Seattle — If you've ever found yourself wondering what to read next, we've got the ultimate checklist for you. 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is a comprehensive guide fourteen years in the making that will surely offer ideas for your to-read list.
Author James Mustich co-founded the book catalog A Common Reader and is currently Vice President for Digital Product at Barnes & Noble. Today he rose to the challenge of narrowing down his entire list to just five, based on special category lists that can be found at the back of the book.
From 12 Books to Read Before You’re 12: The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban
- A novel for young readers about the adventures of two toy mice who leave their happy life in the toy shop and go out into the cruel world. For readers of any age, it has more meaningful things to say about the experience of being alive on this earth than just about any book I know.
From A Long Climb, But What a View: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- Imagine sitting on a shore, contemplating a vast and placid sea; imagine the waves slowly coming up to lift you off the sand and pull you gently toward the unfathomable deep, as a steady current lures you into regions of new sensation, meaning, memory, and consciousness. That’s what reading Proust’s ocean of words is like, for those with the patience and daring to let themselves be carried away.
From Read in a Sitting: The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
- This charming—and wryly hilarious—celebration of the pleasures and powers of reading is a flawlessly pitched fable in which Queen Elizabeth II becomes a late blooming bibliophile and mayhem ensures for the monarchy.
From Listen Up! 12 Terrific Audiobooks: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, read by Martin Jarvis
- Dickens’s story of coming of age and being surprised by one’s destiny is a gripping story in any medium, but Martin Jarvis’s audiobook performance takes it to another level of immersion and enjoyment for the listener.
From Off-Beat Escapes: No Picnic on Mount Kenya by Felice Benuzzi
- What a wonderful story: three Italian prisoners of war, held in Kenya by the British during World War II, decide to alleviate the doldrums of their captivity by climbing the mountain—Africa’s second highest—that looms over them. While it sounds like a plot concocted for a high-spirited film comedy, it is in fact entirely true, and it's an amusing, gripping, and singular narrative.
BONUS LIST:
From Soul Food: Time and the Art of Living by Robert Grudin
- A combination of philosophy, advice, speculation, aphorism, and anecdote, this playful, profound book on the medium and measure of our lives may prove to be one of the most practical and philosophically rewarding books you’ll ever read. Make time for it.
From From the 21st Century: Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology by Ellen Ullman
- This book by a former software developer brilliantly makes the recent history of technology a shared experience. Her pages are filled with impressions, ideas, and sentences that will stop your mind in its tracks, then set it going again with new energy and intelligence. You’ll learn a lot about code in her book, but you’ll learn even more about life.
From Mysterious Matters: The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
- A classic British mystery: if you can imagine a plot that has imbibed too much champagne, you’ll have some idea of the giddy pleasures of this 1946 mystery in which Oxford don Gervase Fen and poet Richard Cadogan unravel a murderous scheme so convoluted your head will be spinning even if you’re drinking tea.
From LOL: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
- Waddling slothfully through middle age, Bill Bryson decided one day that he could do with a walk in the woods—a lengthy walk, in fact: 2,100 rugged miles along the celebrated Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world. The results are informative, affecting, and hilarious.
From Singular Self-Portraits: The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
- An idiosyncratic work of autobiography by an heir to one of America’s richest political legacies (his great-grandfather was the 2nd president of the US, his grandfather the 6th). While the author viewed his own life as a failure, this book is anything but: it is a provocative reflection on how history, technology, and events overtake our assumptions and our lives, and thus it remains ever relevant.
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