1001 Books: A Reading List
There’s a whole community of readers out there who have picked up the challenge in terms of the hugely popular 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Bloggers keep score, review and discuss the titles, and have started entire groups within reader-friendly social networks like GoodReads. For those of you beginning the challenge, here are 10 titles from the list that HarperPerennial publishes (okay, perhaps a couple of the books aren’t Perennials proper but they are paperbacks!) to get you started.
Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho
Twenty-four-year-old Veronika seems to have everything — but something is missing in her life. So, one morning, she takes a handful of sleeping pills expecting never to wake up. But she does — at a mental hospital where she is told that she has only days to live. A book inspired by events in Coelho’s own life, he questions the meaning of madness and celebrates individuals who do not fit into societal norms.
P.S. A film adaptation of this book will come out in ‘09 starring Sarah Michelle Gellar (aka Buffy), David Thewlis and Melissa Leo (Frozen River)
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
Norma Jeane Baker — the child, the woman, the fated celebrity and idolized blonde the world came to know as Marilyn Monroe. In a voice startlingly intimate and rich, Norma Jeane tells her own story of an emblematic American artist — intensely conflicted and driven — who had lost her way.
P.S. Don’t forget to take a peek at the Reading Group Guide for this book.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson’s disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home. A tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.
P.S. The Corrections also lands on Time’s All-Time 100 Best Novels. Listen to an archived interview with the author on NPR.
The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver
A story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it — from garden seeds to Scripture — is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in post-colonial Africa.
P.S. Find out why Barbara Kingsolver dubbed this book “D.A.B” in the P.S. section.
Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
Loan shark Chili Palmer didn’t say anything when Ray Bones stole his leather jacket. Instead, he went to Ray’s house, broke his nose, took the jacket, and left. Twelve years later, Chili finds himself working for Bones, and he’s ordered to collect on a bad debt from Leo Devoe, a guy who died in a plane crash. Getting Leo becomes a movie pitch unfolding in a city where every move you make is a potential scene, and making it big isn’t all that different from making your bones: You gotta know who to pitch, who to hit, and how to knock ‘em dead.
P.S. Get Shorty starring Rene Russo and John Travolta grossed over $100 million dollars at the box office.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel “the unbearable lightness of being” not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
P.S. Read the original review in the NY Times.
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Bilbo Baggins enjoys a quiet and contented life‚ with no desire to travel far from the comforts of home; then one day the wizard Gandalf and a band of dwarves arrive unexpectedly and enlist his services — as a burglar — on a dangerous expedition to raid the treasure-hoard of Smaug the dragon. Bilbo′s life is never to be the same again.
P.S. J.R.R. Tolkien has a new book out this spring — an epic poem found by his son, Christopher Tolkien — called The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.
P.S. The Reading Guide will have you drawing conclusions and asking interesting questions.
The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
A thriller‚ a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force‚ a surrealistic vision of eternity‚ the story of a tender‚ brief‚ unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle‚ and a chilling fable of unending guilt.
P.S. “Flann O’Brien: A Postmodernist When It Was Neither Profitable Nor Popular”
Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard
Based on J. G. Ballard′s own childhood‚ this is the extraordinary account of a boy′s life in Japanese−occupied wartime Shanghai — a mesmerizing‚ hypnotically compelling novel of war‚ of starvation and survival‚ of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.
P.S. Ballard’s top 10 novels include 1984, Moby-Dick, The Trial and The Tempest (read through the P.S. section to see the others on his list).
How many of the 1001 Books have you read? Leave a note in the comments. Have you read any of the above? Which book on our list would you tackle first and why? The best comment wins a copy!
