I’d better get cracking…

So someone sent me this list of 1001 Book to Read Before You Die, and since one of my parents’ Xmas presents to SB and me was the book version of the 1001 movie list and I found the whole experiment pretty fun, I thought I should check it out.

My “score” is not in three digits.

This pretty much baffled me, since I was a Literature major and all, but then I thought more about the makeup of the list. (Note: The List is arranged in loose backwards chronology.) To its credit, it isn’t particularly pretentious (no list that includes The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #301, could be considered so) and is also pretty fair in terms of genre. As expected, most of the books I had read were things I’d read for school, and I cleaned up in pre 1700s, 1700s, and 1800s, where I’ve done a lot of research, and not so much in the more recent centuries.

Also, what counts as a “book” is played fast and loose. For instance, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is #916. According to one edition on Amazon, it’s 36 pages, and I’m pretty sure that includes a foreword and notes. It’s not a book. It’s a story. Note the quotation marks.

However, Lord of the Rings (#494) is treated as a single title. Really? The Count of Monte Cristo (#906), Clarissa (#977), The Brothers Karamazov (#837), and (Amy’s favorite) War and Peace (#857) I can understand. They are each doorstops, but they are also each one book, and were published as such. Not LOTR. (Doesn’t matter what the author himself thought.)

So if you’re trying to up your score and looking to blow through a few selections quickly, here are some hints on where to turn:

#801. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (~25 pages)
#909. “The Purloined Letter,” by Edgar Allen Poe (~28 pages)
#911. “The Pit and the Pendulum”, by Edgar Allen Poe (~22 pages)
#982. “A Modest Proposal,” by Jonathan Swift (~15 pages)

With all the Poe stories on there, you’d think they could just say, “read the complete works of Poe” and call it one book. Then, perhaps, they’d have room to fit some Homer on the list. And if you want to go for some longer, novella style choices, there are plenty, from A Christmas Carol (#913) to The Turn of the Screw (#789) to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (#390). And lots of kidlit: both of Alice’s adventures (#854 and #868), Huck Finn (#825), and The Water-Babies (#872).

Book I was most pleasantly surprised to find on the list: Solaris (#448) though I did do a little happy dance when I saw Douglas Adams on there. And then the third time I saw him on there, I was like, WTF? because, well, see below.

Book whose absence most disappointed me: Probably The Odyssey. (And don’t give me any guff about it being an “epic poem, not a book.” If “A Modest Proposal” can count, so can The Odyssey.) Neither did they have Beowulf. Actually, no poetry (or plays) at all. Maybe there’s an explanation for that in the actual book? And, if so, then my vote for “shoulda been” is The Tale of Genji.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I figure there must have been a no poetry rule, since Chaucer, Milton, and Dante weren’t present either. And all the Poe was prose. Hmmm…

So, what do you think of the list? What would you have put on there? What would you have taken off? What were you happy to see made the cut? (I can already hear the cheers for Rebecca (#603)!)