If you want to kill an hour AND hone your lit snobbery, check out 3M’s list of the 1001 works of fiction you must read.
Naturally my “want to read” list outpaces my “have read” list (at least in intellectual value), and I did give up once I reached the 1700s (because really, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion does not sound like bedside reading), but here are my results:
Have Read (thanks due largely to Murphy’s 20th century fiction course):
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
Pastoralia – George Saunders
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
White Noise – Don DeLillo
The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford (ugh!)
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
Want to read (thanks largely to name recognition, bookshelf envy and the Brookline Booksmith’s Bmail):
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Youth – J.M. Coetzee
Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Trial – Franz Kafka (fro?)
V. – Thomas Pynchon
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (bought, not yet read)
The End of the Affair – Graham Greene (bought, not yet read)
[image of the best wire ever (sent at 6 a.m.!) from Brookline Booksmith's used book cellar find-of-the-week archive]
