Lynsey's 1001 Progress

Discussions1001 Books to read before you die

Rejoignez LibraryThing pour poster.

Lynsey's 1001 Progress

1Lynsey2
Modifié : Sep 21, 2016, 4:00 pm

I began tackling the 1001 list @ 4 years ago. Having been an English major in college I had a good 60-70 books already read when I started. I took most of the past year off from reading anything off the list having experienced an extreme case of list burn out! Here I find myself once again working on the list but hopefully this time a little more selective about what I read. I don't plan to complete the list but I know there are some really great reads that I would still like to get to. And with that said, I will slowly start adding my list of what i've read so far. It could take me a day or two. :)

2Lynsey2
Modifié : Sep 21, 2016, 3:17 pm

Pre-1800's

1. Aesop's Fables
2. Chaereas and Callirhoe
3. Aethiopica
4. The Thousand and One Nights* - 400 pages of Volume one
5. The Tale of Genji
6. Don Quixote
7. The Pilgrim's Progress
8. Oroonoko
9. Robinson Crusoe
10. Gulliver's Travels
11. A Modest Proposal
12. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
13. Candide
14. The Castle of Otranto
15. The Man of Feeling
16. The Sorrows of Young Werther
17. Reveries of a Solitary Walker
18. Vathek

3Lynsey2
Modifié : Sep 21, 2016, 3:22 pm

1800's

19. Sense and Sensibility
20. Pride and Prejudice
21. Emma
22. Rob Roy
23. Ivanhoe
24. The Last of the Mohicans
25. Eugene Onegin
26. The Nose
27. The Fall of the House of Usher
28. Oliver Twist
29. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
30. The Pit and the Pendulum
31. A Christmas Carol
32. The Purloined Letter
33. Martin Chuzzlewit
34. The Devil's Pool
35. Wuthering Heights
36. Jane Eyre
37. Vanity Fair
38. Villette
39. The Scarlet Letter
40. David Copperfield
41. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
42. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly
43. Bleak House
44. Walden
45. A Tale of Two Cities
46. The Woman in White
47. On the Eve
48. The Mill on the Floss
49. Silas Marner
50. Great Expectations
51. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
52. Little Women
53. The Moonstone
54. War and Peace
55. Spring Torrents
56. Middlemarch
57. Around the World in Eighty Days
58. The Hand of Ethelbert
59. Virgin Soil
60. The Return of the Native
61. The Portrait of a Lady
62. Treasure Island
63. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
64. The Death of Ivan Ilyich
65. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
66. The Woodlanders
67. The Master of Ballantrae
68. By the Open Sea
69. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
70. The Yellow Wallpaper
71. The Diary of a Nobody
72. The Real Charlotte
73. Quo Vadis
74. Fruits of the Earth
75. The Invisible Man
76. The Turn of the Screw
77. The War of the Worlds
78. The Awakening
79. Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.

4Lynsey2
Modifié : Sep 21, 2016, 3:32 pm

1900-1949

80. Lieutenant Gustl
81. Heart of Darkness
82. The Hound of the Baskervilles
83. The Call of the Wild
84. The Forsyte Saga
85. A Room with a View
86. The House on the Borderland
87. Ethan Frome
88. The Charwoman's Daughter
89. Remembrance of Things Past
90. The Thirty-Nine Steps
91. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
92. The Shadow-Line
93. Growth of the Soil
94. The Age of Innocence
95. Main Street
96. Crome Yellow
97. The Good Soldier Švejk
98. Amok
99. Life and Death of Harriett Frean
100. Siddhartha
101. The Glimpses of the Moon
102. The Garden Party
103. Babbitt
104. The Forest of the Hanged
105. Ulysses
106. The Fox
107. We
108. The Great Gatsby
109. The Sun Also Rises
110. Blindness
111. Passing
112. Some Prefer Nettles
113. Red Harvest
114. All Quiet on the Western Front
115. The Sound and the Fury
116. A Farewell to Arms
117. Monica
118. The Forbidden Kingdom
119. The Return of Philip Latinowicz
120. Cold Comfort Farm
121. Brave New World
122. Miss Lonelyhearts
123. Cheese
124. Murder Must Advertise
125. The Postman Always Rings Twice
126. Thank You, Jeeves
127. Tender Is the Night
128. They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
129. In the Heart of the Seas
130. Untouchable
131. England Made Me
132. At the Mountains of Madness
133. Absalom, Absalom!
134. Gone with the Wind
135. Of Mice and Men
136. To Have and Have Not
137. Their Eyes Were Watching God
138. The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again
139. Out of Africa
140. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
141. Rebecca
142. The Big Sleep
143. The Grapes of Wrath
144. Finnegan’s Wake
145. For Whom the Bell Tolls
146. Go Down, Moses
147. The Little Prince
148. Ficciones
149. Arcanum 17
150. Animal Farm
151. Pippi Longstocking
152. Cannery Row
153. Death Sentence
154. Closely Watched Trains
155. Cry, the Beloved Country
156. Thousand Cranes
157. Nineteen Eighty-Four
158. The Case of Comrade Tulayev

