Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die discussion

I haven't seen it, but I've heard that there is a new edition out there. It is supposed to be more "international." Some books have been removed, and some have been added. Someone on another site was kind enough to post the books that have been added (at end of post.)

Does anyone know what has been removed? How are you all going to deal with this? Read just the old list? Just the new one? Combine the two? I think I'm going to stick with the old, but keep the new books in mind if there are any I particularly want to read.

(I have too many words, so this will be 2 posts.)

Books added to the 2008 edition of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die:

Pre-1800
The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter – Anonymous
The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
Romance of the Three Kingdoms – Luo Guanzhong
The Water Margin – Shi Nai’an Luo Guanzhong
Tirant Lo Blanc – Joanot Martorell
La Celestina – Fernando de Rojas
Amadis of Gaul – Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo
The Life of Larzirillo de Tormes – Anonymous
The Lusiad – Luis Vaz de Camoes
Monkey: A Journey to the West – Wu Cheng’en
Thomas of Reading – Thomas Deloney
The Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Conquest of New Spain – Bernal Diaz Del Castillo
The Adventurous Simplicissimus – Hans Von Grimmelshausen
The Princess of Cleves –Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
Anton Reiser – Karl Philipp Moritz
A Dream of Red Mansions – Cao Xueqin

1800s
Henry of Ofterdingen – Novalis
Michael Kohlhaas – Heinrich Von Kliest
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr – E.T.A. Hoffmann
The Life of a Good-For-Nothing – Joseph Von Eichendorff
Eugene Onegin – Alexander Pushkin
The Lion of Flanders – Hendrik Conscience
Camera Obscura – Hildebrand
A Hero of Our Times – Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov
Facundo – Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
The Devil’s Pool – George Sand
Green Henry – Gottfried keller
Indian Summer – Adalbert Strifer
Max Havelaar – Multatuli
Pepita Jimenez – Juan Valera
The Crime of Father Amado – Jose Maria Eca de Queiros
Martin Fierro – Jose Hernandez
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
The Regent’s Wife – Clarin Leopoldo Alas
The Quest – Frederik Van Eden
The Manors of Ulloa – Emilia Pardo Bazan
Under The Yolk – Ivan Vazov
The Child of Pleasure – Gabriele D’Annunzio
Eline Vere – Louis Couperus
Thais – Anatole France
Down There – Joris – Karl Huysmans
The Viceroys – Federico De Roberto
Compassion – Benito Perez Galdos
Pharaoh – Boleslaw prus
As a Man Grows Older – Italo Svevo
Dom Casmurro – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Eclipse of the Crescent Moon – Geza Gardonyi

