1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

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1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 28

by Boxall, Peter


  A Thousand Cranes

  Go Tell It on the Mountain

  Casino Royale

  Junkie

  Lucky Jim

  The Lost Steps

  The Hothouse

  The Long Good-Bye

  The Go-Between

  The Dark Child

  A Day in Spring

  A Ghost at Noon

  The Story of O

  Under the Net

  Lord of the Flies

  The Mandarins

  Bonjour Tristesse

  Death in Rome

  The Sound of Waves

  The Unknown Soldier

  I’m Not Stiller

  The Ragazzi

  The Recognitions

  The Burning Plain

  The Quiet American

  The Trusting and the Maimed

  The Tree of Man

  The Last Temptation of Christ

  The Devil to Pay in the Backlands

  Lolita

  The Talented Mr. Ripley

  The Lord of the Rings

  The Lonely Londoners

  The Roots of Heaven

  The Floating Opera

  Giovanni’s Room

  Justine

  The Glass Bees

  Doctor Zhivago

  Pnin

  On the Road

  The Manila Rope

  The Deadbeats

  Homo Faber

  Blue of Noon

  The Midwich Cuckoos

  Voss

  Jealousy

  The Birds

  The Once and Future King

  The Bell

  Borstal Boy

  Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon

  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

  Things Fall Apart

  The Bitter Glass

  The Guide

  The Leopard

  Deep Rivers

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s

  Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring

  Billiards at Half-Past Nine

  Down Second Avenue

  Cider With Rosie

  The Tin Drum

  The Naked Lunch

  Billy Liar

  Absolute Beginners

  Promise at Dawn

  Rabbit, Run

  To Kill a Mockingbird

  The Magician of Lublin

  Halftime

  The Country Girls

  Bebo’s Girl

  God’s Bits of Wood

  The Shipyard

  Catch-22

  Solaris

  Cat and Mouse

  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

  A Severed Head

  Franny and Zooey

  No One Writes to the Colonel

  Faces in the Water

  Memoirs of a Peasant Boy

  Stranger in a Strange Land

  Labyrinths

  The Golden Notebook

  Time of Silence

  Pale Fire

  A Clockwork Orange

  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

  Girl with Green Eyes

  The Death of Artemio Cruz

  The Time of the Hero

  The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

  The Third Wedding

  Dog Years

  The Bell Jar

  Inside Mr. Enderby

  The Girls of Slender Means

  The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

  Manon des Sources

  The Graduate

  Cat’s Cradle

  V.

  Herzog

  The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein

  Arrow of God

  Three Trapped Tigers

  Sometimes a Great Notion

  The Passion According to G. H.

  Back to Oegstgeest

  Closely Watched Trains

  The River Between

  Garden, Ashes

  Everything That Rises Must Converge

  Things

  In Cold Blood

  Death and the Dervish

  Silence

  To Each His Own

  The Crying of Lot 49

  Giles Goat-Boy

  Marks of Identity

  The Vice-Consul

  The Magus

  The Master and Margarita

  Wide Sargasso Sea

  The Third Policeman

  Miramar

  Z

  Pilgrimage

  The Manor

  One Hundred Years of Solitude

  No Laughing Matter

  Day of the Dolphin

  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

  Eva Trout

  The Cathedral

  A Kestrel for a Knave

  In Watermelon Sugar

  The German Lesson

  The Quest for Christa T.

  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

  2001: A Space Odyssey

  Belle du Seigneur

  Cancer Ward

  Myra Breckinridge

  The First Circle

  A Void / Avoid

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  Ada

  The Godfather

  Portnoy’s Complaint

  Jacob the Liar

  The French Lieutenant’s Woman

  Slaughterhouse Five

  Blind Man with a Pistol

  Pricksongs and Descants

  Tent of Miracles

  The Case Worker

  Moscow Stations

  Heartbreak Tango

  Seasons of Migrations to the North

  Here’s to You, Jesusa!