5Lynsey2
Modifié : Août 19, 2021, 10:47 am

1950-1999

159. The 13 Clocks
160. The Grass Is Singing
161. A Town Like Alice
162. The Catcher in the Rye
163. Foundation
164. A Dance to the Music of Time
165. The Old Man and the Sea
166. Excellent Women
167. Wise Blood
168. The Unnamable
169. Casino Royale
170. Bonjour Tristesse
171. Lord of the Flies
172. The Talented Mr. Ripley
173. The Wonderful "O"
174. The Glass Bees
175. Homo Faber
176. The Birds
177. Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris
178. Things Fall Apart
179. Henderson the Rain King
180. How It Is
181. The Country Girls
182. The Magician of Lublin
183. Rabbit, Run
184. To Kill a Mockingbird
185. Memoirs of a Peasant Boy
186. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
187. The Shipyard
188. Catch-22
189. Girl with Green Eyes
190. The Girls of Slender Means
191. The Street of Crocodiles
192. The Bell Jar
193. Things: A Story of the Sixties
194. August Is a Wicked Month
195. In Cold Blood
196. The Master and Margarita
197. The Cubs and Other Stories
198. The Deadbeats
199. Chocky
200. The Quest for Christa T.
201. Cancer Ward
202. Heartbreak Tango
203. Pricksongs and Descants
204. Portnoy's Complaint
205. The Driver's Seat
206. Fifth Business
207. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
208. The Breast
209. The Summer Book
210. Invisible Cities
211. Surfacing
212. The Black Prince
213. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
214. The Fan Man
215. The Year of the Hare
216. Willard and His Bowling Trophies
217. Fateless
218. Grimes
219. Almost Transparent Blue
220. Kiss of the Spider Woman
221. The Hour of the Star
222. The Beggar Maid
223. Woman at Point Zero
224. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
225. If on a winter's night a traveler
226. The Safety Net
227. So Long a Letter
228. The Daughter
229. The Newton Letter
230. A Pale View of Hills
231. The Color Purple
232. Schindler's List
233. The House of the Spirits
234. Worstward Ho
235. Waterland
236. The Lover
237. Flaubert's Parrot
238. Money: A Suicide Note
239. Half of Man Is Woman
240. Contact
241. The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman
242. The Passion
243. Kitchen
244. Nervous Conditions
245. Sexing the Cherry
246. The Book of Evidence
247. Like Water for Chocolate
248. The Remains of the Day
249. Like Life
250. The Music of Chance
251. The Shadow Lines
252. The Things They Carried
253. Black Water
254. All the Pretty Horses
255. Possessing the Secret of Joy
256. The English Patient
257. The Invention of Curried Sausage
258. The Virgin Suicides
259. The Shipping News
260. The Stone Diaries
261. The Club Dumas
262. The Robber Bride
263. A Suitable Boy
264. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
265. Morvern Callar
266. Forever a Stranger
267. Silk
268. Fugitive Pieces
269. Fall on Your Knees
270. The Life of Insects
271. Enduring Love
272. The God of Small Things
273. American Pastoral
274. Memoirs of a Geisha
275. Amsterdam
276. The Hours
277. Veronika Decides to Die
278. The Elementary Particles
279. Another World
280. The Poisonwood Bible
281. Timbuktu
282. Sputnik Sweetheart
283. Cryptonomicon

6Lynsey2
Modifié : Sep 21, 2016, 3:59 pm

2000's

284. After the Quake
285. Pastoralia
286. Ignorance
287. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
288. The Devil and Miss Prym
289. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
290. The Blind Assassin
291. Atonement
292. Life of Pi
293. Troubling Love
294. Snow
295. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
296. The Namesake
297. The Colour
298. The Master
299. Cloud Atlas
300. Drop City
301. The Swarm
302. The History of Love
303. Saturday
304. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
305. The Accidental
306. Carry Me Down
307. The Inheritance of Loss
308. Half of a Yellow Sun
309. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
310. Falling Man
311. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
312. Animal's People
313. The White Tiger
314. The Elegance of the Hedgehog
315. Cain
316. A Gate at the Stairs
317. A Visit from the Goon Squad
318. Nemesis
319. Freedom
320. The Sense of an Ending
321. The Marriage Plot
322. The Art of Fielding
323. 1Q84

7Simone2
Sep 22, 2016, 8:34 am

Welcome Lynsey, you are well on your way!

