Dan Johnson

Posted By Dan on October 19, 2006

Courtesy, once again, of Jessa at Bookslut, I find myself looking at 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.  According to the Amazon review, “Each work of literature featured here is a seminal work key to understanding and appreciating the written word.”  Uh-huh.  Here’s what I’ve read of ‘em, with my very-snarky opinions.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon. Dug it.

Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer. Overrated, but ok.

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen. Wildly, massively, unbelievably overrated. Cut out the middle 200 pages and it’s a good book.

Life of Pi – Yann Martel. Cute.

House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski. One helluva book. I still think about it sometimes.

Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson. Quite good, much better than the sequels.

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver. Fantastic book.

Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden. I dug it, lots of people I know didn’t.

Underworld – Don DeLillo. I’m Counting this even though I totally hated it, couldn’t finish the damned thing, and think that people who read modern DeLillo on the bus are reading it because they want people to notice them reading it)

Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace. Too long. I like his essays better.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami. His best book, I think. Wonderful writing.

Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard. The first funny book on this list. And Hiassen does this kind of thing better. Still, it’s decent.

The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien. Wonderful stuff, absolutely brilliant.

Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro. I read this on my semester abroad in Australia, and I didn’t have any other books to read in my first several days there, so I read it about six times. I love this book.

The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams. Read them both, and I thought they were both meh.

The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe. Read it in Germany in 2001. Liked it.

The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster. I don’t remember this doing anything for me.

Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons. This is great, but they put this on the list over friggin’ Sandman? I’m now angry.

Neuromancer – William Gibson. Here’s the only hard SF on this list so far, and it was oddly dated by the time I went to college. Influential, but I never thought it was a particularly good story.

Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole. Fun book, but I don’t remember much of it.

The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco. The first book on this list I read for a class.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams. This was his first and best novel.

The Shining – Stephen King. “Well, we gotta put something by the guy on there, but all of us literary people hate his guts, so why don’t we put the one that was made into a movie by that dead guy that all the literary people respect?” I’m really beginning to dislike the people who made this list; it feels like one of those Lists That Lit Snobs Put Together, With Nods For What They Think Popular Things Are. This book is good, though - the scene with the bushes coming to life is one of the scariest things I’ve ever read.

Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice. It’s hard to describe how unimpressed I was with this book when I read it in high school.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou. I read this in high school, and it’s one of those books I think I’d get a lot more out of now, when I’ve got more of a sense of history and have experienced a bit more.

Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Funny, interesting. My fave Vonnegut.

The Godfather – Mario Puzo. I remember reading this at the beach, preparing not to like it, and being blown away. Wonderful story.

The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon. Read it in college, and the only thing I remember is that Pynchon is weird and somehow his pic isn’t in his high school yearbook. Also, he was into this indie band, Lotion, that I saw a few times when I lived in Boston. Boy, that’s a memorable book.

Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut. I think I read everything I read of Vonnegut in one week. Not a knock on the guy, I liked them all.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey. I remember reading it, but nothing at all about it.

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller. Read it in high school. I should have read it in college; without more knowledge of history, it’s pointless. And, no history class I took ever went past the Depression, so…

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee. Is this the Great American Novel? I wouldn’t have any problem with arguments that it is. One of the greatest, most affecting novels I’ve ever had the joy to read.

On the Road – Jack Kerouac. Life instructions for high school kids. Horrifically ripped-off by every angst-ridden nineteen year old with a journal.

The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien. Technically, this is three books. And they do go on and on and on and on. I predicted this being in here three hundred books ago. So predictable.

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison. Another high school English book. Had no affect on me at the time - hm…I wonder if that had something to do with trying to convince a bunch of white, wealthy high school kids with absolutely no race or class consciousness that this had something to do with their lives? I’m not ripping the book, I’m ripping the curriculum.

Foundation – Isaac Asimov. I hope they mean the trilogy here, because the story is really the first three books. Good stuff, this.

