Average Customer Review: Number of Reviews: 14 Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers. |
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
There are some odd omissions in this compilation,
Also absent are the Nobel prizewinners Orhan Pamuk and Naguib Mahfouz. And Shiva Naipaul. And Bill Bryson. I daresay I'll think of many other absentees in the next days and weeks ... |
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Caution: unputdownable,
Like anything of this sort, such a list is always going to provoke reactions about what was included, and what was left out. There's a good mix here - something for everyone - and popular titles get a look in too, which is great. I doubt I would have read "The Shining" without the recommendation of this book - but I'm now glad I did. This chunky, well-illustrated book of literary signposting should be on every book-lovers shelf I think. An ideal present for anyone who loves reading. |
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
A great book for dipping into.......,
However I don't think the purpose of the book is to spur us on to competitive reading or to demoralise us if we haven't read a lot of the books selected. What this book is great for is to alert you to works you may want to read at some time in the future but have simply never got around to - such as To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf or The Idiot by Dostoevsky (both sitting on my bookshelves gathering dust). It is also a good reminder of some books read long ago - The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, Germinal by Zola and The Razor's Edge by WS Maugham. Obviously any list of this type is contentious and we all bring our own prejudices to such a venture. (No William Boyd? Shame on you! Six Margaret Attwoods....hooray) And it is beautifully illustrated throughout with pictures of writers and original book covers. |
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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
A knee-buckling tome,
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68 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
Reader's Treasure Chest,
Inevitably everyone will quibble about the selection, so why should I be any different? The omission of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers is an unforgivable oversight. Other surprise absentees include Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess and anyone called Bradbury (there is no sign of The History Man, or Fahrenheit 451). And it's probably best not to mention Watership Down or Terry Pratchett - I don't envy the publishers having to deal with all those irate fans. Maybe they were collateral damage in an editorial decision to avoid "children's" books - something which enabled them to sidestep Harry Potter, but also resulted in there being no place for Louis Sachar's Holes, or anything by Philip Pullman, Malorie Blackman or even Roald Dahl. (Is there a 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up in the pipeline I wonder? If so, can I be a compiler please?) Such omissions are made harder to understand by the presence of quite a few insubstantial novels from recent years, and some of the choices make no sense at all. For example: two books by Paulo Coelho have been included, neither of which is The Alchemist; while BS Johnson is represented by three books, none of which is his legendary book-in-a-box (The Unfortunates). There is also a page where Youth by JM Coetzee sits next to Dead Air by Iain Banks, despite much stronger novels by both authors being absent. (I would have certainly included Coetzee's Age of Iron.) The compiler also shows a treacherous predilection for the cinema: too many books seem to have been chosen because they spawned classic films. The Graduate and The Postman Always Rings Twice spring to mind. So The Third Man is here, but not Our Man In Havana; while Arthur C. Clarke is represented by the novelisation of 2001: A Space Odyssey rather than Childhood's End (or Rendezvous With Rama, or The Fountains of Paradise). Cassell also publish 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, but somehow I doubt the compiler of that book has chosen any mediocre films of great novels. One more minor quibble: the title index at the front and the author index at the back are both riddled with errors and omissions, which seems sloppy. Despite all that it is a wonderful compendium to dip into over and over again - but beware: you will end up with lots more of books to add to your must-read list. |
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
19 and one quarter years, and then some,
Each book gets about 300 words which editor Peter Boxall describes like this : "What each entry does is to respond, with the cramped urgency of a deathbed confession, to what makes each novel compelling, to what it is about each novel that makes one absolutely need to read it." 1001 books - it's a lot. If you had the time and money to read every one at a rate of one per week, you'd need 19 and a quarter years, so you better get going. But seriously, you aren't going to do that. The pre-1700 section, in particular, is strictly for students of literature - I stick my neck out and say that very few will be reading "Euphues : The Anatomy of Wit" by John Lyly or "Aithiopika" by Heliodorus for fun. And then the dogged reader will be coming up against the rarely-scaled Everests of literature such as Dorothy Richardson's "Pilgrimage" (13 vols, thousands of pages) or Proust (likewise) or "Infinite Jest" (one volume, 1100 pages). Each of which are going to take you 6 months solid. Odd things abound in this mighty guide. "Like Life" by Lorrie Moore is included - a collection of short stories, not a novel. So okay - why no Raymond Carver, America's greatest short story writer? And sometimes it's hard to see that the reviewer even likes the book in question - "The Secret History" is described as "quality trash for highbrows"! Or take this: "As with his other writing `The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' raises questions about the representation of female characters, and invites accusations of latent misogyny. These are valid objections that may engender fruitful considerations of this novel as a historical document as much as a work of experimental fiction." Well, that's hardly an enthusiastic endorsement. (And while on the subject of misogyny, I'm sad to see the loathsome `American Psycho' in here - the reviewer (and editor) has fallen for the old "it's ironic, it's not actually a book that revels in descriptions of butchering women" line. It may be ironic, but I'm sorry to say that Mr Ellis does, in fact, revel in vile descriptions of butchering women. So it is - extremely - misogynistic.) Some authors are wildly over-represented, such as J M Coatzee, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster, all of which have more titles in here than Henry James. It's interesting to check if the Booker Prizewinners are included - 20 are out of 37 and there are some strange omissions - no room for "Vernon God Little" or "The True History of the Kelly Gang", "Sacred Hunger" (nothing at all by Barry Unsworth in fact - what's wrong with him?), "The Famished Road" or "Hotel du Lac". So you can see this is a guide with enough in it to annoy everyone - tremendous fun for everyone, but particularly those who have just been sentenced to a long stretch of solitary confinement. |
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51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
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