Walden

I'm listening to the audiobook of Walden and see it is on the 1001 books list. Yay! another one to mark r on Arukiyomi's wonderful spread sheet.

I don't have the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die book and maybe my question is answered there.

If this list is fiction--why is Walden included? Are there other similar books of essays/memoir/philosophy that are also included? Any other book that wouldn't qualify as fiction?

I never thought the 1001 was only fiction. There are other non-fiction works. Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings comes to mind off the top of my head; Rousseau's Confessions is basically a memoir; I'm certain there's tons more.

Oh, the list is bizarre. In my opinion, trying to apply logic to it just ends in frustration. It seems to be almost all fiction, but not quite. Why the non-fiction pieces that are included are there, and not others, I don't know. Just off the top of my head, for example, I see many novels by both Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, but none of their brilliant essays. And why the memoir Wild Swans, but not others? I can't see the logic, so I look at it as a fiction list with a few other things slipped in.

But these lists are great for generating conversation!

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee is, im pretty sure, a memoir.

Yeah, a lot of people think the list is all fiction, but there are definitely works on the list that cannot be classified as straight fiction.
Besides those already mentioned, these immediately come to mind:
In Cold Blood
Aesop's fables
Adjunct: An Undigest
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano
The Enormous Room

I am sure there are others. Not to mention, the list includes short stories, children's literature, and (I believe) some plays.

Watchmen is a graphic novel, being the only one on the list. So there are a few things that are oddly placed within the list.

Thanks for all the replies. The fact that there are non-fiction on the list makes it even more interesting as to what isn't included on the list.

I'll interested to see what other nonfiction comes to people's mind. I'm annotaing my list with people's recommendations and catagorizations.

trinah--that is very interesting about Watchmen. It's one of my daughter-in-college's favorite genres. I'll have to check it out.

Watchmen is one of *the* best graphic novels. Not that I have read a lot of graphic novels, but I read Watchmen and it is amazing. So it is a good representative of the graphic novel format and I am glad it was in there.

The list sometimes serves as a "best of the best" list and sometimes a sampler of different literary ideas. I don't think anyone would call the short stories of Poe novels, but several are in there. Poe never wrote a novel, but not having his work in there would have been an oversight.

I think it is the same thing for Walden...there are some exceptions if the work is of literary, social and/or cultural significance.

-- M1001

Are there any listed that are actually poetry?

I have heard somewhere that there is one, but I have no idea what it is or if this is right. If anyone knows would they be able to post a message here.

Thanks!

I have the book here and I don't think there's poetry in.
What I find frustrating is that there are hardly collections of short stories listed, and only a handful of plays (you can't leave out William Shakespeare and expect to be taken seriously). This means that Anton Chekhov is not in, surely a giant in literature. On the other hand, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (which I think runs to about 5 pages or so of text) and some classic Poe stories are in. And where the hell are the Iliad and the Odyssey? How many books that did make it in are not inspired by those two books?

Anyway, I see it as a chance to find books that I never knew about, so I won't complain too much.

#10 - I think the editor was considering works that were not just impressive/great/revolutionary/unique/groundbreaking or what have you. He was also trying to include books that actually affected the novel form in general.
Perhaps it was easier to argue that the Iliad and the Odyssey influenced novel writing more than Shakespeare's plays. I could be wrong though, I'm just speculating.

whoa my message is invisible. I'll try again.

Ovid's Metamorphosis is verse.