  Fifth Business

  Play It As It Lays

  Jahrestage

  A World for Julius

  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

  The Bluest Eye

  The Sea of Fertility

  Rabbit Redux

  Cataract

  Group Portrait With Lady

  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

  The Book of Daniel

  Lives of Girls & Women

  House Mother Normal

  In a Free State

  Surfacing

  G

  The Summer Book

  The Twilight Years

  The Optimist’s Daughter

  Invisible Cities

  Gravity’s Rainbow

  The Honorary Consul

  Crash

  The Castle of Crossed Destinies

  The Siege of Krishnapur

  A Question of Power

  Fear of Flying

  The Dispossessed

  The Diviners

  The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

  Dusklands

  The Fan Man

  The Port

  Ragtime

  The Commandant

  The Year of the Hare

  Humboldt’s Gift

  Woman at Point Zero

  Willard and His Bowling Trophies

  Fateless

  The Dead Father

  Correction

  A Dance to the Music of Time

  W, or the Memory of Childhood

  Autumn of the Patriarch

  Patterns of Childhood

  Blaming

  Cutter and Bone

  Interview With the Vampire

  The Left-Handed Woman

  Kiss of the Spider Woman

  Almost Transparent Blue

  In the Heart of the Country

  The Engineer of Human Souls

  Quartet in Autumn

  The Hour of the Star

  Song of Solomon

  The Wars

  Dispatches

  The Shining

  Delta of Venus

  The Beggar Maid

  Requiem for a Dream

  The Singapore Grip

  The Sea, The Sea

  Life: A User’s Manual

  The Back Room

  The Virgin in the Garden

  The Cement Garden

  Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy

  If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

  So Long a Letter
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  Burger’s Daughter

  A Bend in the River

  A Dry White Season

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  Fool’s Gold

  Smiley’s People

  Southern Seas

  The Name of the Rose

  Clear Light of Day

  Confederacy of Dunces

  Rituals

  Smell of Sadness

  Broken April

  Midnight’s Children

  Waiting for the Barbarians

  Summer in Baden-Baden

  The House with the Blind Glass Windows

  Leaden Wings

  The War at the End of the World

  Lanark: A Life in Four Books

  Rabbit is Rich

  Couples, Passerby

  July’s People

  On the Black Hill

  The House of the Spirits

  Schindler’s Ark

  A Pale View of Hills

  Wittgenstein’s Nephew

  The Color Purple

  A Boy’s Own Story

  If Not Now, When?

  The Book of Disquiet

  Baltasar and Blimunda

  The Sorrow of Belgium

  The Piano Teacher

  The Life and Times of Michael K

  Waterland

  LaBrava

  The Christmas Oratorio

  Fado Alexandrino

  The Witness

  Shame

  Money: A Suicide Note

  Flaubert’s Parrot

  Professor Martens’ Departure

  Blood and Guts in High School

  Larva: Midsummer Night’s Babel

  Nights at the Circus

  Neuromancer

  The Wasp Factory

  Democracy

  The Lover

  The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

  Empire of the Sun

  The Busconductor Hines

  Dictionary of the Khazars

  The Unbearable Lightness of Being

  Legend

  The Young Man

  Love Medicine

  White Noise

  Half of Man Is Woman

  Reasons to Live

  The Handmaid’s Tale

  Hawksmoor

  Perfume

  Blood Meridian

  Contact

  Simon and the Oaks

  The Cider House Rules

  Annie John

  The Parable of the Blind

  Love in the Time of Cholera

  Ancestral Voices

  The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman

  The Drowned and the Saved

  Watchmen

  Extinction

  An Artist of the Floating World

  Memory of Fire

  The Old Devils

  Matigari

  Anagrams

  Lost Language of Cranes

  The Taebek Mountains

  Ballad for Georg Henig

  Enigma of Arrival

  World’s End

  The Pigeon

  Of Love and Shadows

  Beloved

  All Souls

  The New York Trilogy

  Black Box

  The Bonfire of the Vanities

  The Black Dahlia

  The Afternoon of a Writer

  The Radiant Way

  Kitchen

  Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

  Cigarettes

  Nervous Conditions

  The First Garden

  The Last World

  Oscar and Lucinda

  The Swimming-Pool Library

  The Satanic Verses

  Wittgenstein’s Mistress

  Paradise of the Blind

  Foucault’s Pendulum

  Gimmick!

  Obabakoak

  Inland

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

  Like Water for Chocolate

  The History of the Siege of Lisbon

  The Trick is to Keep Breathing

  The Great Indian Novel

  The Melancholy of Resistance

  The Remains of the Day

  London Fields

  Moon Palace

  Sexing the Cherry

  Like Life

  The Buddha of Suburbia

  The Shadow Lines

  The Midnight Examiner

  The Things They Carried

  The Music of Chance

  Stone Junction

  Amongst Women

  Get Shorty

  The Daughter

  Vertigo

  American Psycho

  The Laws

  Faceless Killers

  Astradeni

  Regeneration

  Typical

  Mao II

  Wild Swans

  Arcadia

  Hideous Kinky

  Memoirs of Rain

  Asphodel

  The Butcher Boy

  Smilla’s Sense of Snow

  The Dumas Club

  Written on the Body

  The Crow Road

  Indigo

  The English Patient

  Possessing the Secret of Joy

  All the Pretty Horses

  The Triple Mirror of the Self

  Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture

  The Discovery of Heaven

  Life is a Caravanserai

  Before Night Falls

  The Secret History

  The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

  Remembering Babylon

  The Holder of the World

  The Virgin Suicides

  The Stone Diaries

  A Suitable Boy

  What a Carve Up!

