Customer Reviews
Revised 2008 edition - By: James, 21 Jun 2008 
This second "international" edition has been revised to include a far wider range of authors, including many prize winners (Nobel - Isaac Bashevis Singer, SY Agnon, Orhan Pamuk, Naguib Mahfouz; Neustadt - David Malouf, Alvaro Mutis), more Spanish-language novels (Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Bolano, Juan Carlos Onetti) & classics like Ferdydurke (Gombrowicz), The Guide (RK Narayan), Dom Casmurro (Machado de Assis), the Chinese epic The Dream of Red Mansions/Story of the Stone, & Seasons of the Migration to the North (Tayeb Salih). Most of the books cut from the 1st edition are from authors with 3 or more entries, giving a much more varied list (although a shame to lose The Brothers Karamazov ?).
The 1001 are still quite biased toward Europe, with fewer US titles than similar books. Everyone will have their own gripes with individual choices (I would have liked to have seen Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar, Paradiso by Jose Lezama Lima, Life & Fate by Vasily Grossman, All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren, The Poor Christ of Bomba by Mongo Beti, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Petersburg by Andrei Bely). It is interesting to see some titles included which are not yet available in English translation (The Unknown Soldier by Vaino Linna, Grande Sertao by Joao Guimaraes Rosa), let's hope publishers take note.
My main reservation - as with the first edition - is the inconsistency. Why include the epic poem the Lusiad & not the Iliad or Aeneid, or verse such as Eugene Onegin & not Goethe's Faust, history like The Conquest of New Spain & not Gibbon, short stories by Lorrie Moore & not Chekhov. Also the index is full of errors & omissions like the first edition (Mishima's The Sound of Waves is listed under William Faulkner).
But this is still a fascinating book to browse & a great source of ideas for sampling world literature. A third edition would be welcome, maybe deleting the "quality trash" (the book's description) like Donna Tartt's The Secret History in favour of more little-known masterpieces which deserve to be better known.
Fun Argument Starter for Fiction Lovers - By: A. Ross, 04 Jun 2008 The first thing to understand about this massive brick of a book is that the title is meant to catch one's attention & that like the contents, it must be taken with a very large grain of salt. Dial it down to "1001 Books You Might Like to Read at Some Point" & you're more on target. The second thing to understand is that for editorial purposes, "book" generallly means "adult novel" for the most part, so there's no non-fiction or poetry or plays or essays or or children's books or short stories (with one or two unexplained exceptions). The third thing to understand is that the book originated in Britain, & as such, has a rather British emphasis & a rather decidedly modern tilt. (The editor teaches at the University of Sussex, & a disproportionate number of the contributors either teach there with him or are current or former doctoral students there.) With these points understood, most fiction-lovers will find this to be a reallly fun coffee-table or bathroom book to have around for years.
Each of the 1001 books is given roughly 300 words in which to "respond...to what makes each novel compelling, to what it is about each novel that makes one absolutely need to read it." However, with around 100 contributors, the style of these varies wildly: some focus on the book's prose style, some its context, many are mere plot summaries, & unfortunately very few are genuinely inspirational. Arranged chronologicallly by date of original publication, the book grants roughly 80 pages to the years leading up to 1800, 140 pages to the 1800s, 650 pages to the 1900s, & 65 pages to the relatively recent 2000s. Aside from the 300 words & some basic bibliographic information, almost each selection is accompanied by some kind of artwork (jacket art, author photos, stills from film adaptations, etc.), making the book vivid & gorgeous throughout. Of course, the real fun in a book like this is the arguments it provokes, & the general hue & outcry about omissions or disproportional representation. Before I get into my own pet peeve, here's a little context:
-- The most heavily represented authors are J.M. Coetzee & Charles Dickens with 11 entries each, Samuel Beckett with 10, Graham Greene & Virginia Woolf with 9, Paul Auster, J.G. Balllard, & Ian McEwan with 8, & Saul Bellow, Dom DeLillo, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Philip Roth, & Salman Rushdie with 7. This does not include instances where trilogies have been lumped together into a lone entry, as is done several times. And I'll admit this is based on a quick run through the index, rather than a careful parsing, so I may have missed one or two people or miscounted slightly.
