71 out of 1001, and counting

So I was alerted to this list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and, as an English major, I was immediately interested and skeptical. The debate over which books 'should' be read, if any, is old and interesting, I think more interesting to discuss than to decide, but since someone has made their decision, here are my results:

1 The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
2 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
3 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
4 The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
5 Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
6 Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
7 The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
8 The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
9 Beloved – Toni Morrison
10 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
11 The Lover – Marguerite Duras
12 The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
13 Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
14 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
15 A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
16 Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
17 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
18 A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
19 Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
20 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
21 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
22 The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
23 Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
24 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
25 The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
26 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
27 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
28 Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
29 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
30 Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
31 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
32 A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
33 The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
34 Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
35 Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
36 The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
37 Summer – Edith Wharton
38 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
39 The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
40 Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
41 Howards End – E.M. Forster
42 A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
43 The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
44 Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
45 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
46 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
47 The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
48 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
49 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
50 Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
51 Middlemarch – George Eliot
52 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
53 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
54 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
55 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
56 Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
57 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
58 Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
59 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
60 The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
61 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
62 Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
63 Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
64 Persuasion – Jane Austen
65 Emma – Jane Austen
66 Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
67 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
68 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
69 A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
70 Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
71 Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe

Not bad, but also not great for an English major. I will say this, I think that contemporary and modern works were over-emphasized, I'm not sure why some authors' entire works were listed while other authors of equal standing were under-represented and it was a Western/white/male heavy list. I would love to see other peoples' results. And I would just love to have more comments in general.