1900s
Sansokan: The Tigers of Mompracem – Emilio Salgari
None but The Brave – Arthur Schnitzler
The Call of The Wild – Jack London
Memoirs of my Nervous Illness – Daniel P. Schreber
The Way of All Flesh – Samuel Butler
Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann
Solitude – Victor Catala
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Rainer Maria Rilke
Platero and I – juan Ramon Jimenez
The Underdogs – Mariano azuela
Pallieter – Felix Timmermans
Home and the World – Rabindra Nath Tagore
Growth of the Soul – Knut Hamsu
The Storm of Steel – Ernst Junger
Life of Christ – Giovanni Papini
Claudine’s House – Colette
The Forest of the Hanged – Liviu Rebreanu
Kristin Lavransdatter – Sigrid Undset
The New World – Heruy Walda-Sellasse
Chaka the Zulu – Thomas Mofolo
Under Satan’s Sun – Georges Bernanos
Alberta and Jacob – Cora Sandel
The Case of Sergeant Grischa – Arnold Zweig
Some Prefer Nettles – Junichiro Tanizaki
Retreat Without Song – Shahan Shahnoor
I Thought of Daisy – Edmund Wilson
Monica - Saunders Lewis
Insatiability – Stanislaw lgnacy Witkiewicz
The Return of Philip Latinowicz – Miroslav Krleza
The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
The Forbidden Realm – J. J. Slauerhoff
Viper’s Tangle – Francois Mauriac
Cheese – Willem Elsschot
Man’s Fate – Andre Malraux
The Street of Crocodiles – Bruno Schulz
The Bells of Basel – Louis Aragon
Untouchable - Muik Raj Anand
War With the Newts – Karel Capek
Rickshaw Boy – Lao She
Ferdydurke – Witold Gombrowicz
The Blind Owl – Sadegh Hedayat
Alamut – Vladimar Bartol
On the Edge of Reason – Miroslav Krleza
The Man who Loved Children – Christina Stead
Broad and Alien is the World – Ciro Alegria
Chess Story – Stefan Zweig
Joseph and His Brothers – Thomas Mann
Pippi Longstocking – Astrid Lindgren
Bosnian Chronicle – Ivo Andric
The Tin Flute – Gabrielle Roy
Andrea – Carmen Laforet
The Death of Virgil – Hermann Broch
Zorba The Greek – Nikos Kazantzakis
House in the Uplands – Erskine Caldwell
Froth on the Daydream – Boris Vian
Journey to the Alcarria – Camilo Jose Cela
Ashes and Diamonds – Jerzy Andrzejewski
In the Heart of the Seas – Shmuel Yosef Agnon
The Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen – Tadeusz Borowski
The Guiltless – Hermann Broch
Barabbas – Par Lagerkvist
The Hive – Camilo Jose Cela
Excellent Women – Barbara Pym
A Thousand Cranes – Yasunari Kawabata
The Lost Steps – Alejo Carpentier
The Hothouse – Wolfgang Koeppen
The Dark Child – Camara Laye
A Day in Spring – Ciril Kosmac
The Mandarins – Simone de Beauvoir
Death in Rome – Wolfgang Koeppen
The Sound of Waves – Yukio Mishima
The unknown Soldier – Vaino Linna
The Burning Plain – Juan Rulfo
The Tree of Man – Patrick White
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands – Joao Guimaraes Rosa
The Glass Bees – Ernst Junger
The Manila Rope – Veijo Meri
The Deadbeats – Ward Ruyslinck
The Birds – Tarjei Vesaas
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon – Jorge Amado
The Guide – R. K. Narayan
The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Deep Rivers – Jose Maria Arguedas
Down Second Avenue – Ezekiel Mphahlele
The Magician of Lublin – Isaac Bashevis Singer
Halftime – Martin Walser
Bebo’s girl – Carlo Cassola
God’s Bits of Wood – Ousmane Sembene
The Shipyard – Juan Carlos Onetti
No One Writes to the Colonel – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Peasant Boy – Xose Neira Vilas
Time of Silence – Luis Martin-Santos
The Death of Artemio Cruz – Carlos Fuentes
The Time of the Hero – Mario Vargas Llosa
The Third Wedding – Costas Taktsis
Three Trapped Tigers – Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Back to Oegstgeest – Jan Wolkers
Closely Watched Trains – Bohumil Hrabel
Garden Ashes – Danilo Kis
Death and the Dervish – Mesa Selimovic
Silence – Shusaku Endo
To Each His Own – Leonardo Sciascia
Marks of Identity – Juan Goytisolo
Miramar – Naguib Mahfouz
Z – Vassilis Vassilikos
The Manor – Isaac Bashevis Singer
Day of the Dolphin – Robert merle
The Cathedral – Oles Honchar
Jacob the Liar – Jurek Becker
The Case Worker – Gyorgy Konrad
Moscow Stations – Venedikt Yerofeev
Heartbreak Tango – Manuel Puig
Seasons of Migrations to the North – Tayeb Salih
Here’s to You Jesusa! – Elena Poniatowska
Fifth Business – Robertson Davies
Play It As It Lays – Joan Didion
A World For Julius – Alfredo Bryce Echenique
Cataract – Mykhaylo Osadchyi
Lives of Girls & Women – Alice Munro
The Twilight Years – Sawako Ariyoshi
The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty
The Dispossessed – Ursela K. Le Guin
The Diviners – Margaret Laurence
The Port – Antun Soljan
The Commandant – Jessica Anderson
The Year of the Hare – Arto Paasilinna
Women at Point Zero – Nawal El Saadawi
Blaming – Elizabeth Taylor
Kiss of the Spider Woman – Manuel Puig
Almost Transparent Blue – Ryu Murakami
The Engineer of Human Souls – Josef Skvorecky
Quartet in Autumn – Barbara Pym
The Wars – Timothy Findley
The Beggar Maid – Alice Munro
Requiem for a Dream – Hubert Selby Jr
The Back Room – Carmen Martin Gaite
So Long a Letter – Mariama Ba
A Dry White season – Andre Brink
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
Baltasar and Blimunda – Jose Saramago
The Christmas Oratorio – Goran Tunstrom
Fado Alexandrino – Antonio Lobo Antunes
The Witness – Juan Jose Saer
Professor Martens’ departure – Jean Kross
Larva: Midsummer Night’s Babel – Julian Rios
Fool’s Gold – Maro Douka
Southern Seas – Manuel Vasquez Montalban
Clear Light of Day – Anita Desai
The House with the Blind Glass Windows – Herbjorg Wassmo
Leaden Wings – Zhang Jie
The War at the End of the World – Mario Vargas Llosa
Couples, Passerby – Botho Strauss
Democracy – Joan Didion
The Young Man – Botho Strauss
Love machine – Louise Erdrich
Half of Man is Woman – Zhang Xianliang
Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
Simon and the Oaks – Marianne Fredriksson
Annie John – Jamaica Kincaid
Ancestral Voices – Etienne Van Heerden
The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman- Andrzej Szczypiorski
Memory of Fire – Eduardo Galeano
Ballad for Georg Henig – Viktor Paskov
Of Love and Shadows – Isabel Allende
All Souls – Javier Marias
Black Box – Amos Oz
Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto
The First Garden – Anne Herbert
The Last World – Christoph Ransmayr
Paradise of the Blind – Duong Thu Huong
Gimmick! – Joost Zwagerman
Obabakoak – Bernado Atxaga
Inland – Gerald Murnane
The Great Indian Novel – Shashi Tharoor
The Shadow Lines – Amitav Ghosh
The Daughter – Pavlos Matesis
The Laws – Connie Palmen
Faceless Killers – Henning Mankell
Astradeni – Eugenia Fakinou
Memoirs of rain – Sunetra Gupta
All The Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
The Triple Mirror of the Self – Zulfikar Ghose
Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture – Aposolos Doxiadis
Before Night Falls – Reinaldo Arenas
The Adventures and misadventures of Maqroll – Alvaro Mutis
Remembering Babylon – David Malouf
The Holder of the World – Bharati Mukherjee
The Twins – Tessa de Loo
Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light – Ivan Klima
Deep River – Shusaku Endo
Our Lady Of Assassins – Fernando Vallejo
Troubling Love – Elena Ferrante
The Late-Night News – Petros Markaris
Santa Evita – Tomas Eloy Matinez
A Light Comedy – Eduardo Mendoza
Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie Macdonald
Margot and the Angels – Kristien Hemmerechts
Crossfire – Miyabe Miyuki
The Heretic – Miguel Deliber
Dirty Havana Trilogy – Pedro Juan Gutierrez
Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolano
Pavel’s Letters – Monika Maron
In Search of Klingsor – Jorge Volpi
The Musuem of Unconditional Surrender – DubravKa Ugresic