8M1nks
Sep 22, 2016, 11:56 am

Hi Lynsey, it's always nice to have more reading company! I think burnout is quite common in this sort of thing - The List, although full of excellent books, can be a little too intense. I read around 50/50 now and I try not to read too many books from around the 1950s thro 1980s in one go as those are more likely to be the sort of books I find hard going. Fortunately I usually really like the older books.

9paruline
Sep 22, 2016, 3:21 pm

Welcome, you've already read an impressive number of books!

10Lynsey2
Sep 22, 2016, 4:33 pm

>7 Simone2: Thanks Simone!

>8 M1nks: I love the older books as well, particularly 19th century fiction.

>9 paruline: THANKS Paruline! I read almost entirely off the list for a few years. Thus the burnout. Since I don't intend to read the entire list, I finally decided it would be o.k to take it at a more leisurely pace. :)

11LisaMorr
Sep 22, 2016, 5:22 pm

You're well on your way!

What did you think of Vathek - that's another one (like Arabian Nights) that I put down and haven't yet picked it up again, although I do plan to.

12brakketh
Sep 22, 2016, 9:37 pm

Welcome Lynsey2. I certainly understand the conflict between being a completionist and wanting to balance various reading projects, one of which is certainly reading for pleasure. Hope the group helps you stay motivated and suggests some interesting reads from the list.

13.Monkey.
Sep 23, 2016, 2:52 am

>11 LisaMorr: If it was much longer, I would probably have been forced to stretch out Vathek and read like, a paragraph at a time over many days, lol. But since it's pretty much a short story, the repetitive agony was tolerable enough to get by. The story itself wasn't bad, though.

14Lynsey2
Sep 23, 2016, 8:29 am

>11 LisaMorr: I struggled with Vathek as well. I would agree with .Monkey's assessment. Tolerable only because it's not as long as 1001 Nights. I gave it 2 stars which means I didn't enjoy reading it. I don't give out a lot of 2 stars because usually I can find something to appreciate about a work of fiction, whether it's the prose or the characterization, or the plot. I read Vathek a few years ago and I remember next to nothing about it, which is also telling.

15Lynsey2
Sep 23, 2016, 8:36 am

>12 brakketh: Thanks! I appreciate your comment about the conflict between being a completionist and reading for pleasure. I am sometimes nervous that I will get towards the end of the list and have only awful books left that i've stated i'm not going to read. Then I will read them because I hate leaving things unfinished. I keep telling myself that there are books on this list I will never be able to read because they are unobtainable or not translated into English. Therefore, it follows that I should not bother trying to read everything as I will never be able to complete it.

16LisaMorr
Sep 23, 2016, 9:24 am

>13 .Monkey.: and >14 Lynsey2: Thanks for your thoughts on Vathek. What I found really intriguing was the backstory on the author in the introduction - that'll be one of the reasons for finishing the book for me.

17Lynsey2
Sep 26, 2016, 7:38 am

324. Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot - 3 stars

"As he spoke, the crowd around us had withdrawn, whether from no longer being able to hear or from having lost interest in the subject; for in general, man is like a child and prefers being amused to being instructed." And this IS the point of the conversation between the narrator and Rameau's nephew where I lost interest. Up to this point I had found it a relatively interesting debate, albeit a bit rambling. Fortunately, the dialogue is short and I was 2/3 of the way through before losing interest.

18gypsysmom
Sep 26, 2016, 2:00 pm

You have already read more books off the list than I have and, while you don't give your age, I suspect you are quite a bit younger than I am. Congratulations. I applaud your decision not to read everything on the list.

19Lynsey2
Sep 27, 2016, 12:26 pm

I am in my 50's but I really have read the majority of the list books in the last 4 years. I was reading 70-90 books a year with the majority of them being list books. Thus the burnout. :)

20Lynsey2
Oct 25, 2016, 8:09 am

325. Of Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende - 3 stars

An uninspiring read, I was disappointed at how I failed to connect with this book. It had every thing that I usually enjoy in a book so I thought that perhaps it just wasn't the right time for me to be reading it but then I got to the the last quarter of the book. The beautiful descriptive prose that Allende is known for stopped and was replaced with a straight forward telling of the events that happened. It felt like she was rushing to get to the end of the book and I found myself actually appreciative of that. I still think it's a book worth reading. The language is beautiful in the first half of the book and it gives a glimpse into life in a South American dictatorship which makes me thankful for my freedom.

