1001 Books

What's the worst thing that could happen to someone struggling with an ever-increasing pile of books waiting to be read? Someone else publishing a book called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die that's what! Thanks Peter Boxall - that's just what I needed! Another list of books I will be unable to resist looking through and, inevitably, even more books I will want to read, but probably never get round to. As if there haven't been enough of these lists already:

The BBC's Big Read
The Channel 4 / Waterstone's Books of the Century
Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels: The Best in English since 1939
The Modern Library Top 100 best English language novels of the 20th century
etc. etc.

According to the review in tomorrow morning's Observer, those 1,001 books you must read before you kick the bucket include ELEVEN by J.M. Coetzee. Now I'm an admirer of Coetzee - have been ever since I read his memoir Boyhood with which I felt a tremendous affinity - but eleven? That's going too far; and judging by the review there is a faint, fusty, male smell about the list as well. (Although I wouldn't go as far as Tim on Intersecting Lines who thinks "it sounds like meretricious crap".) Even so, I look forward to skimming through it, and the UK edition does have a superb cover...

...borrowing from the iconic Penguin cover design for Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.
Mind you, at 960 pages, it must be the size of a cow!
(Tra-la-laa, Tra-la-la-laaa... )

So why 1,001?
"Because of its Scheherazadian connotations" the author says.
Which reminded me of another book I still haven't read:

Arabian Nights:
Tales from the Thousand and One Nights

Maybe I should get it down off the shelf and fall asleep reading one of Scheherazade's tales tonight. Then again, if I'm ever going to get all these books read I'm going to have to stop sleeping at all.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is published by
Cassell Illustrated on March 9th.