readeron's attempt

I'm using this list: http://www.listology.com/list/1001-books-you-must-read-you-die

The books I've read so far:

- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
- The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
- White Teeth – Zadie Smith
- The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
- Timbuktu – Paul Auster
- Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
- American Pastoral – Philip Roth
- Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
- The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
- The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx

- American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
- Moon Palace – Paul Auster
- Libra – Don DeLillo
- Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
- The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
- Perfume – Patrick Süskind
- The Lover – Marguerite Duras
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
- Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
- Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis

- Shame – Salman Rushdie
- The Color Purple – Alice Walker
- The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
- If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
- The World According to Garp – John Irving
- The Shining – Stephen King
- Fateless – Imre Kertész
- Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
- The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll

- Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
- Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
- Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
- The Godfather – Mario Puzo
- Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
- The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
- The Joke – Milan Kundera
- In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
- Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

- The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
- Things – Georges Perec
- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
- Herzog – Saul Bellow
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
- A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
- Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
- Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow

- Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
- The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
- The End of the Road – John Barth
- On the Road – Jack Kerouac
- Justine – Lawrence Durrell
- Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
- The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- The Quiet American – Graham Greene
- Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan

- Lord of the Flies – William Golding
- Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
- Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
- The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
- The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
- Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
- Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
- Animal Farm – George Orwell
- The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Embers – Sandor Marai

- The Outsider – Albert Camus
- Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
- Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
- Murphy – Samuel Beckett
- Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
- Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
- They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy
- A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
- Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

- The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
- Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
- Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
- The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
- The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence
- Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
- The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield

- Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
- The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
- Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
- Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
- Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
- The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
- Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
- A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

- Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
- Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
- The Awakening – Kate Chopin
- The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
- The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
- The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
- Dracula – Bram Stoker
- The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
- 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 Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
- Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
- Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
- Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
- In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu

- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll
- Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
- Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
- A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- Villette – Charlotte Brontë

- Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
- The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
- Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
- Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

- The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
- Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
- A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
- Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
- The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
- The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
- Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
- The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
- Le Pere Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo

- The Red and the Black – Stendhal
- Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
- Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
- Persuasion – Jane Austen
- Emma – Jane Austen
- Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
- Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett

- The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
- Candide – Voltaire
- Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
- Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
- Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
- Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
- The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
- Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

Total: 168 books
So there are 833 more to go:)
One book per month sounds like a realistic goal!
(which means I'll be about 110 years old when I die...)

A great starting list - welcome!

I love the fact you've chosen to amend your age at death rather than reading rate - why didn't I think of that?

Thanks!:) One tries to be optimistic, and I usually can't keep to any strict reading plans, so it felt more logical this way.:))

169. The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien
170. Them by Joyce Carol Oates

(I've already read Them twice, but I forgot to list it.)

I just saw your new thread here and decided to pop in and say "Hi!" I was just mentioning to a friend of my daughter how much you like the Paul Auster books. She and I are going to try to read some this Fall.

I hope to get caught up on your other thread this weekend.

Hi BJ, it's always good to see you!:) Your words are really so touching now, they sort of made my day!:) I wish my IRL friends or relations would know which authors I like, too, or I just could chat about books with them a bit more. (They have a lot of different other hobbies, and too little free time, but still...) You are really so lucky that your family and friends love reading so much! Plus, sometimes it still surprises me and I find it so amazing (and yes, so cool) that someone in America knows my taste in books. It would've felt like sci-fi to me even some 10 years ago, and now it's reality. And really moving somehow.

I hope you will enjoy Auster's novels, I still can remember how happy I was when I discovered them for the first time.:)
Have a great day!

I enjoy sharing books with you as well. Happy reading! :)

Happy Reading!:)

171. In the Heart of the Country by J M Coetzee

172. Molloy by Samuel Beckett

173. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

174. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

175. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

ah... what did you think of that one then?

