Of the so-called 1001 Books to read before you die, I’ve read 125:

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Jazz – Toni Morrison
A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham
Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The World According to Garp – John Irving
Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Sula – Toni Morrison
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
A Void/Avoid – Georges Perec
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
V. – Thomas Pynchon
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies – William GoldingJunkie – William Burroughs
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Arcanum 17 – André Breton
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
Nadja – André Breton
To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Amerika – Franz Kafka
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
Impressions of Africa – Raymond Roussel
Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
The Immoralist – André Gide
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
Middlemarch – George Eliot
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Maldoror – Comte de Lautréaumont
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
Candide – Voltaire
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais
Metamorphoses – Ovid

I guess I’m a little over a tenth ready to die. I’ve actually read a few more, but for some, it’s been so long that I just can’t figure out what book I’ve read. For ex, I know I read a Thomas Hardy book in high school — but they all sound pretty much exactly the same, and I don’t remember enough of the plot to remember which book it was.

(via Kottke)

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