Don't Worry, I Won't Even Try

Here’s another book list, ten times longer than the usual. It lists 1,001 books, including Nabokov’s entire ouvre, incidentally. I doubt that any one person has read all of these books, and I suspect it’s a compilation of other booklists out there, but I guess I could be wrong.

There are a lot of good and great books on here, but I don’t think there were a whole lot of tough choices made; this person just included everything. Even The Black Dahlia, which is horrible! No Ayn Rand, though, which is something. And Breton’s Nadja is on there, which makes me happy. But did you know Edith Wharton wrote something called The Glimpses of the Moon or something? I didn’t. It seems like if an author is on there, the list includes all their minor and major works, and does no culling, and that weakens the whole list. And if you’re going to compile a list this exhaustive and not include The Epic of Gilgemesh, I just don’t trust you.

Anyway, I like seeing how many books I’ve read when I see a list like this. It took me awhile to calculate and I might have missed one or two, but I counted 143½. Seems rather pitiful when compared to Doppleganger’s 200 books, but hey, at least I’ve read Ulysses!