1001 Books You Must read

This is the book I picked up in Borders on Saturday. (The one with a dollop of something sticky on the back cover. But never mind that.)

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die edited by Peter Boxall is a book all bibliophiles and bookaholics will adore. And less experienced readers who'd appreciate a guide to what's well worth spending their precious reading time on, will find it here.

There are excellent short reviews of each of the books, all of which tell stories, most of them novels. (The novel as we know it originated in the early C18th, but Boxall includes the best of what went before. )The list starts with Aessop's Fables and ends with books which made it to last year's Booker shortlist.

Of course "best" must always be subjective, but I was so delighted to find most of the fiction I would have included if I'd been compiling such a list, I can forgive the omissions. (Hey, this is an impossible task Boxall has set himself anyway!)

And it isn't a stuffy list only embracing boring "classics" either, - there's plenty of lighter fare (though no less deserving of a place) and the best genre fiction is also included. Steven King, Douglas Adams, John Le Carre, Anne Rice and Patricia Highsmith all make it in.

Some novels I greeted like old friends:

Underworld by Don de Lillo
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Contact by Carl Sagan
Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
On a Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
Waterland by Graham Swift
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
The Reader by Bernhard Sclink
The Poisonwood Bible by Barabar Kingsolver
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

... and many, many more!

For those too mean or too broke to buy the book, you can access Boxall's complete list here.

But then you'd be missing out out the wonderful illustrations - author photos, book covers, movie posters. The cover illustration brings back happy memories of reading yet another favourite novel: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

The Guardian reviews the book here.

Let's All Play Humiliation

Goodness. Peter Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before you Die is suddenly discovered by The New York Times. I can feel a little superior here in that it has been sitting on the shelf above my writing desk for more than 2 years.

I don't think that the love of :

...literary lists and the fights they provoke

is a peculiarly British affliction, as William Grimes implies. His own newspaper came up with a list of the best American novels not so long ago, and annually lists the "100 most notable" and then the "ten best" books; Americans Peder Zane and Francine are among those to have written books listing books.

But good for Grimes, he steps up to the plate and engages in a good argue with Boxall about what should have been included in place of what is ... which is really the point of a book like this in the first place.

But do such lists cause feelings of :

... guilt and inadequacy

as Grimes implies? Book lovers do rather play a game of oneupmanship with books, feeling smugly superior when we have read something the other person we're in conversation with hasn't, feeling trumped when the tables are turned on us.

I had forgotten this :

In his novel “Changing Places,” David Lodge — not on the list — introduces a game called Humiliation. Players earn points by admitting to a famous work that they have not read. The greater the work, the higher the point score. An obnoxious American academic, competing with a group of colleagues, finally gets the hang of the game and plays his trump card: “Hamlet.” He wins the game but is then denied tenure.

Let's play a round of Humiliation here. What are your gravest literary omissions?

My list would be very very long indeed, but just to start the ball rolling I will go first - with Kafka's The Trial. I do want to read it ... just never have. Haven't even got a copy of it yet. But I laugh at myself nodding knowingly whenever anyone brings it up in conversation.

Please reserve your snorts of derision until you have made your own confession in the comments.

Your Lifetime Reading Plan

You may remember me posting some time back about an excellent guide to some of the best fiction ever written - 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die by Peter Boxall.

A new edition of the book was published in 2008 and of course had to include some new titles. Now one blog has not only downloadable lists of the books, but the spreadsheet also helps you record what you've read and is still sitting on your shelves tbr - and then calculates how many of these great books you need to read per year to get through the whole lot!

(Thanks very much to CW for passing me this link.)