1001 books you must read before you die

Shelfari has a list of the 1001 books you must read before you die .... the irony being there are 1087 books on the group's shelf? It's set out in centuries and looks to be far more representative than the lists we've posted to date - but probably still very anglo-centric.

I've read 24 books on this list:

• Wild Swans


• Perfume


• The Godfather


• Chocky - saw the BBC series and then had to read the book which started it all


• To Kill a Mockingbird - intending to re-read this and pick up all the things I missed as a 14 year old


• A Town Like Alice - loved the book and the 80's mini series with Helen Morse (ironically the daughter of my Mum's GP as a kid) and Bryan Brown


• The Lord of the Rings


• Day of the Triffids - I had a John Wyndham thing happening as a teenager - I also read The Chrysalid and tried to get through the Kracken but I think my love for his writing had waned by then ... to be overtaken by Virginia Andrews if I remember correctly :(


• Nineteen Eighty-Four


• Animal Farm


• Grapes of Wrath


• The Hobbit


• Brave New World


• All Quiet on the Western Front


• Of Human Bondage - after reading a collection of his short stories a few years earlier and as a rebellion against some 'well meaning older friends' who told me the it was too depressing for me to read at that point in my life!


• Dracula


• Frankenstein


• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn


• Treasure Island


• Alices Adventures in Wonderland


• The Fall of the House of Usher - I'm pretty sure??


• The Picture of Dorian Grey


• Little Women - I got the six book "Little..." set for Christmas one year and then lost 'Little Women' buggering up the set


• Robinson Crusoe

I also started - but didn't finish

• Interview with a Vampire - never got into it, but loved the movie


• Name of the Rose - as above


• Arcadia - it was Dave's book and had to be returned to the library before I got through it- just never got around to reborrowing for whatever reason (oh yeah I had a baby not long after that!)

As for Dave - well of course has read at least 10% of the books on the list - 106 to be exact (so we wont be listing them here) plus three he started and couldn't finish (including Finnegan's Wake) and nine others that he's not sure of!

As Tricksy Pixie commented below - these lists do always make you feel inadequate. I've read more than 24 books in my life ... but these lists dont feature the books that happen to have graced my night stand ... my penchant for Patricia Cornwall, my deep love for Raymond E Feist, my recent interest and enjoyment of Kate Forsyth's series, my well read obsession with Dean Koontz in my 20's ... and of course I could go on - but I wont.

So to sum up - MY all time five favourite books are:

1. Magician - Raymond E Feist (I try and read this every year if possible)
2. Charlottes Web - EB White (again I read it every year when I was a kid - and should revisit it)
3. Women Who Run With Wolves - Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes
4. Lightning - Dean Koontz
5. Sahara - Clive Cussler

Not classics (other than Charlotte's Web maybe?)- but cracking good yarns. Where to now Paul - ideas for discussions for this week that don't revolve lists of books nor diabolical plans to take over the world of publishing?

What books have you read on the 1001? What are you five favourite books?

Love Between the Shelves

My dear friend Catherine sent me the article It's not you, it's your books from The New York Times website. Author Rachel Donadio writes:

"Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility."

This week between my blog and Paul's blog there has been much discussion about books - the good, the popular, the intelligent, the bad, the most read and the least read - oh and then there was shelfari thrown into the mix just to make it really interesting. I would seem a rather unlikely way to put the spark back in a relationship - but well - Dave and I both love books, we both love each other - it would make sense ... well wouldn't it?

We started having conversations again - meaningful conversations about books. With all the other more interesting things to discuss and debate when we were initially falling in love, books probably didn't get a see in. Dave started shelving his reads on Shelfari, I began compiling my 'must read - no seriously this time' list. He started telling me about Anna Karenin (which he is currently reading) and I began to share short story ideas. Everyone started to smile and joke again ... and Dylan's rather irratic behaviour became more bareable.

It's not that we had stopped talking to each other prior to this week - it's simply that when you have a child, when you lead busy lives, you can stop having meaningful discussion because its almost impossible to have one uninterupted or you're tired.

I remember that when I met Dave I was impressed that he was a voracious reader (my ex partner never read and my love of reading was a constant source of tension until basically I gave up reading all together) Dave read lots of 'interesting' books - the sort of titles that you'd find on a university literature course reading list. If studying a Masters in Enviromental Geochemistry didn't give me an indication as to his curiosity and intellect - his reading did.

He was reading Satre at the time we met. I was reading a book about the lives of the Bronte sisters and a conspiracy theory surrounding the deaths of the Bronte children and Charlottes marriage to AB Nicholls (I for the life of me cannot remember or find the title now.) I had been struggling with reading - finding that after the hours of reading text books and scientific papers - reading for pleasure put me to sleep (that's the degree in which I exhausted myself with my studies) And until recently - I haven't been an avid reader like I used to be.

