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List of must-read books turns 'well-read' into just 'read'
(by Kara Krekeler - June 25, 2008)
Ask anyone who knows me, and you’ll hear that I’m a voracious reader, and I always have been.
My mom would tell you that while I was growing up she often didn’t trust me to clean my room unsupervised, lest I start reading every book that I was supposed to be putting away. My co-workers today would tell you that there is rarely a day that I’m not eating lunch with one hand while holding open a book with the other.
My husband and I were talking about this the other day, and between the two of us, we figured that I probably read — front to back, one at a time and no skimming — around 30 books a year, not counting the tried-and-true favorites that I turn to after reading a particularly heady tome. If you add those in, my total probably comes to around 40 or 45 a year.
Considering I’ve had this habit since childhood — and those mass-produced kids’ chapter books go a heck of a lot faster than literary novels for adults, so my reading output during those years was even higher — it’d be fair to estimate that I’ve read somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 to 1,000 books in my lifetime. (Picture books need not apply.)
Too bad only a handful of those books are included in 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, a book by Peter Ackroyd and Peter Boxall that oddly enough isn’t on its own list. (The authors must not have been striving for greatness with this one.)
The book was published in 2006, but due to coverage earlier this month by the New York Times, I stumbled across it only recently. According to the Times article, Ackroyd and Boxall polled literature professors, writers and other academics that almost no one has heard of to create this list of the most important novels to read in a single lifetime.
The trouble is, even without Shakespeare’s plays, religious tomes or books of poetry, it seems almost impossible to read everything on the list; even the book reviewer who wrote the Times article noted that he’d only read about a third of the entries. I found the full list online, and after an eyeball-straining read through the entries, determined that I had read a grand total of 42 of them.
Forty-two. That’s it. It was unnerving to see that only 4 percent of my lifetime of reading has literary merit according to the creators of this list. And several of those I’d read only because they were assigned to me in high school or college. (Trust me, I would not have picked up, much less finished reading, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart if I didn’t think I’d be tested on the material.)
Admittedly, the list, like any other “best of” compilation, is subjective and meant to inspire debate. Sure, I agree with the inclusion of several of the books on the list, but isn’t it a bit narcissistic to include multiple books by one of the co-authors? Is The Shining really the most seminal Stephen King novel out there? And should anything by the best-selling horror author be held in the same regard as certifiable classics by Dickens or Proust?
Had I had a hand in creating the list, I certainly would have argued for more children’s and young-adult books, which are few and far between on the list as it was published. Where’s Dr. Seuss’ whimsical introduction to environmentalism, The Lorax, or Lois Lowry’s required-reading tale of Nazi Germany, Number the Stars? And what about A Wrinkle in Time, The Wizard of Oz and the works of Roald Dahl? Surely Ackroyd and Boxall could have cleared out a couple of Philip Roth’s books — or even, God forbid, one of Ackroyd’s own books — to make room for those.
So despite my misgivings about the ridiculously long list, I printed it out from a website, and plan on hanging onto it, ticking off books as I read them. And even though I don’t plan on using it as a to-do list, if the day ever comes that I get burned out on rereading Harry Potter (doubtful), perhaps I’ll turn to the list for just which Hemingway volume is worth my time.
The full list from 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is available at www.listology.com. There are several versions of the list (most annotated with individual posters’ commentary), but each version includes all the same books.
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