C.E.’s Comments (group member since Mar 02, 2012)

C.E.’s comments from the 501 Must-Read Books group.

An updated opinion, six years later:

I've since read Uncle Tom, and while it has significant historical value I can't say it offers much as literature, so it's absence is understandable. I'm still backing Harper Lee, and could still be coerced to add Catch 22.

I keep a running list of others I'd propose, for various reasons, and not all of which I've read:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter
All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Remarque
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry
The Call of the Wild / White Fang, by Jack London
The Decameron, by Boccacio
The Little Engine that Could, by Watty Piper
Watership Down, by Richard Adams
Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis
The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown
We Were the Mulvaneys, by Joyce Carol Oates
Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow
The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson
Chess, by Stefan Zweig
Over Sea, Under Stone, by Susan Cooper
A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
I, Claudius, by Robert Graves
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
Night, by Elie Wiesel
The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
Boy's Life, by Robert R. McCammon
The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman
A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass
The Journals of Captain Cook, by James R. Cook
???? By Chinua Mieville?
???? By Neil Stephenson?
The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Little, Big, by John Crowley
Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana Jr.
???? By Ann Patchett
???? By Nevil Shute

I'm still committed to this list (off and on, at any rate) and have doubled my count of titles since first starting, so I'm up to just over 150 now. There's been a lot of fantastic finds, with only a few that didn't impress me.

I've forged this image in my mind of a white British male being the one behind this list, based on the selections, but nothing's come to light about his identity, to the best of my knowledge.

Haven't seen it for sale lately (or anything else in the 501 series), so I don't expect we'll have an updated version like we've seen with the 1001 list. I still prefer this one, so it's too bad. There's definitely a few titles I'd drop/add, but it would be nice to have that from the source. Wishful thinking, I guess.

I can't find any information about the book pictured in the image above. What is the 501 Book Journal?

I'm surprised that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" are nowhere to be seen; I thought those would be shoe-ins. "Catch 22" isn't a book I especially like, but it's another I'm surprised isn't here.

I expect they could have made the list entirely from western cannon but then pared it down to fit in more foreign entries. That's the best explanation I can think of for some peculiar absences.

I was going to propose we list all 501 books on the group bookshelf ... but that's a bit intimidating. I added the first from each of the six categories ... but that's a little meaningless. What to do?

Maybe just for fun, whenever a member completes a book from the list they should add it to the shelf?

I've read 80 from the list so far, and while I don't focus all of my reading only on this list I would say every third or fourth book is from it. I've a long list of TBR items that never would have been brought to my attention if not for this book. Many of the ones I've read so far have been very pleasant surprises.

This list seems spectacularly less popular than the 1001 books list, but having compared them I find this one much more to my liking. One, it's shorter. Two, it's purposely diverse in its authors, almost never listing the same author twice in the same category (the only exception is Dickens, under "Classics"). Three, the selections are genuinely good reads, not merely highbrow art pieces. The vast majority are very easy to find (I'm having trouble with a small number of them, esp. in the sci-fi and thriller categories.)