My Attempt at the Complete 1001 List

Hi! I just joined the group and wanted to post what I've read so far. I also wanted a place to review the books I'm reading. I'm not very far in the list, but I'm going to change that! :) I made a note by the ones I was required to read in high school. I don't remember a lot about some of them, but I also don't care to go back and reread some of them so I'm counting all the ones I know that I've read whether I remember much about them or not. Surprisingly, I didn't have to read any books that are on the list in college (but I didn't take many English classes in college).

I also rated the books based on a 5 star rating system. Since I can't remember some of them very well I rated them on the general feeling I have toward the book so some of the ratings may not be super accurate for now. I will start to review books that I'm reading now. I also just joined the group read so some of the books I'm reading will be redundant with that thread.

Here are the books that I've read so far:

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen--high school (3 stars)
2. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe--high school (5 stars)
3. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne--high school (2 stars)
4. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens--high school (4 stars)
5. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (4 stars)
6. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (3 stars)
7. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy (3 stars)
8. Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith (3 stars)
9. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (4 stars)
10. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (3 stars)
11. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (3 stars)
12. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad--high school (4 stars)
13. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald--high school (2 stars)
14. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien--high school (3 stars)
15. Animal Farm by George Orwell--high school (4 stars)
16. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (4 stars)
17. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (4 stars)
18. Lord of the Flies by William Golding--high school (5 stars)
19. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (4 stars)
20. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee--high school (3 stars)
21. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (2 stars)
22. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (3 stars)
23. Libra by Don DeLillo (3 stars)
24. The Dumas Club by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (5 stars)
25. Atonement by Ian McEwan (4 stars)
26. The Body Artist by Dan DeLillo (2 stars)
27. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (5 stars)
28. Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee (3 stars)
29. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon (3 stars)
30. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (3 stars)
31. Orlando by Virginia Woolf (2 stars)

Welcome here! The Group Reads are a good way to read some books you otherwise wouldn't have thought of!

The group reads are a GREAT way to read books you might not have picked up otherwise, at least they have been for me. I joined the group last year with about the same number of books completed as you have - although mine was a very different list than yours. Looking forward to seeing you in the Orlando group read next month!

Thanks! It's nice to hear that I'm not the only one that has a small list to start (although it looks like you've improved a ton since you joined!). I'm really excited to have some accountability through the group reads. And it's always nice to see when others are struggling with the same books that I am. :)

And thank you both for the welcome!

That is quite an unusual list I think - you have a few of the more unusual classics rather than the more popular. I see that most of the standard ones were also read at school - are you quite young?

Welcome to the group.

Welcome!

Thanks again for the welcomes, and yes I'm in my early 20s. That's funny that you could tell that. :) When I first discovered the list, I was somewhat intimidated so I started off with some of the shorter ones which is why The Kreutzer Sonata and The Diary of a Nobody are in there. Were those a couple of the unusual ones you were talking about?

Just finished Walden last night (actually, very early this morning. I was determined to finish before the start of this week) and I'd have to say it was quite a journey. There were moments I was very pleasantly surprised and other moments where, I must confess, I 'read' whole sections without really understanding what the heck he was talking about. But I just wanted to include some of my favorite passages.

"The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity."

"And not till we are completely lost, or turned round--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

"Goodness is the only investment that never fails."

"What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics....If (a man) is surrounded by mountainous circumstances...they suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side."

The essay definitely made me think and challenged some of my belief systems. It's also very cool to experience the beginning of the environmental movement. I'm glad I read it, but because I zoned out a few times and found him somewhat longwinded about the strangest things, I give it 3 out of 5 stars.

Orlando: Well, I just finished and can say that the emotion I'm feeling right now is confusion. And yes, confusion is an emotion. It's a mixture of discomfort, fear, and anxiety... As I was reading, I felt like I was always just at the tip of some great epiphany, but it never came to me. The book is about Orlando, who, at the beginning, is a young boy living in the 16th century and by the end is a modern woman (at the time Woolf wrote the book in 1928). Time is depicted as the villain, in that every time a clock strikes, Orlando suffers some sort of heartbreak, whether it's his love not meeting him and supposedly running off with another man, or else her (Orlando) realizing that she is in the present moment, which is apparently a terrifying realization. The only thing that "defeats" time is when Orlando is engulfed in nature or art. He/She writes a poem/prose throughout the book called The Oak Tree, which seems like a symbol for his/her life as it survives time and all of her hardships, just as she does. There was a lot of the book I didn't really understand. However, I did really like Woolf's writing style (I had never read one of her books before this). She is sarcastic, blunt, and to the point (sometimes), which I like. Obviously, though, there's a lot of obscurity in the book that I just didn't get. I don't know if any of this rambling makes sense because, as I said, I feel very confused. I give the book 2 out of 5 stars.