-- Despite the above, many prominent writers are completely missing, such as the following: William Boyd (Any Human Heart), Ray Bradberry (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451), Willa Cather (Death Comes For the Archbishop), Roddy Doyle (Barrytown trilogy), Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Naguib Mahfouz (Cairo trilogy), Norman Mailer (The Naked & the Dead), Bernard Malamud (The Fixer), Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, No Country For Old Men), George McDonald Fraser (Flashman series), John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra), Orhan Pamuk (My Name is Red), Walker Percy (The Moviegoer), Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged), J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter series), Jane Smiley, Walllace Stegner (Crossing to Safety), William Styron (Sophie's Choice), Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist). Again, I'll admit the above list is largely compiled from other reviewers' mentions.
-- Although you would think a book like this would give a token nod to the established critical orthodoxy, only about half of Booker Prize winners appear, & only about 2/3 of Nobel Prize winners who were known for their novels appear. That's not to say that every prize-winning book is a must read, but when they come at the expense of decent, but entirely unremarkable, selections such as Zadie Smith's "On Beauty" or Ardal O'Hanlon's "Talk of the Town," one has to wonder...
-- Genre fiction gets very short shrift. Crime & science fiction are represented by the most obvious of choices (Chandler, Christie, Hammett, Asimov, & Clarke for example, although there are three Elmore Leonards). Horror gets a brief look-in with Dracula, Frankenstein, a Lovecraft short story & a Stephen King book. Aside from the obvious Tolkein, there's a lone fantasy title. Adventure tales are represented by H. Rider Haggard. And there are no westerns whatsoever. It's as if there was an editorial decision made that genre selections must be included & somewhat was assigned the task of rounding up the usual suspects. Oh yes, it's worth pointing out that a token graphic novel (Watchmen) was included, so that's nice.
My own personal bone to pick is with the Eurocentrism of the selections. I did a quick & dirty tabulation & found that roughly 70% of the selections were from Western Europe, roughly 25% from the U.S., & roughly 5% the rest of the world. The world's most populous country, China (currently 1 in 5 humans is Chinese), is represented by exactly zero entries. Ditto for the entire Arab-speaking/reading world. Don't even get me started on Africa -- entries authored by white African authors outnumber those by non-white African authors by a 2:1 ratio. And not coincidentallly, alll the non-white African writers represented alll wrote in English. It's not that hard to find excellent fiction in translation, & as an example, I would point to the omission of Nobel laureates like Mahfouz, Pamuk, & pretty much every other non-Western winner. Anyway, that's just my own pet peeve, & most others probably don't care.
Ultimately, it's a fun book to have lying around to dip into from now & then or as a provocation to oneself or others.
There are some odd omissions in this compilation - By: Caroline Richmond, 05 Aug 2007 The book lists several titles by Saul Bellow, but none by that marvellous (and Nobel prize-winning) writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is nothing by William Boyd. There is a general shortage of modern fiction in translation: Peter Hoeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow is included, though the plot fallls apart in the second half of the book, but there is nothing by Kerstin Ekman, whose literary thrillers Under The Snow & Blackwater are far better.
Also absent are the Nobel prizewinners Orhan Pamuk & Naguib Mahfouz. And Shiva Naipaul. And Bill Bryson.
I daresay I'll think of many other absentees in the next days & weeks ...
Caution: unputdownable - By: Jl Adcock, 18 Jul 2007 Any book that encourages reading has got to be a good thing. Whilst generallly not a fan of titles that try tell me how to spend my time before I croak - this actuallly covers a vast amount of literature that surely will enrich any life - even if you only tackle a smalll number of the offerings recommended here.
Like anything of this sort, such a list is always going to provoke reactions about what was included, & what was left out. There's a good mix here - something for everyone - & 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.
A great book for dipping into....... - By: Wynne Kelly, 31 May 2007 
This is a great book for "dipping into" rather than reading from start to finish. One of the members of the reading group I belong to brought it along to one of our meetings & I knew I had to buy my own copy. Like many people I had to do a count of how many of the 1001 books I had actuallly read - it was about 140. So I have a long way to go......
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 & The Razor's Edge by WS Maugham.
Obviously any list of this type is contentious & we alll 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 & original book covers.