The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger. For my thoughts on this book, go read King Dork by Frank Portman.

I, Robot – Isaac Asimov. Huh. More Asimov. I liked this one - actually, I had both this and Foundation in a one-book set, and when I read it (I was like eight) I thought they were the same story, and I remember starting into Foundation and thinking “hey, where the heck are the robots?”

Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell. Is there someone alive who hasn’t read this? I mean aside from the Washington press corps?

The Plague – Albert Camus. I don’t remember why I read this, but I think I liked it. Something about the mass death appealed to my 16-year-old self.

Animal Farm – George Orwell. Fun, short book. Anyone ever think about how incredibly short old books were? Now, if a novel isn’t 300 pages, nobody’ll buy it.

The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene. Another high school read. I remember absolutely nothing about this book.

The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck. Read this in the jungle in Ecuador late last year for the first time. Completely blew me away, but I doubt it would have made as much of an impact when I was in high school, which is when everyone else read it.

The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler. Ah, noir. How we love thee…

Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck. Wow. A high school book I actually liked. No wonder I didn’t win any English awards - I vocally despised everything we were assigned, with rare exceptions. And I love to read. I wonder how much badly-designed school curricula destroys young readers. Probably a lot. Sigh…

The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien. There are much better dragon-centric kids’ stories.

At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft. My God, they put this in here? Lovecraft was completely insane and his writing was wild and impenetrable, but his ideas were amazing.

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley. Again, the Washington press corps thing.

All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque. A remarkable book - perhaps the best anti-war book ever written.

A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway. OK, but I liked A Movable Feast best, and I bet that one’s not on this list.

The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway. See above.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald. Re-read this last summer, and OhdearGod it’s good. It’s so good. It’s incredible, amazing. If Fitgzgerald had only ever done this, he’d be one of the best writers and storytellers who had ever walked the earth. It’s that good.

Siddhartha – Herman Hesse. High school, don’t remember it, move along.

Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs. Thinking about it now, it’s amazing how racist this book is.

The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells. Too bad Tom Cruise made the movie. A good book, and a fun radio play if you ever get a chance to listen to it, which you can do here.

Dracula – Bram Stoker. Of course I’ve read this. I love vampires.

The Time Machine – H.G. Wells. Morlocks! Eloi! I liked the mid-’50s movie version better with the nuclear war stuff and the mega-hot Eloi girl. Wells’s Eloi were more like airheaded, benevolent gnomes.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain. Twain rules. Another one of the giants who have walked the earth.

The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins. Just read this - meh.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll. Have I read this? Or is this another of those cultural osmosis things where I only think I have because the memes and lines from this are friggin’ everywhere?

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens. Read this in high school, and we had a substitute for the entire time we read it, which wasn’t good because we were relatively smart and hated the book. We made the sub’s life hell, which I feel pretty bad about now.

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne. A textbook example of a book which should never be taught to high school students. I hated this book so much when I read it, I nearly set the school copy on fire. Now, I might like it more. But I’ll never read it. The thought of it makes me want to break things.

The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe. This isn’t a book. It’s a short story. It’s ok.

A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens. Loved this one.

Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens. A double-shot of Dickens that I liked! Neat.

Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe. Read it when I was eleven or twelve, and I loved it then. How come we never read stuff like this in school? Crikey.

That’s it, and it’s also the longest post I’ve ever written on this site. Funny, that. I’ve read 66 of the 1001 books I need to read before I die. If I have 60 years left (that’s optimistic), I need to read about fifteen of these per year before I kick the bucket. Of course, since almost all of the late-twentieth century books are from the same fifteen authors (Ian McEwan can’t have been that good every time. Surely not good enough to leave out Christopher Moore), I can probably skip a good chunk of ‘em and still leave my conscience clear.

Who am I kidding? This list was so utterly predictable. I felt like I was being lectured about morality by a Republican just reading it. Read what you like, and be happy about it. That’s much more productive than reading lists like this.

Categories: General
Tags: