223: E.M. Forster: A Room With a View
Hmm. It was nice, but I've read enough of better books of this style.

224. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Quite fun, but the last utopia section did drag.

225. Graham Greene: The Third Man
I guess the principal reason for the inclusion of this book was the film. And the scene in the book not filmed was actually interesting, but it's not like one misses out much if one sticks to the film...

226. Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Well, this one I liked a lot, and the theme of the invisibility goes well beyond the question of race...

31hdcanis
Dec 5, 2019, 3:05 am

227. Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending
Hmm, the theme the selectivity of the memories and their questionable interpretation were quite interesting, but the mystery in the centre did start to get on my nerves, the opaqueness of the woman showing obscure hints and just going "you just don't get it" again and again.

228. Rabindranath Tagore: The Home and the World
This one I liked. The politics are central in the novel, the characters are a bit "types" instead of real people, Tagore paces the novel oddly (a bit like Greek drama, most of the action takes place elsewhere and we see only people talking about the action) and the talk is more rhetoric than natural (but the introduction mentions that it is also a question of the culture and that in Bengali high rhetoric style is more natural than in many other languages) so I think it requires an appreciation for allegorical, essayistic fiction. Which I have, and the central political questions show a bias of the author but are still not black-and-white.

229. Graham Greene: The End of the Affair
Occasionally interesting, but not the best Greene I have read so far.

32hdcanis
May 1, 2022, 5:47 am

Been a long while since I've been active here, and I haven't been intentionally following the list (and thus read plenty of worthy books that are not featured), but some more entries:

230. Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South
The main character surely was impressive, but also impressively the story was not just about her. I really should continue with Gaskell.

231. Luigi Pirandello: One, No One and One Hundred Thousand
A banal observation leads to highflowing philosophicla musings. Nice.

232. Laura Esquivel: Like Water for Chocolate
Ehh, it's ok. A quick entertaining read and an example of magical realism done well, but no more.

233. Hermann Hesse: Rosshalde
Another "it's ok". Familiar elements from other Hesse books I've read, but I've read better.

234. Graham Greene: The Honorary Consul
Interesting. Some familiar themes from other Greene books, and there's interesting meditations of both terrorism and love...

235. Raymond Chandler: Farewell My Lovely
Chandler is not among my favourite hardboiled writers, but admittedly he writes good dialogue and the sense of the milieu is great, so it is entertaining.

236. James M Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice
This is a lot more in my line of thrillers, dark, fateful, raw...

237. Heinrich von Kleist: Michael Kohlhaas
A strong novella about justice and power, has enough twists and material for reflections of its own, and has not really been outdated (and some books strongly influenced by this have in their own right ended up in the list as well, the story seemed familiar and sure enough, Ragtime has lifted its major storyline from this one).

33hdcanis
Jul 3, 2023, 4:33 pm

Updating, some entries since the last time.

238. Naguib Mahfouz: Miramar
I've been on Mahfouz kick, this is good but not even his best book.

239. Slavenka Draculic: S. A Novel About the Balkans
Not for the weak of heart, but a great, great book.

240. Hermann Hesse: The Steppenwolf
Yes, it's a bit kitschy and silly but with some lurking wisdom in it as well.

241. Joris-Karl Huysmans: Against Nature
Weird, funny, completely of its setting and completely unlike anything.

242. Jim Thompson: The Killer Inside Me
Nice hardboiled thriller.