2000s
Bartleby and Co – Enrique Vila-Matas
Celestial Harmonies – Peter Esterhazy
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon
I’m Not Scared – Niccolo Ammaniti
Soldiers of Salamis – Javier Cercas
Snow – Orhan Pamuk
The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri
Vernon God Little DBC Pierre
The Successor – Ismail Kadare
Lady Number Thirteen – Jose Carlos Somoza
Your Face Tomorrow – Javier Marias
The Swarm – Frank Schatzing
Suite Francaise – Irene Nemirovsky
The Book about Blanche and Marie – Per Olov Enquist
Small Island – Andrea Levy
2666 – Roberto Bolano
The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst
The Accidental – Ali Smith
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian – Marina Lewycka
Measuring the World – Daniel Kehlmann
Mother’s Milk Edward St. Aubyn
Carry Me Down – M.J. Hyland
Against the Day – Thomas Pynchon
The Inheritance of Loss – Kiran Desai
The Kindly Ones – Jonathan Littell
Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
Falling Man – Don Delillo
Animal’s People – Indra Sinha

Wow, reading all of those crossed my eyes! I have never heard of most of these, which is kind of sad. I'm going to look some of them up and then decide which ones I want to add. But I am starting The Namesake now. :)

so which got left off?

Thanks for posting the list for us, Sarah! I'm glad to see a few of the additions:

All The Pretty Horses
A Dry White Season
Call of the Wild
The Optimist's Daughter
Kiss of the Spiderwoman
Pippi Longstocking

Maybe the Inheritance of Loss and Before Night Falls, but I haven't read the Inheritance....

Wow, several of Joan Didion's were added!
Lots of new authors....
I'll have to study this when I find out what was taken off to make way for these. That's what happened, right?

I'm anxious to see how others of you react to the new list!

And "The Way of All Flesh"! Great to see that one added!

I just did a rough approximation of the titles that you posted. If ~350 new titles are being added (for whatever reason), I think I would more interested to see what is being removed and why. There are a few on this list of additions that I would certainly question.

Since I don't have the actual book, I have no idea what got taken off the list... I was able to find the book on Amazon UK, but not Amazon US, so perhaps it is only available in Britain right now? If anyone is able to get their hands on the book, we'd all like to know what got kicked off.

Nice, I am really interested to peruse the added reads. It's good to see a more international take on the list and new authors that I'm not as familiar with.

Though Allan Hollinghurst's Line of Beauty? Gag me with a spoon!

i'm right there with Bishop: what got the boot is every bit as interesting as what got added back in. hopefully the ones that were removed were the sort where a single author was over-represented by the inclusion of even their more minor works. but does that really add up to 350-worth??