21Lynsey2
Nov 26, 2016, 10:12 am

326. A Man Asleep by Georges Perec - 3 stars

What started out as an interesting concept quickly lost my interest. I enjoyed the first quarter of this story as the young student describes his withdrawal from life as he's known it and tries to just exist at the barest level. I preferred Perec's Things: A story of the sixties.

22Lynsey2
Déc 30, 2016, 8:28 am

327. The Once and Future King by T. H. White - 3.5 stars

I was very hot and cold with this book. At times I loved it, and then I got bored with it. When I would pick it back up it would interest me again but failed to hold that interest for long.

23Lynsey2
Jan 15, 2017, 8:13 am

328. Silence by Shusaku Endo - 4 stars

An interesting look at Christian missionaries in Japan in the 1700's during a time when Christianity was outlawed and christians were tortured for their beliefs. Many theological questions are addressed but the primary one is where is God in our suffering. The book is very well written and has many parallels to the betrayal of Jesus by Judas. I believe enjoyment of the book helps if you have some knowledge of Christianity and Jesus' story.

24Kristelh
Jan 15, 2017, 9:23 pm

Happy New Year of reading, Lynsey!

25gypsysmom
Jan 15, 2017, 9:38 pm

>23 Lynsey2: I've been looking at the previews for the movie which stars one of my favourite actors Liam Neeson. I had no idea it was a 1001 list book.

26Lynsey2
Jan 16, 2017, 12:32 pm

>25 gypsysmom: I like Liam Neeson too and my husband and I were going to see the movie last Friday night but then I read a review describing it as punishingly long and just wasn't up for it. I know it is going to be a difficult movie to watch.

27Lynsey2
Jan 16, 2017, 12:33 pm

>24 Kristelh: Thanks Kristel! Happy New Year to you also! Hope you had a nice holiday!

28Lynsey2
Modifié : Fév 4, 2017, 6:40 am

*329. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell - DNF

I will definitely give this one another try down the road. I got to page 74 and had to put it down because I was tired of struggling to stay engaged. I can't remember the last time I was that bored reading a book. Given the fact that most people seemed to enjoy this book and I usually love 19th century fiction I am willing to concede that the problem is more with me than the book.

29Lynsey2
Modifié : Fév 4, 2017, 2:24 pm

330. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote - 4 stars

I am one of the few people over 50 who has never seen this movie. And yet I seemed to know the story as I read this quick character study of a free spirit who refuses to be tied down. Personally, i'm a rule follower so there were many times that Holly's behavior left me feeling uncomfortable. Poor Fred. She really doesn't treat him very well or anyone for that matter so i'm not quite sure why everyone loves her. Overall though I really enjoyed Capote's writing and am glad I finally got to this book.

30Lynsey2
Fév 26, 2017, 10:01 am

331. Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus by Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot - 3 stars

Historically important, this had it's moments. At times I chuckled and at other times I wished I had an English teacher to explain what I was missing.

31Lynsey2
Modifié : Mai 23, 2017, 7:45 am

332. The Reader by Bernard Schlink - 4 stars
333. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen - 3 stars

32Jan_1
Mai 6, 2017, 10:58 am

I had the same response to Cranford, totally bored by it, its the first book I just stopped reading & cannot bring myself to pick it up again.

33Lynsey2
Mai 23, 2017, 7:47 am

Glad I'm not alone in this!

34Kristelh
Déc 25, 2017, 8:22 am

Stopping by to wish you the best of the end of 2017 and the start of 2018.

35gypsysmom
Déc 25, 2017, 5:13 pm

>34 Kristelh: Merry Christmas to you. If your family was as good to you as mine were to me then you will have a very good book year in 2018 too.

36Lynsey2
Modifié : Août 19, 2021, 12:03 pm

334. The Sea by John Banville - 3 stars
335. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - 5 stars
336. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - 2 stars
337. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - 4 stars
338. H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald - 3.5 stars
339. Americanah by Chimanda Ngozi-Adichie - 4 stars
340. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison - 3 stars
341. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - 3 stars

37Lynsey2
Modifié : Déc 14, 2021, 11:52 am

342. Small Island by Andrea Levy - 4 stars
343. Claudine's House by Colette - 3.5 stars
344. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy - 4 stars
345. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich - 3 stars
346. Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz - 4 stars
347. Memento Mori by Muriel Spark - 4 stars
348. Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates - 3.5 stars