Considering past relationships - I don't really think that literature really played that big a deal in deciding compatibility, with perhaps one noticeable exception. I dated a pilot before I met Dave (aptly named 'The Princess by my bestfriends!) When we met he raved about The Way of the Peaceful Warrior and encouraged me wholeheartedly to read it. I was working as a waitress at the time and returning back to Albury after a trip away with him, I got a reasonable sized tip. I took the money down to the local bookstore and bought The Way of the Peaceful Warrior and devoured it. At the end I was left a little confused - because I just didn't get it - all the hype from The Princess I had expected something earth shattering, and it wasn't. Obviously I'd missed the point. And that was probably it. We didn't break up because I didn't like The Way of the Peaceful Warrior or find it life changing - we broke up because hype doesn't last (the literary and romantic type!)

With Dave, the books came later ... because the first thing that struck me was not what was (or wasn't) on his beside table ... but what was in his wardrobe (isn't that where all the best skeletons hang out?) The door was slightly open and I couldn't help but glance in as I went to the loo. There were a pair of Tigger slippers in there. That probably said far more, at the time, about him than the Satre on his bedside table - had I bothered to look.

In retrospect - I was more likely to have been left by the wayside by Dave for my 'bogan taste in music' - rather than an incompatibility in literature. We both read and enjoyed it, that seemed enough. Thankfully most things in life are malleable. Both our tastes in music have become more accomodating and gratefully, due to Dave's love of classical literature my own reading horizons are expanding.

Which begs the question - have you ever broken off a relationship over literary incompatibility or is it, as the New York Times article suggests, just symbolic of a larger problem or schism? Or does it really matter at all? To read or not to read - that is the question ....

Whats on your Shelf

Continuing on with the theme of books ... I've taken photos of the two shelves of books that I walk past everyday (as they're on eye height on the way to the kitchen).

Do you have a favourite shelf ... or a secret pile of books (because there is one of those on our bedroom floor belonging to Dave!) that you would care to share with us?

Bonus points for the first correct guess on this question as to the owner of 'EveryMan' (the one with the bright purple skin) - Dave or my good self?

Clicking on the actual photos will blow them up to the size of your whole screen - in case your particularly curious!

Books, books, books: part two

Below is Waterstone Book Stores choice of the greatest novel from each year from 1900-1998. And it’s interesting to compare lists – this list, to the list of unread books on Paul’s blog and that of the Waterstone’s 100 most popular books. (I should also add that this ‘toast’ seems to be a very Anglo-centric list with only a few novels that don’t fit this mold).

Sadly, although I have read many novels by authors on this list (such as Huxley, Steinbeck and Maugham) and have others in our bookshelf (Wind in the Willows, Sons and Lovers, and The Remains of the Day to name a few), I have only actually read TWO on this list – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Nineteen Eighty-Four. I do far better on Paul’s list of books that sit on a shelf to make you look smart and interesting.

And that I find it a weird quirk of human behaviour. Why buy a book that you never intend to read? Yes, there are probably at least fifty to a hundred books in our bookshelves that have not been read yet, but they are there with the intention of being read some day. I would never buy a book to just put it there … or to impress someone.

What would happen is someone asked if I had read [insert novel name]? I’d go red and my nose would itch as I tried to concoct some type of half truth (I’m the world’s worst liar – thus the blush and give away ‘your nose will grow if you lie nose thing’ I do when I’m not being entirely honest). What do people who have these books on their shelves for the specific intention of creating a false persona say when others ask after their collection of books?

I’m rather proud of our collection of books (one day we aspire to have an actual library in our home – complete with the groovy sliding ladder that moves you from case to case). The majority of the ‘good ones’ belong to my partner who reads only highbrow literature (I’m not sure what he actually calls it though). I’ve always been more interested in a cracking yarn (Clive Cussler and Wilbur Smith etc) than something that expands the horizons of my mind. In my defence I have read in my time some ‘literature’ of my own accord (as in not because it had to be read for school) ‘Of Human Bondage’ the most poignant because of the juxtaposition of the story and my life as an employee on a cruiseboat at the time of reading. There may be changes afood though.

My partner raised an eyebrow when I asked over the weekend if we had Crime and Punishment. And that’s just the beginning. From the list below there is any number of books that I want to read one day … it’s just a matter of time. And that’s the thing about committing to writing … committing to reading.

I set myself the goal of reading a book a month this year. I wanted to set a number that committed me in a way that was achievable – after all, there is still writing to do and a family to take care of.

