It’s Not Happening

So some effete snob decides to devise and share a list of 1001 books we must all read before dying, which suggests that s/he thinks most Americans will live for more than 1,000 years. Still, this is the sort of exercise that pleases my inner librarian, so in the interests of full disclosure, I’ll post those I have read:

• Pastoralia – George Saunders
• Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
• Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
• Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
• The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
• Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• Perfume – Patrick Süskind
• White Noise – Don DeLillo
• Queer – William Burroughs
• Neuromancer – William Gibson
• Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
• Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
• High Rise – J.G. Ballard
• Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• Crash – J.G. Ballard
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
• The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
• The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
• Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
• The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
• The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
• Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
• Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
• A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
• The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
• Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges
• Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
• Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
• Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
• Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
• On the Road – Jack Kerouac
• The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
• Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• Junkie – William Burroughs
• Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
• Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
• The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
• The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
• The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
• I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
• Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
• The Plague – Albert Camus
• Animal Farm – George Orwell
• Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
• Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
• For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
• The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
• Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
• Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
• The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
• At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
• Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
• Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
• Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
• Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
• The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
• Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
• The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
• The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
• The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
• Dracula – Bram Stoker
• The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
• The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
• Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
• Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
• Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
• Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
• Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Silas Marner – George Eliot
• A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
• The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
• The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
• The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
• A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
• The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
• Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• Candide – Voltaire
• Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
• Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

So…more than I would have thought (nearly 100), but almost all easily categorized as Forced to Read in School, I Was One of Those Guys in College, or Given to Me by a Girlfriend. If this list seems shockingly illiterate or weird, that’s only because I am – the list itself is mostly what you’d expect, though I was surprised that Ballard had several books on while, say, Twain had only one. But it’s all subjective, who cares, etc., etc.