I quite enjoyed it, especially its style grabbed me. One more Márquez novel that I enjoy like this and he can be added to my favourite authors.:)

176. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov

177. The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

178. The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

179. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

180: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Did you like Don Quixote? It took me a while to get into it (like, a month) but finally I completely loved it and was sad when it was over! It made me rethink those dwarves that Velazquez was painting a generation later -- I mean, "empathy with the Different" was not a big concept in 17th-century Spain, was it?

Sure. Don Quixote actually became one of my favourite books, though I started to read it last June or July, so completing it took about half a year for me.:) I think I'll reread it sometime, it was so rich in historical, social, autobiographical (and so on) details and literary allusions, and still it was so immensely funny and human at the same time. I must admit I had to google Velazquez' paintings, and I think you are right, my imagination painted those scenes all with quite different colours: it was a bit more of a playful comedy to me than a serious, tearful drama. I'm even missing Sancho's bouquets of flowery proverbs now.:)

181. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

182. Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll

183. The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard

184. The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf

185. The Case Worker (A látogató) by George Konrad (Konrád György)

186. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

187. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
188. Silk by Alessandro Baricco
189. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

hey what did you think of 187?

It's a gem. I absolutely loved it. A brilliant, highly enjoyable, occasionally really touching, postmodern satire. I higly recommend it, especially if you like magic realism.
I wrote and quoted about it more here:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/130528#3348638

yes, I've read it. Just wondered what you thought. My thoughts here if you're interested:

http://johnandsheena.co.uk/books/?p=131

... although I'd probably appreciate it now I've read a bit more widely.

Have you read Midnight's Children? I thought that was fabulous. I'll never forget the section where he's delirious with fever. I'd never read anything like that before.

Oops, I see. And I really liked your review.

I haven't read Midnight's Children yet, but definitely plan to. I think, before reading Shame by Rushdie I just couldn't get into his style of writing. It was the first book by him that I could really enjoy and appreciate fully (and the first one that I actually completed). Since then I think it's only a matter of time before I read all his other books, too.

190. What Maisie Knew by Henry James

191. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

192. Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Céline

193. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

#38 Did you like it? It was one of the first 1001 books that I read and, not having much experience with novels, I was shocked.

Also, re your comment about Midnight's Children at #34, I think you would like it. Just think stream of consciousness combined with magical realism and you're into a great nove.

# 39 I quite liked Death in Venice (gave it 3 stars out of 5), probably because it reads a bit like a psychothriller (like novels by Patricia Highsmith:), as the creepy middle-aged artist is gradually sinking deeper and deeper in self-deceit, rationalizing his obsession less and less convincingly even for himself. It was a bit like an intellectual horror story steeped in Greek mythology and with no gore at all (which is alright for me, since I don't really like slasher horror anyway:). On the other hand, the autobiographical aspect of the novel could make one wonder. But probably this background info is only part of the show. One can never know what the truth is when it comes to authors and the literary legends they often manage to create about themselves.:)

Midnight's Children sounds really intriguing, thanks for the recommendation, I'll try to get a copy from the library and give it a try soon.

194. Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

195. Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard

196. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
197. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

198. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

Any special plans for #200?

Ooops, I didn't realize that I got to souch a milestone!:) No.200 became Wittgenstein's Nephew. An amazing book.

199. Jules Verne: Journey to the Center of the Earth
200. Thomas Bernhard: Wittgenstein's Nephew

201. Flann O'Brien: The Poor Mouth

202. J. M. Coetzee: Life & Times of Michael K

#46 Why did you think Wittgenstein's Nephew such an amazing book? It has been on my TBR list for ever but I still need a bit of convincing...

It would be really hard to define what makes a book amazing for me. In this case, probably the style, the characterization, and the honesty of the story. It's not a fluffy read, not even a nice one, but quite unputdownable. (A bit forgettable, too, but maybe that's my fault.:)

203. Bret Easton Ellis: Less Than Zero
204. Amelie Nothomb: Fear and Trembling
205. H. P. Lovecraft: At The Mountains of Madness