In January I managed to read the 600+ pages of Wild Swans which told me that I have it in me. It meant turning the computer off at night in January, rather than being sucked down into mindless internet surfing. I took my book with me wherever I went incase there was a chance to sneak in a page or two while I was waiting somewhere. I even chose to just go out for coffee and a read as one of my Artist Dates. And I managed to get through all 600+ which was a great way to open the year.

This month I have managed to read two books, so I’ve decided to raise the bar a little – two books a month? Why not! And having said that, my battery is about to run out of oomph, so it’s off to continue with Gerald Seymour’s The Unknown Solider, my Dad’s addition to my reading list for this year and perhaps the last cracking good yarn for a while.

How many on this list have you read? How many do you intend to read ‘one day’? What ones are noticeably absent (the first to spring to mind is To Kill a Mockingbird)?

Feel free to copy and post the list to your own blog but please link back here – even if it’s just to honour the time it took to type this list up from the photocopied list gifted to me by Annie gave me. As to how the list came about - I don't know. I can't find a reference to it on the web.

TOAST OF THE CENTURY - Waterstone Bookstores
1900
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – Frank L Baum

1901
Kim – Rudyard Kipling

1902
The Hounds of Baskerville – Conan Doyle

1903
The Riddle of Sands – Erskine Childers

1904
The Golden Bowl – Henry James

1905
Kipps – HG Wells

1906
The Railway Children – Edith Nesbit

1907
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad

1908
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahme

1909
Tono-Bungay – HG Wells

1910
Howards End – EM Forster

1911
In a German Prison – Katherine Mansfield

1912
‘Twist Land and Sea – Joseph Conrad

1913
Sons and Lovers – DH Lawrence

1914
The Ragged Trousered Philantropist – Robert Tressel

1915
The Good Solider – Ford Madow Ford

1916
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

1917
Uneasy Money – PG Wodehouse

1918
Return of the Solider – Rebecca West

1919
The Moon and Sixpence – Somerset Maugham

1920
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

1921
Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley

1922
Ulysses – James Joyce

1923
Riceyman Steps – Arnold Bennett

1924
A Passage to India – EM Forster

1925
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

1926
Winne-The-Pooh – AA Milne

1927
The Lighthouse -Virginia Woolf

1928
Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh

1929
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemminway

1930
Strong Poison – Dorothy L Sayers

1931
The Waves – Virginia Woolf

1932
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

1933
Love on the Dole – Walter Greenwood

1934
Murder on the Orient Express – Agatha Christie

1935
Mr Norris Changes Trains – Christopher Isherwood

1936
Absalom!Absalom! – William Faulkner

1937
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

1938
Brighton Rock – Graham Green

1939
At Swim-two-Birds – Flann O’Brien

1940
Farwell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler

1941
Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton

1942
The Robber Bridegroom – Eudora Welty

1943
The Last Summer – Kate O’Brien

1944
Fair Stood the Wind for France – H E Bates

1945
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

1946
The Member of the Wedding – Carson McCullers

1947
Whisky Galore – Compton MacKenzie

1948
The Naked and the Dear – Norman Mailer

1949
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

1950
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

!951
The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

1952
The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

1953
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

1954
Lord of the Flies – William Golding

1955
Lolita – Vladimir Nabakov

1956
The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith

1957
On the Road – Jack Kerouac

1958
The Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe

1959
The Naked Lunch – William Burroughs

1960
Rabbit Run – John Updike

1961
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

1962
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

1963
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – Ian Fleming

1964
The Wapshot Chronicle – John Cleever

1965
An American Dream – Norman Mailer

1966
The Magus – John Fowles

1967
The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter

1968
A Fan’s Notes – Fredrick Exley

1969
Portnoy’s Complaint – Phillip Roth

1970
The Vivisector – Patrick White

1971
Something Happened – Joseph Heller

1972
Bird of Night – Susan Hill

1973
Fear of Flying – Erica Jong

1974
The War Between the Tates – Alison Lurie

1975
Changing Places – David Lodge

1976
SAville – David Storey

1977
Staying On - Paul Scott

1978
Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin

1979
Treasures of Time – Penelope Lively

1980
Earthy Powers – Anthony Burgess

1981
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

1982
Lanark – Alasdair Gray

1983
Waterland – Graham Swift

1984
Money – Martin Amis

1985
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

1986
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

1987
Bonfires of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe

1988
Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey

1989
The Remains Of The Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

1990
The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi

1991
The Famished Road – Ben Okri

1992
The Secret History – Donna Tartt

1993
The Shipping News – E Annie Proulx

1994
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields

1995
Behind the Scenes at The Museum – Kate Atkinson

1996
Everyman for Himself – Beryl Bainbridge

1997
Enduring Love – Ian McEwan

1998
Underworld – Don DeLillo

Books, books, books: part one

This is a list of 106 books that people have bought but have never got around to reading. Never one to mince his words Paul Anderson (where I got the list from - sorry Paul I'm having linking issues that I will try and resolve!) comments “Literary ornaments to make you look smart in other words.” Strangely enough, I’ve read more on this list than on the Toasts of the Century! And yes, I do believe that there would be a number of different books on here should the list have been compiled in Australia. Books that readily jump to mind would be ‘For The Term of his Natural Life’ and ‘My Brilliant Career’

