I was recently interviewed by Finn Harvor on the current state of the book/publishing industry. I hope I made at least a little bit of sense.

Jason Kottke recently posted a link to a book called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, foreward by Peter Ackroyd and Edited by Peter Boxall. (I've used Jason's referral code, as I'm not a member of Amazon's program, and somebody should get the bump, should you decide to buy the book from that link.) Posting about a book like this is worthless, really, unless you've managed to take a look at the list, and so here it is (or so I've been given to understand). The list is composed entirely of fiction, and by that they mean prose fiction so nobody has to worry about struggling through Shakespeare or Milton (why Shakespeare should be much of a struggle is beyond me, but plenty of folks seem intimidated). It's also pretty heavily biased in favour of books published after 1900, and we could debate forever why some books were chosen and some were not. Why choose Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden, an excellent book, certainly, but not the follow-up Still Life, the only work of literature other than Othello to reduce me to tears? Why so much Faulkner, but no Light in August? The list seems compiled rather than considered, but I suppose that's the way of lists. And even though this list is presented with less behind it than, say, Harold Bloom's The Western Cannon, here's what I've read from it (note that I've included The Recognitions, because I'm reading it now, and that I have excluded those works that I have not read in full):

1. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro


2. On Beauty, by Zadie Smith


3. The Double, by José Saramago


4. Fury, by Salman Rushdie


5. Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk


6. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel


7. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski


8. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson


9. Underworld, by Don DeLillo


10. The Ghost Road, by Pat Barker


11. The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields


12. Regeneration, by Pat Barker


13. Possession, by A.S. Byatt


14. Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro


15. Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco


16. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie


17. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, by Douglas Adams


18. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams


19. The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson


20. Watchmen, by Alan Moore & David Gibbons


21. White Noise, by Don DeLillo


22. Neuromancer, by William Gibson


23. Flaubert’s Parrot, by Julian Barnes


24. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie


25. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco


26. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino


27. The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt


28. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison


29. The Public Burning, by Robert Coover


30. Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino


31. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson


32. Slaughterhouse-five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


33. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles


34. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, by Vladimir Nabokov


35. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke


36. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick


37. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez


38. The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon


39. V., by Thomas Pynchon


40. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut


41. The Collector, by John Fowles


42. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey


43. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov


44. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges


45. Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem


46. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller


47. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee


48. Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs


49. The Once and Future King, by T.H. White


50. The Bell, by Iris Murdoch


51. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac


52. Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov


53. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien


54. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov


55. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene


56. The Recognitions, by William Gaddis


57. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding


58. Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming


59. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger


60. Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake


61. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell


62. Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake


63. Animal Farm, by George Orwell


64. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges


65. The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


66. The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse


67. Between the Acts, by Virginia Woolf


68. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler


69. Murphy, by Samuel Beckett


70. The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien


71. Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner


72. Miss Lonelyhearts, by Nathanael West


73. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley


74. Orlando, by Virginia Woolf


75. Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse


76. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway


77. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf


78. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald


79. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse


80. Ulysses, by James Joyce


81. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce


82. The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan


83. Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence


84. The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad


85. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad


86. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James


87. The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells


88. The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells


89. The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells


90. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells


91. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson


92. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain


93. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson


94. The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James


95. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll


96. Silas Marner, by George Eliot


97. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens


98. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë


99. The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe


100. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens


101. Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley


102. Émile; or, On Education, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau


103. Pamela, by Samuel Richardson


104. A Modest Proposal, by Jonathan Swift


105. Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe


106. Love in Excess, by Eliza Haywood


107. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Okay, I'll be honest, I just like posting lists every so often, and I feel like I'm due. And 107 books, from a list like this one, really isn't so bad, especially considering I was twenty years old before I started reading much beyond spy novels and bad fantasy.