Strange Exclusions: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Part VI

There's one book called 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and there's another called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I'm not an advocate of the "must . . . before you die" school of thought--there are no "musts" before you die--but I can understand the desire to see what a list of the top 1001 books on your lifetime reading list would look like. What would mine look like? It wouldn't look very much like the bibliography found in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, that's for sure.

For the book's title being 1001 Books it's strange how the introduction appears oriented towards novels--and then, in the actual list, the term "novel" appears to be used rather loosely, and if the goal was to recommend 1001 novels then that should've been the title. I thought I'd find much more of these kind of books:

Classics of World Literature

The Illiad and The Odyssey

The Dialogues of Plato

The Prince by Machiavelli

The Communist Manifesto by Marx

Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau (Walden is listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die but Civil Disobedience isn't)

The Federalist Papers

Women's Literature

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

The Second Sex by Simone Beauvoir

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Twentieth Century Classics

The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence

Churchill's four-vol. History of the English-speaking Peoples

Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl

Born Free by Joy Adamson

The Diary of Anne Frank

From Here to Eternity by James Jones

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Gray

Strange Omissions Considering Various Authors

Mark Twain is represented by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but not The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which is almost a pre-requisite for Huckleberry Finn)

Poe is represented by The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum (which is usually classified as short fiction) but not by Masque of the Red Death or The Murders in the Rue Morgue 

Theodore Dreiser is represented by Sister Carrie but not An American Tragedy

Steinbeck is represented by The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men but not East of Eden or Cannery Row or The Pearl or Travels With Charley or Tortilla Flat

Dickens is represented by Bleak House and David Copperfield and Great Expectations and Oliver Twist but not A Tale of Two Cities or A Christmas Carol

Sinclair Lewis is represented by Babbitt and Main Street but not Arrowsmith or It Can't Happen Here or Kingsblood Royal 

Annie Proulx is represented by The Shipping News but not Brokeback Mountain (which is one of those works that sometimes is treated as short fiction and sometimes as a novel)

Robert Louis Stevenson is represented by Treasure Island and Jeckyll and Hyde but not Kidnapped

Joyce's Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegan's Wake are included, but not Dubliners

Emphasis on the "novel" may explain--but not excuse--classic book-length poetic works, not just The Illiad and The Odessey, but also such works as Kahil Gibran's The Prophet and Longfellow's Hiawatha and Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish. 

Children's and YA Classics:  The Little Prince, Pippi Longstocking, Carroll's Alice books, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, those are mixed in with adult--sometimes very adult--reading, but nobody thought to include the following:

Heidi by Johanna Spyri

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Bambi by Felix Salten

Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson

Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little by E. B. White

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

Hans Binker

The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

YA classics such at The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton and Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

A few more strange exclusions, before I close:

Generation X by Douglas Coupland

Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

The Autobiography of Malcom X and Roots by Alex Haley

Maybe someday when I have "nothing better to do" (like read a classic book), I'll undertake my own list of 1001 Books that should be on everyone's lifetime reading list. I'll probably have to break it up into five or ten installments.

Strange Inclusions: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Part V

 While browsing the book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die I often thought, of all the books in the world, why are these 1001 books the ones that you "must read" to have the richest fullest life possible (if that's what "before you die" means)? The introduction says much about "the novel" but the compilation lists 1001 books, not 1001 novels. Emphasising the novel may explain the absence of much of the world's non-fiction and poetry, but, in that case, several of the listings don't appear to fit the common definition of "novel," either. 

Some examples of non-fiction included:

Walden by Henry David Thoreau (which the compliation admits is, "not exactly a novel")

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

An account of the conquest of "New Spain" written by one of Cortez' soldiers

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, which is a short satirical essay

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

One Thousand and One Nights is an ancient collection of ancient folklore tied together by a framing device

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (his famous "non-fiction novel")

Some examples of short fiction included:

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which is a collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe

The Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Illyich by Leo Tolstoy

Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Contributors to 1001 Books are largely from British institutions and the book was originally published in Great Britain, so that may explain why there is so much emphasis on British and European authors, along with works from the former British empire. (Republicans could lose their minds over how "woke" this compilation is, containing so many works from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.) An American compilation would probably come up with a very different list of books. 

Further, I expected more emphasis on the world's great works of scholarship and not so much emphasis on pop-culture entertainment, including what appears to be an over-representation of sci-fi, horror, and detective literature. 

Some of the more dubious examples of pop-culture entertainment include: H. G. Wells being represented three times, by The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr. Moreau, or that Nabokov is represented by Lolita--and three other books.

The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (which brushes up against non-fiction)

Religous works: Considering that books of the world's great religions--like the Bible and the Koran--are absent, it's strange that the list includes such religous-themed works as The Last Temptation of Christ and The Satanic Verses.

Lastly, several works normally considered children's literature are haphazardly thrown into the general list, when you think they'd be more likely considered a side category, if included at all--making for something like 1001 Books You Must Read, Including 100 You Should've Read in Grade School.

 Perhaps we may accept as explanation, the entry for Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which states, "Like many of the titles found in the "Children's Classics" section of bookstores, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not a children's book as we understand the term these days, and it is not surprising that adaptations of Twain's work aimed at children are usually quite heavily edited." I question the wisdom, though, of throwing Pippi Longstocking into the same catch-all net as the Marquis De Sade.