To understand, the books that I have read are in bold, those that live in our home but I’ve never read (ie belong to Dave and he’s read them) are in italics. I have underlined those books that I would like to read and currently don't own.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Anna Karenina (Dave is actually reading this at the moment)
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi : a novel
• The Name of the Rose (I did begin this last year after years of wanting to. The three page description of the chapel door near the start tripped my boredom/literary wanking tolerance and I put it back on the shelf. He knew too much and didn’t know what to leave out. Sad to say we got the movie out instead during the Christmas Holidays!)
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses (but we have other James Joyce lying about)
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• The Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov (the first book – Dave’s never been able to find Part Two)
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveler’s Wife (on Paul’s recommendations this sounds very interesting)
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations (because I’ve seen just about every movie/mini series/tv adaptation and I should at least read one Dickens in my life!)
• American Gods
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha (we saw the movie a few years ago and I have always meant to read it and decide whether the movie was a good or bad adaptation)
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (is this what the musical Wicked is based on? Bonus points for someone who can answer me that!)
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian : a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New World (I read this for school – but I recently went back and started to read it again – sad to say that I haven’t finished it though, which is pathetic given that its not a long book. I also have Brave New World Revisited (1959) – which is Huxley’s review of history against his 1932 classic. His references to ‘herd poisoning’ in regards to Hitler and the use of propaganda have real bearings on our life today. A must read once you’ve tackled Brave New World)
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein (picked up for $2 on a throw out table at the Fossey’s Variety Store in Forbes NSW and read in various wheat fields on the steps of a combine harvester in 1996. I love how the story came about – quoted from the preface of my book “The idea for Frankenstein came from Mary Shelley in a half-walking nightmare in the summer of 1816. She had been staying with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron on the shores of Lake Geneva when at Byron’s suggestion they were all challenged to make up a ghost story. Percy Bysshe Shelley is a distant relative of Dave and is noted as being a ‘black sheep of the family’.
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula (read in 1993 in a very old share house in Ballarat, in rooms that were pitch black and ice cold at night. This was not long after the movie with Gary Oldman came out – though I did read the book first! I exploded a can of condensed milk, in the process of making caramel, while reading this. Thus I’ll never forget reading it and scraping the caramel off the micro Venetian blinds in the kitchen. My Dad brought the ladder over and scrapped it off the ceiling.)
• A Clockwork Orange (seen the movie)
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath (I read this while I was pregnant with Dylan and the final scene of the book haunted me in those early weeks of breastfeeding. It was also one of the seminal exposures of breastfeeding in strange circumstances that made a huge impact on me. I’ve just finished reading East of Eden and would love to re-read Grapes again.)
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• 1984 (I read my Dad’s old Penguin copy some stage in my early 20’s. I’d seen the movie when I was in my late teens and it was a book that I always intended to read. Big Brother will always been all about Orwell for me!)
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (bought on that same throw out table and read before Frankenstein. I had seen the movie in my teens and the book did not disappoint. It’s another of those books that has always stayed with me.)
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (seen the movie)
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir (I think my mother has this book now. It was a birthday present for my 25th birthday and I read it almost in one sitting. I will never forget the pig’s cheeks for Christmas lunch, nor the sugar water in the baby’s bottles. I’ve never laughed and cried so much, nor been so trusting in the human spirit to always rise up.)
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything (I’ve read Tales from a Small Island and loved it – plus love the back of Down Under because – yes – I’ve been to that service station in the town of Hay … and I know just what the dudes who work there were like!)
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon (this was my first exposure to paganism and the goddess religions and it stuck with me – you could say it planted the seeds that lay dormant for quite a few years, until motherhood allowed them to shoot. I’ve gone on to read a number of her books – and do intend to go back and read Mists again some time soon.)
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita I cant help but want to know what the book is like – knowing all the controversy that surrounded the movie that came out in the late 90’s. I found the movie both compelling and confronting – and wondering where the book might push me)
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit (read when I was a teenager and I don’t remember ANY of it! I have since read The Lord of the Rings)
• In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island (an abridged young adults version – at a time when I was reading some HG Wells as well – all bought from the little supermarket in our dodgey little country town!)
• David Copperfield (seen the movie – not too keen to read the book)
• The Three Musketeers

And you?