karchesky :: blog :: miscellaneous

1001 books you must read before you die is a book that compiles a list of, you guessed it, 1001 fiction books that a number of critics considered really good. Anyways, I went over the list and I found out a couple of semi-depressing facts. The first is that, despite having been an avid reader all my life, I’ve only read 30-40 of these books. So that means I’m missing out on some of the world’s finest writings. Though I generally enjoy whatever it is I’m reading, so it’s really not so bad. Even so, there are a number of books there that I’d really like to read, whenever I get time enough to do it.

The other thing is that there’s a number of books that I can’t be sure if I’ve read or not. My parents had this quite large library of classics and I’d go over it time and again, trying to find something that interested me. I read a lof of books from there but now I just can’t remember which ones. There’s also a number of books which I read when I was way too young, and didn’t understand until much later. For instance, I read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was frigging seven. Lately I’ve been itching to read it again, which should be a great experience, but certainly won’t help me increase the percentage of books I’ve read in that list. Similarly, I read Animal Farm around that age - but that only because someone had a strange sense of humor at the children’s library I visited (or, perhaps, they seriously thought from the name that it was a book for kids).

Finally, and this is also about my memory and also about how young I was when I read some of these… there are books on the list that I know I’ve read but I couldn’t tell you what they were about if my life depended on it. The fall of the house of Usher? Oliver Twist? I know he was an orphan, and that’s it. And I know there was a ghostly dog that haunted the Baskervilles or something like that. Oh well.

Anyways, here are the books I read from that list:

1. Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
2. Neuromancer – William Gibson
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
5. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
6. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
7. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9. Animal Farm – George Orwell
10. Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
11. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
12. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
13. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
14. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
15. Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
16. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
17. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
18. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
19. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
20. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
21. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
22. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
23. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
24. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
25. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
26. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
27. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
28. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
29. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
30. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
31. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

Then there are these books, which I’m not sure if I ever read them. In some cases (Jorge Luis Borges, Ian Fleming, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) it’s because I read a whole lot of their stuff, a long time ago, and the titles have blended in my memory.

1. Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
2. Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
5. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
6. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
7. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper

Finally, there are these books which I’ve only read in part. Some of them, I intend to finish some day:

1. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
3. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
4. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
5. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous