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| 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die | 
 enlarge | Creators: Peter Ackroyd, Peter Boxall
Publisher: Universe
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy New: $20.00
You Save: $14.95 (43%)
New (32) Used (13) Collectible (1) from $12.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  49 reviews
Sales Rank: 42556
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 960
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.5
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 6.4 x 2.4
ISBN: 0789313707
Dewey Decimal Number: 011.73
EAN: 9780789313706
ASIN: 0789313707
Publication Date: March 7, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
For discerning bibliophiles and readers who enjoy unforgettable classic literature, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is a trove of reviews covering a century of memorable writing. Each work of literature featured here is a seminal work key to understanding and appreciating the written word.The featured works have been handpicked by a team of international critics and literary luminaries, including Derek Attridge (world expert on James Joyce), Cedric Watts (renowned authority on Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene), Laura Marcus (noted Virginia Woolf expert), and David Mariott (poet and expert on African-American literature), among some twenty others.Addictive, browsable, knowledgeable—1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die will be a boon companion for anyone who loves good writing and an inspiration for anyone who is just beginning to discover a love of books. Each entry is accompanied by an authoritative yet opinionated critical essay describing the importance and influence of the work in question. Also included are publishing history and career details about the authors, as well as reproductions of period dust jackets and book designs.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 44 more reviews...
 Just 1001 Books Some Prof Likes September 30, 2006
214 out of 238 found this review helpful
Like so many bad, bad movies, this book is a beautiful production. It features slick, heavy paper; a million color pictures; attractive, readable typeface; witty contributors. Its proportions seem just right for its weight.
But unless you just love grazing on hors d'oeuvres (and many do), you're likely to be disappointed by this beautiful but cynical exercise in marketing to the culturally insecure. As somebody has already noted: No Iliad. No Odyssey. No Aeschylus. No Euripides. No Boccaccio. No Chaucer. No Dante. No Machiavelli. No Shakespeare. No Marlowe.
No Old or New Testament. No Q'uran. No Lao-tse, Confucius, Bhagavda-Gita (really short and really good). No Beowulf. No Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
In fact, only 13 works from before 1700 make the cut - and lest you think fun is the criterion, one of them is John Lyly's Euphues long regarded as one of the most unreadable and, shall we say, "affected" works in English literature. You get John Lyly instead of John Milton.
On the other hand, you do get 69 titles of books that have appeared since 2000. That's a lot of "classics" in record time. How did they pick these? And there's another 700 - out of 1001, if you can dig it, "you must read before you die" written in the 20th Century.
The 19th Century is well represented, I'll grant. Huck Finn is here - but not Twain's more complicated Letters from the Earth, The Mysterious Stranger, A Connecticut Yankee, or Pudd'nhead Wilson.
They also felt it necessary to fill out the list with a few short stories like Lovecraft's "The Mountains of Madness" and Gogol's "The Nose." Great stories, but two actual books had to go to make room for them. Books like The Red Badge of Courage, for example.
Or maybe The Red Badge got crowded out by Justine or American Psycho.
This is a book for people who like to read about books in snappy reviews, and look at color pictures of books. You'll find some titles worth pursuing, but you could do better, for starters, just by getting a list of Cliff's Notes titles and going on from there.
You can do that for free.
 My new favorite book about books March 17, 2006
145 out of 159 found this review helpful
I read a lot of books. I have often looked at the various "books about books" and been disappointed. They are usually geared toward the casual reader, and they never prove very useful to me.
This book is different. First of all, it's gorgeous. I am not thrilled with the cover, but the inside illustrations and pictures are all terrific and good quality. Almost every page contains either an author photo, or full color picture of the book cover.
The books listed all have wonderful no-spoiler, intelligent summaries. I find myself learning things about novels I've already read, and I have been reshuffling my "to read next" pile as I go along.
This is an eclectic selection, even though admittedly it's Western oriented. I don't know if any reference book can have everyone's favorites - there are a lot of novels out there. Yet this one is very comprehensive and satisfying.
