Here is a critic's list of "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die": http://www.librarything.com/bookaward/1001+Books+You+Must+Read+Before+You+Die or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1001_Books_You_Must_Read_Before_You_Die
And of those 1001, I have read 144 of them, as follows:
Quote:
The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings by Marquis de Sade
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Aesop's Fables by Aesop
Against the Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Amerika by Franz Kafka
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis
At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft
The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard
The Bell by Iris Murdoch
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
The Brothers Karamazov by Fjodor Michajlovič Dostoevský
Burmese Days by George Orwell
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Castle by Franz Kafka
The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story by Horace Walpole
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Coming Up for Air by George Orwell
The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo
Crash by J. G. Ballard
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin
Demons by Fjodor Michajlovič Dostoevský
Die Leiden des jungen Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Down There by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Emma by Jane Austen
The Enchanted Wanderer: Selected Tales by Nikolai Leskov
The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecký
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
Fanny Hill by John Cleland
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
The First Circle by Alexander Solzjenitsyn
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again by J. R. R. Tolkien
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
The Idiot by Fjodor Michajlovič Dostoevský
The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
The Monk by M. G. Lewis
Mother by Maxim Gorki
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
News from Nowhere by William Morris
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
The Nose by Nikolai Gogol
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
Notes from Underground by Fjodor Michajlovič Dostoevský
Oblomov by Ivan A. Goncharov
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
The Plague by Albert Camus
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe
Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress by Daniel Defoe
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Solaris by Stanisław Lem
Spring Torrents by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
A Tale of a Tub and Other Works by Jonathan Swift
Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson
Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Tirant Lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Tree of Man by Patrick White
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Ulysses by James Joyce
Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Hough by Sheridan Le Fanu
Vathek by William Beckford
The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel by Flannery O'Connor
Virgin Soil by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
Voss by Patrick White
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
War with the Newts by Karel Čapek
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I may have missed a few from skimming through the list too quickly, and I'm sure I've forgotten some books completely, but this is about right. As you can see I've pretty much stuck to reading the canonical classics before I die, there will be plenty of time in Hell to read Maya Angelou and Virginia Woolf.
PS. I was surprised that critics had nominated so much modern junk , but I suppose everything is disposable these days.
Afterthought
Perhaps the reason why critics prefer modern novels is that it gives them a reason to exist by championing some work or other that they can get to early, and claim expertise over any other academic or critic. Nobody is going to stand out much by championing Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, anybody can do that. I'm reminded of William Golding's novel "The Paper Men", about a novelist who is harassed by literary academics who want to analyse his books before he's even written them, going so far as to scour through his rubbish bins looking for clues.
Another Afterthought
Kurt Vonnegut has four books in the 1001 list, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse 5. But it does not include what I think are his best two books, The Sirens of Titan, and Mother Night, both of which he wrote early in his career. Vonnegut is a bit like a rock band that did his best albums very early, hit the big time with lesser albums, then slowly dissipated into elderly irrelevance doing what were essentially parodies of his early stuff.
Preliminary. Based on my
Preliminary. Based on my librarything list + what I've seen in Tiggers list which wasn't in my librarything list because its part of a collected book or because I've read it but dont own it. I'll add more of such works when I go through the list.
By way of comparison
When you look at any critical list of 'greatest films ever made', they are invariably much more conservative in their choices than what we find here, with them always rolling out the grand old canonical favourites like Battleship Potemkin, Citizen Kane, Passion of St. Joan of Arc, Sunset Boulevard and so on. The plus side is that faddish or ideological junk is deservedly given the boot, so there was never much risk of Peter Greenaway's or Mike Leigh's nonsense ever polluting such lists. But then there's the problem of getting worthy new films to be properly recognised, they really have to prove themselves with both critics and audiences over a few decades to get there.
The imdb Top 250 list is fairly interesting with regards the division between popular and critical opinion, while nerd fanboy audiences may vote for rubbish like Sin City and Lord of the Rings, over time popular and critical opinion converges. So after twenty or thirty years there is pretty solid agreement as to what the best films are.
hrm.
the similar 1001 Movies list put out by the same group has Indiana Jones on the cover.
If they took the same
If they took the same approach as they did to the book list, then I'm sure Peter Greenaway, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, and Lars von Trier's rubbish will be heavily represented.
Where is Candide?
Usually if someone has only read one work from the French Enlightenment it is the relatively digestible Candide by Voltaire. Vastly overrated though it might be, there is at least a literary and historical justification for reading it, which is more than I can say for any of the third world names that I've never heard of before that I see populating this list.
Another observation
I notice that Norman Mailer is nowhere to be found on this list. Like so many of the big name 20th Century American writers he was very much of his era, and now that he has died, and soon his generation with him, what once seemed like a giant will soon seem like a dwarf. I expect by the time of the next edition of the 1001 list Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Hunter S Thompson, Truman Capote, Richard Brautigan, Gore Vidal, etc. will be slipping further down and off. Who will replace them? Black and other ethnic writers, who once having secured a place, will never relinquish it, even if nobody is actively reading their works. Mailer's black contemporaries such James Baldwin and Richard Wright will remain in the list forever, not for any literary purpose but to ensure 'representation'.
Often it is not what you did, but who is backing you.