I learned from a goodreads friend in the Netherlands that a different version of the 1001 List is published there. Could it be that you have just gotten wind of the U.K. version and that it is and will remain different from the U.S. version?

Just a thought since no one has located any explanation of why a new version and what has been removed from it, have they? I certainly haven't, and I did do a little reseach....

I just joined the group, and I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of this list. I have seen some books posted here and there, but not an entire list. Thankyou.

Here's a link to the book at Amazon UK:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/1001-Books-Mu...

It has a different cover, and you can look at just a few pages of the book. I'm thinking it might be different, but I'm not totally sure. Anyone? :)

Hey! yes, my dutch version looks almost but not quite like this one! of course, it doesn't have the latest additions from the 2000s on it, those should be fun to check out and I already have "half of a yellow sun" at home!
Baically, as I said before, author's that are really overrepresented (Ballard, Rushdie, atwood) were cut. However, some single authors, like Neal Stephenson, whose Cryptonomicon book I definetely will check out, were also cut.
... So again, I'm kind of glad that I know both lists - gives you more variety and that is all good since I'm not really after completing one or the other list anyway!

..."the Swarm" by Frank Schaetzing, though, is really not a book one HAS to read. That would be like saying that one HAS to read "The DaVinci Code"

There are quite a few on both versions of the list that fall into that category in my opinion, Smarti.
And didn't the N.Y. Times article we were referred to put "Interview With A Vampire" and "The Breast" in this category as well? Think so...and so do I.

true, there are probably very few books one really HAS to read. I was just astounded by "The Swarm", which is, in my opinion only a mediocre thriller. But then, so might be Interview with the Vampire for anybody not into fantastic fiction!

Sorry, Smarti! I made the post including "Interview..." before I read your list of five favorites so far. Actually, I liked it when I read it also; and my personal favorites are different than the list I'd make that others "must read"! I think that is what you were saying also..

Ok, so, since it's my penultimate day at my job and I'm not really working, I made a new spreadsheet to which I added these updated books. The total number is now 1276. I put asterisks next to the books that were "new."

My first impressions, sadly, involve the presumed need to diversify the list, and going by how truly useless many of the existing moder-day entries are, I don't have a lot of faith for their new brethren.

It's also interesting to note that, again, both Blindness and The Master of Go were omitted, that only one of Bohumil Hrabal's novels was included (though thank god Klima and Skvorecky got a nod), and a host of other oversights. Since I like nothing better than an uphill climb, I'm adding the books and not subtracting any (ok - there's every possibility my finger might slip and hit delete over a Victorian novelist).

Yelena, you should give Roberto Bolano a try. I noticed that both of his novels were added, though at this time I think only The Savage Detectives has been translated into English. I'm hoping the English translation of 2666 comes out soon, because I am nowhere near confident enough in my Spanish to attempt that.

Still, skip over Line of Beauty if you can. It was one of the most uninteresting reads of the past six years for me. But then the British aristocracy has always bored the pants off of me, whether it's Victorian or Thatcher-era.

Maybe I've had a UK edition of the list all along, I've noticed that people mention books that aren't in my copy. So far I've reached over 400, will be really peeved if they are all books kicked off the list. I've looked at the new edition on amazon and had a quick look at the index page and from what I can remember they look pretty much the same. Have to go by the list on 43things website as my copy is in storage in New Zealand.
Might have trouble with Taebek Mountains as I believe it's only available in Korean.

Yelena, would you be willing to link to that updated spreadsheet here? I've been really curious about the edits, but I don't own either book!

I don't think a lot of the formatting held up, but here it is: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?ke...

The new ones are marked by asterisks instead of numbers since I didn't have the time to figure out exactly where in the chronology each fit. Sorry...

The Line of Beauty was a fine read but even so, I see your point and if anything I'd replace it with At Swim, Two Boys with some overlap in subject matter the latter is still a broader book and just as deeply touching IMO.

So just a question I thought of while reading through all these posts: if there was a new 2008 version, does that mean we might expect a new version is 2009, 2010, 2011...? This might make the list never-ending.

This might make the list never-ending.

Which would suit me just fine. I never expect to finish it, but love their take on certain works and would really enjoy seeing what gets added/removed as the years progress.

Logan, I concur, I went through (which took forever) and read the descriptions of each book and only added the ones I found interesting to my to-read list. I figure once I get through that list (about 5 years I think) then maybe I will start looking at this list again and find new books. As new books get added I will go through them and find the ones that look interesting.

This is an excellent and useful list! But I've counted only 281 books on here that were added to 2008, whereas is seems that 282 books were removed from 2006 edition... So I'm missing a book somewhere. I've been staring at these lists entirely too long today.