Highly, highly recommended.
19 and one quarter years and then some June 10, 2006
116 out of 129 found this review helpful
This is a splendid and much needed guide - the beautiful illustrations are worth the price. It should be stacked on your shelf next to "The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction" and "The salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors" which are also recommended and which take completely different approaches. "1001 Books" presents you with The Really Great Stuff . Which is where the fun starts - this is a book all readers will want to argue passionately with. Almost at the same time as I'm finding authors I'd never heard of and making "must buy" lists, I'm shouting at the editors - "what's this? You've got three in here by Douglas Adams, and NONE by Roddy Doyle? What's all that about??" I mean, Douglas Adams is good for one, but not three... And if Douglas Adams, then Garrison Keillor...
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.
I am appalled March 30, 2006
55 out of 105 found this review helpful
I haven't read this book, and probably won't.
Why, then, do I feel justified in reviewing it? A list of books that purports to advise readers what they "must" read before they die must stand, at least in large part, on the books selected for it. In the absence of the "Look Inside this Book" feature being active for this book, I searched for and found elsewhere a list of the 1,001 books that are included in this book, and spent a few minutes looking it over.
1,001 books is a large number (few people read a book a week, but even at that rate, with no time out, it would take nearly 20 years, without reading anything other than these books, to complete the list). There is plenty of space for both foundational and later literature.
But looking at the list of books selected, I am appalled. Other reviewers have noted the high number of contemporary books, many of which are unlikely to pass the test of time. But some of the omissions are, frankly, appalling. The core of Western literature, without which a reader is much limited in their ability to understand later writing, is missing. How can the Iliad and Odyssey not be books one should read before one dies? Aithiopika, but not the Aeneid? Not Oedipus Rex, Antigone, or indeed a single Greek play? Not Plato's Republic? Not Chaucer's Canterbury Tales? Not Milton's Paradise Lost? The Little Prince, but not The Divine Comedy? And not a single work of Shakespeare? And not the single work which has affected later literature more than any other work ever written -- the Bible?
I do not worship the classical canon at the expense of later writing. But to suggest that it is more valuable before one dies to have read Dining on Stones than to have read King Lear is doing a very serious disservice to prospective readers who may indeed be wondering what books it will benefit them to have read at some point during their lifetimes. Steering those readers away from the foundational works of Western literature into a bath of modern novels is not only irresponsible but downright cruel.
Readers who seriously want to know what they should read before they die would be much better with Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan. That is the best single source I know of the true books that one really should read before one dies. To die having read Fingersmith but not having read the Odyssey would be to have ill spent one's reading time here on earth.
UNBELIEVABLE MISTAKE December 11, 2006
28 out of 56 found this review helpful
I have just received a copy of the Spanish translation of this book, and obviously I have not had time to read it, but just when turning the pages I found a book that I have read. It is "The Bridge on the Drina" by the Bosnian novelist Ivo Andric, who won the Nobel Prize in 1961.
The authors tell us that the whole novel happens around the bridge that the Turkish built in Mostar, and that was destroyed during the last Yugoslavian war, and recently rebuilt. They insist several times in this affirmation. Congratulations, but maybe they should have read the novel before recommending it or even talking about it.
"The Bridge on the Drina" does not happen in Mostar, but in Visegrad. It is not a supposition; the author says so in the first pages. But there is more. Amongst many other reasons, the bridge cannot be the Mostar one because... the river Drina does not flow through Mostar! Mostar's river is called Neretva. During the last war, the bridge on the river Drina in Visegrad received no damage at all. It lost one of its eleven arches during WWI, and also some minor damage during WWII, but not in last Bosnian war.
Instead, Mostar Stari Most (the Mostar old bridge) was effectively destroyed in 1993 by the Croatians, yes, but Mr. Andric does not say a word of this bridge in his novel, sorry about it.
After finding a mistake like this the first day I take a look on "1001 books ...", I wonder whether it has been a good idea spending a lot of money in it. Will the other 1000 comments offer this same level of exactness?
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