  On Love

  The Twins

  Looking for the Possible Dance

  Birdsong

  The Shipping News

  Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light

  The Invention of Curried Sausage

  Disappearance

  Deep River

  Felicia’s Journey

  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

  How Late It Was, How Late

  City Sister Silver

  Pereira Declares: A Testimony

  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

  Our Lady of the Assassins

  Land

  Whatever

  Troubling Love

  The Late-Night News

  The End of the Story

  Love’s Work

  A Fine Balance

  The Reader

  Santa Evita

  Morvern Callar

  The Unconsoled

  Alias Grace

  The Clay Machine-Gun

  Infinite Jest

  Forever a Stranger

  The Ghost Road

  Fugitive Pieces

  Hallucinating Foucault

  A Light Comedy

  Fall on Your Knees

  Silk

  The God of Small Things

  Margot and the Angels

  The Life of Insects

  Money to Burn

  Jack Maggs

  Underworld

  Enduring Love

  Crossfire

  The Poisonwood Bible

  Veronika Decides to Die

  The Hours

  All Souls Day

  The Heretic

  Elementary Particles

  The Talk of the Town

  Dirty Havana Trilogy

  Savage Detectives

  Disgrace

  As If I Am Not There

  Pavel’s Letters

  In Search of Klingsor

  The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

  Fear and Trembling

  1900s

  Sandokan: The Tigers of Mompracem

  Emilio Salgari

  Lifespan | b. 1862 (Italy), d. 1911

  First Published | 1900

  First Published by | A. Donath (Genoa)

  Original Title | Le Tigri di Mompracem

  “On December 20th 1849, a violent hurricane raged over Mompracem . . . home to t
he most feared pirates in the Sea of Malaysia.”

  The Tigers of Mompracem, Emilio Salgari’s most famous novel and the greatest Italian bestseller of all time, features the first adventure of Sandokan, Salgari’s enduring creation that spawned a whole legion of sequels. The Tigers are a band of rebel pirates fighting against the colonial power of the Dutch and British empires. They are led by Sandokan, the indomitable Tiger of Malaysia, and his loyal friend, Yanez de Gomera, a Portuguese wanderer and adventurer (his bearing a Spanish name was an error of the writer). After twelve years of spilling blood and spreading terror throughout Malaysia, Sandokan has reached the height of his power, but when the pirate learns of the existence of the Pearl of Labuan, his fortunes begin to change.

  In the dozen novels that comprise the Sandokan series, Salgari’s pen transformed the bloodthirsty pirate into a noble warrior, a kind of Malay Robin Hood, imbuing his character with a strong sense of idealism, passion, and loyalty. Though popular with the masses, Salgari was shunned by critics throughout his life and for most of the twentieth century. It was not until the late 1990s that his writings began to be revisited and new translations appeared in print, becoming very popular, especially in Italy, Spain, and Latin America. The adventurous flair of the books has inspired numerous writers, from Umberto Eco, who would read Salgari as a way to explore the world, to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who devoured his books as a young man. LB

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Sister Carrie

  Theodore Dreiser

  Lifespan | b. 1871 (U.S.), d. 1945

  First Published | 1900

  First Published by | Doubleday, Page & Co.

  Original Language | English

  Sister Carrie is a gripping and grim novel that charts the fortunes of three main characters making their way at the turn of the nineteenth century. Carrie Meeber moves from the Midwest to Chicago to live with relatives who feel obliged to take her in. She takes a menial job and then moves in with the raffish salesman, Charles Drouet. However, she soon tires of him and attaches herself to the more socially elevated George Hurstwood. He leaves his wife and family for her, steals a large sum of money from his employers, and they run off to New York. There, Carrie rises while George falls. She becomes a celebrated actress and dancer, while he lapses into poverty after she leaves him.

  Theodore Dreiser’s novel is a major landmark in American fiction, which helped to establish a distinctly American literary identity. Sister Carrie is significant for a number of reasons. Dreiser’s sparse, journalistic style depicts the realities of everyday city life in a powerful language that seems to hide nothing, so that we feel we see characters as they really are. Equally important, the novel does not serve as a fable, and no serious judgments are offered on the protagonists’ behavior. Carrie is a woman dealt a bad hand, who determines to make the most of what she has, seizing opportunity when it is offered. Charles is a pleasure-seeker, a mixture of the vulgar and the appealing. And George, a tormented and unhappy man, loses all he has in pursuit of a modest, but unobtainable, goal. AH

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  None but the Brave

  Arthur Schnitzler

  Lifespan | b. 1862 (Austria), d. 1931

 

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