1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die [Paperback]

This second "international" edition has been revised to include a far wider range of authors, including many prize winners (Nobel - Isaac Bashevis Singer, SY Agnon, Orhan Pamuk, Naguib Mahfouz; Neustadt - David Malouf, Alvaro Mutis), more Spanish-language novels (Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Bolano, Juan Carlos Onetti) and classics like Ferdydurke (Gombrowicz), The Guide (RK Narayan), Dom Casmurro (Machado de Assis), the Chinese epic The Dream of Red Mansions/Story of the Stone, and Seasons of the Migration to the North (Tayeb Salih). Most of the books cut from the 1st edition are from authors with 3 or more entries, giving a much more varied list (although a shame to lose The Brothers Karamazov ?).

The 1001 are still quite biased toward Europe, with fewer US titles than similar books. Everyone will have their own gripes with individual choices (I would have liked to have seen Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar, Paradiso by Jose Lezama Lima, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren, The Poor Christ of Bomba by Mongo Beti, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Petersburg by Andrei Bely). It is interesting to see some titles included which are not yet available in English translation (The Unknown Soldier by Vaino Linna, Grande Sertao by Joao Guimaraes Rosa), let's hope publishers take note.

My main reservation - as with the first edition - is the inconsistency. Why include the epic poem the Lusiad and not the Iliad or Aeneid, or verse such as Eugene Onegin and not Goethe's Faust, history like The Conquest of New Spain and not Gibbon, short stories by Lorrie Moore and not Chekhov. Also the index is full of errors and omissions like the first edition (Mishima's The Sound of Waves is listed under William Faulkner).

But this is still a fascinating book to browse and a great source of ideas for sampling world literature. A third edition would be welcome, maybe deleting the "quality trash" (the book's description) like Donna Tartt's The Secret History in favour of more little-known masterpieces which deserve to be better known.

The first thing to understand about this massive brick of a book is that the title is meant to catch one's attention and that like the contents, it must be taken with a very large grain of salt. Dial it down to "1001 Books You Might Like to Read at Some Point" and you're more on target. The second thing to understand is that for editorial purposes, "book" generally means "adult novel" for the most part, so there's no non-fiction or poetry or plays or essays or or children's books or short stories (with one or two unexplained exceptions). The third thing to understand is that the book originated in Britain, and as such, has a rather British emphasis and a rather decidedly modern tilt. (The editor teaches at the University of Sussex, and a disproportionate number of the contributors either teach there with him or are current or former doctoral students there.) With these points understood, most fiction-lovers will find this to be a really fun coffee-table or bathroom book to have around for years.

Each of the 1001 books is given roughly 300 words in which to "respond...to what makes each novel compelling, to what it is about each novel that makes one absolutely need to read it." However, with around 100 contributors, the style of these varies wildly: some focus on the book's prose style, some its context, many are mere plot summaries, and unfortunately very few are genuinely inspirational. Arranged chronologically by date of original publication, the book grants roughly 80 pages to the years leading up to 1800, 140 pages to the 1800s, 650 pages to the 1900s, and 65 pages to the relatively recent 2000s. Aside from the 300 words and some basic bibliographic information, almost each selection is accompanied by some kind of artwork (jacket art, author photos, stills from film adaptations, etc.), making the book vivid and gorgeous throughout. Of course, the real fun in a book like this is the arguments it provokes, and the general hue and outcry about omissions or disproportional representation. Before I get into my own pet peeve, here's a little context:

-- The most heavily represented authors are J.M. Coetzee and Charles Dickens with 11 entries each, Samuel Beckett with 10, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf with 9, Paul Auster, J.G. Ballard, and Ian McEwan with 8, and Saul Bellow, Dom DeLillo, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Philip Roth, and Salman Rushdie with 7. This does not include instances where trilogies have been lumped together into a lone entry, as is done several times. And I'll admit this is based on a quick run through the index, rather than a careful parsing, so I may have missed one or two people or miscounted slightly.

-- Despite the above, many prominent writers are completely missing, such as the following: William Boyd (Any Human Heart), Ray Bradberry (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451), Willa Cather (Death Comes For the Archbishop), Roddy Doyle (Barrytown trilogy), Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Naguib Mahfouz (Cairo trilogy), Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead), Bernard Malamud (The Fixer), Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, No Country For Old Men), George McDonald Fraser (Flashman series), John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra), Orhan Pamuk (My Name is Red), Walker Percy (The Moviegoer), Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged), J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter series), Jane Smiley, Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety), William Styron (Sophie's Choice), Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist). Again, I'll admit the above list is largely compiled from other reviewers' mentions.

-- Although you would think a book like this would give a token nod to the established critical orthodoxy, only about half of Booker Prize winners appear, and only about 2/3 of Nobel Prize winners who were known for their novels appear. That's not to say that every prize-winning book is a must read, but when they come at the expense of decent, but entirely unremarkable, selections such as Zadie Smith's "On Beauty" or Ardal O'Hanlon's "Talk of the Town," one has to wonder...

-- Genre fiction gets very short shrift. Crime and science fiction are represented by the most obvious of choices (Chandler, Christie, Hammett, Asimov, and Clarke for example, although there are three Elmore Leonards). Horror gets a brief look-in with Dracula, Frankenstein, a Lovecraft short story and a Stephen King book. Aside from the obvious Tolkein, there's a lone fantasy title. Adventure tales are represented by H. Rider Haggard. And there are no westerns whatsoever. It's as if there was an editorial decision made that genre selections must be included and somewhat was assigned the task of rounding up the usual suspects. Oh yes, it's worth pointing out that a token graphic novel (Watchmen) was included, so that's nice.

My own personal bone to pick is with the Eurocentrism of the selections. I did a quick and dirty tabulation and found that roughly 70% of the selections were from Western Europe, roughly 25% from the U.S., and roughly 5% the rest of the world. The world's most populous country, China (currently 1 in 5 humans is Chinese), is represented by exactly zero entries. Ditto for the entire Arab-speaking/reading world. Don't even get me started on Africa -- entries authored by white African authors outnumber those by non-white African authors by a 2:1 ratio. And not coincidentally, all the non-white African writers represented all wrote in English. It's not that hard to find excellent fiction in translation, and as an example, I would point to the omission of Nobel laureates like Mahfouz, Pamuk, and pretty much every other non-Western winner. Anyway, that's just my own pet peeve, and most others probably don't care.

Ultimately, it's a fun book to have lying around to dip into from now and then or as a provocation to oneself or others.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is undoubtedly a fun and informative read in many respects; however, I was rather taken aback by the heavy weighting in favour of very recent publications. While one appreciates that this book deals almost entirely with novels, (a comparatively 'modern' literary form, I believe), it still struck me as rather unbalanced to list 69 books written in the 21st century, but only 46 from the whole of the 18th. I find it highly doubtful that many of the books of the past decade which are listed here will still be considered essential reading in even twenty years time.
The book could, in my opinion, have been improved by the inclusion of more classic Children's novels (J.M. Barrie and E. Nesbit are notable absentees), and by having employed a less arbitrary assessment criteria. It seemed a little bizarre to include the Thousand and One nights and Aesop's fables but not the fairy tales of Grimm, Andersen and Perrault, for example.
These quibbles aside, "1001 Books" is still an interesting introduction to many of the greatest novels ever written, and some of the more contentious entries are sure to spark lively debate. Beautifully printed and presented, it would make a good gift for anyone who enjoys reading.