![]() ![]() ![]() Enormous, picturesque, fully annotated and researched, and each book is picked with love.ĭo I have any issues with this tome? Perhaps. That being said, this book is a beautiful doorstopper. I don't know if this list is quite as life-changing as it purports, but I will grant it this: It is very eclectic and a wide-reaching list of true classics interspersed with the best of the best B-List books you've probably never heard of or you might have heard in passing before they slipped beneath the waves of all the other books on the high seas. I have cherry-picked about 20-30 books out of this reference book to look into at a future date, and I am NOT planning on finding all the rest. The number, as of today, sits at a modest 205. ħ/2/18 - By request, I counted how many of these I've actually read. The full list is available on the companion website: 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die.Īs for me, I have picked up a shorter and probably less impressive list, which are patiently waiting on the shelves of my library to be opened, either again or for the first time. But all in all, there you have it: a full library to keep you reading all the way to the grave. Some of these choices or omissions are indeed questionable and might well become a bit outdated in quite a short time. James Mustich’s book provides a sort of blurb orgy, with a blend of “to read before you die” list fetishism, so pervasive on the internet (see right here: Popular 100 Books To Read Before You Die Shelf).Ī few of the books in this selection are unavoidable highbrow, no-brainer classics: Homer, Dante, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hugo, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Mann… But Mustich, a man who made his career as a librarian and publisher in Connecticut, also has some surprises in store, from a wide variety of genres, times and places: illustrated children books, contemporary political or historical essays, graphic novels, cookery books, poetry, travelogues, memoirs, spirituality, crime fiction or philosophy. Making lists of books to read is a hopeful by-product of this obsession. One of the quiet delights of any bibliophile is to wander between the shelves of a library (sometimes one’s private collection, and sometimes more extensive public libraries or bookshops), examine the backs of books, feel the grain of their covers and, more often than not, read the back cover blurbs, in careful search of the next read. Add it all up, and in fact there are more than six thousand titles by nearly four thousand authors mentioned-a life-changing list for a lifetime of reading. ![]() There are nuts and bolts, too-best editions to read, other books by the author, “if you like this, you’ll like that” recommendations, and an interesting endnote of adaptations where appropriate. And its alphabetical arrangement by author assures that surprises await on almost every turn of the page, with Cormac McCarthy and The Road next to Robert McCloskey and Make Way for Ducklings, Alice Walker next to Izaac Walton. Lists to help pick and choose, like Offbeat Escapes, or A Long Climb, but What a View. There are classics, of course, and unexpected treasures, too. Or, like browsing in the best kind of bookshop, stumble on a completely unknown author and work, and feel that tingle of discovery. Or come across a title you always meant to read and never got around to. But it’s not a proscriptive list of the “great works”-rather, it’s a celebration of the glorious mosaic that is our literary heritage.įlip it open to any page and be transfixed by a fresh take on a very favorite book. Celebrate the pleasure of reading and the thrill of discovering new titles in an extraordinary book that’s as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the 1,000-plus titles it recommends.Ĭovering fiction, poetry, science and science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children’s books, history, and more, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die ranges across cultures and through time to offer an eclectic collection of works that each deserve to come with the recommendation, You have to read this. ![]()
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