1001 books you must read before you die
May 15th, 20081001 books you must read before you die is a book that compiles a list of, you guessed it, 1001 fiction books that a number of critics considered really good. Anyways, I went over the list and I found out a couple of semi-depressing facts. The first is that, despite having been an avid reader all my life, I’ve only read 30-40 of these books. So that means I’m missing out on some of the world’s finest writings. Though I generally enjoy whatever it is I’m reading, so it’s really not so bad. Even so, there are a number of books there that I’d really like to read, whenever I get time enough to do it.
The other thing is that there’s a number of books that I can’t be sure if I’ve read or not. My parents had this quite large library of classics and I’d go over it time and again, trying to find something that interested me. I read a lof of books from there but now I just can’t remember which ones. There’s also a number of books which I read when I was way too young, and didn’t understand until much later. For instance, I read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was frigging seven. Lately I’ve been itching to read it again, which should be a great experience, but certainly won’t help me increase the percentage of books I’ve read in that list. Similarly, I read Animal Farm around that age - but that only because someone had a strange sense of humor at the children’s library I visited (or, perhaps, they seriously thought from the name that it was a book for kids).
Finally, and this is also about my memory and also about how young I read when I read some of these… there are books on the list that I know I’ve read but I couldn’t tell you what they were about if my life depended on it. The fall of the house of Usher? Oliver Twist? I know he was an orphan, and that’s it. And I know there was a ghostly dog that haunted the Baskervilles or something like that. Oh well.
Anyways, here are the books I read from that list: Read the rest of this entry »
