When I was young, my father used to chastize me for not looking up from my book while crossing the street. Calling me a “bookworm” was an apt metaphor: when I picked up a book, I crawled inside it and very rarely broke free to see the light of day until I was done.

These days, I don’t read as many books as I did back then — partly because of the fact that I’m a big magazine and periodical reader now. I certainly don’t read as much fiction, as my literary diet now consists of almost solely non-fiction works.

So when Jason Kottke posted a link to this list of 1001 fiction books everyone must read before they die, I was a bit nervous to take a poll of how many on that list I had already consumed.

Turns out, I wasn’t doing too badly. Out of the 1001, I have already read 204 and have added quite a few of the rest to my library hold list.

I’ve posted a list of all the 204 I have read below and highlighted my favorites with an (*) asterisk. I’d definitely love your input on what I should read next if you have some tips and suggestions.

• Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro
• Saturday — Ian McEwan (*)
• Slow Man — J.M. Coetzee
• The Plot Against America — Philip Roth
• The Light of Day — Graham Swift
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — Mark Haddon (*)
• Family Matters — Rohinton Mistry
• The Double — José Saramago
• Everything is Illuminated — Jonathan Safran Foer
• Kafka on the Shore — Haruki Murakami
• Middlesex — Jeffrey Eugenides
• Youth — J.M. Coetzee (*)
• Gabriel’s Gift — Hanif Kureishi
• Atonement — Ian McEwan
• Fury — Salman Rushdie (*)
• Choke — Chuck Palahniuk
• Life of Pi — Yann Martel (*)
• The Feast of the Goat — Mario Vargos Llosa
• White Teeth — Zadie Smith
• City of God — E.L. Doctorow
• The Human Stain — Philip Roth
• The Blind Assassin — Margaret Atwood
• Timbuktu — Paul Auster
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet — Salman Rushdie
• Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee (*)
• Intimacy — Hanif Kureishi
• Amsterdam — Ian McEwan
• The Hours — Michael Cunningham
• The God of Small Things — Arundhati Roy (*)
• Memoirs of a Geisha — Arthur Golden
• Enduring Love — Ian McEwan
• Underworld — Don DeLillo
• Jack Maggs — Peter Carey
• Fugitive Pieces — Anne Michaels
• Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
• The Moor’s Last Sigh — Salman Rushdie
• A Fine Balance — Rohinton Mistry (*)
• Captain Corelli’s Mandolin — Louis de Bernieres
• The Shipping News — E. Annie Proulx
• Trainspotting — Irvine Welsh
• On Love — Alain de Botton (*)
• The Virgin Suicides — Jeffrey Eugenides
• The English Patient — Michael Ondaatje
• Black Dogs — Ian McEwan
• American Psycho — Bret Easton Ellis
• Vertigo — W.G. Sebald
• The Buddha of Suburbia — Hanif Kureishi
• Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro (*)
• Catâ’s Eye — Margaret Atwood
• Foucault’s Pendulum — Umberto Eco
• The Satanic Verses — Salman Rushdie
• Oscar and Lucinda — Peter Carey
• The Black Dahlia — James Ellroy
• Beloved — Toni Morrison
• Watchmen — Alan Moore & David Gibbons
• Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel Garci­a Marquez
• The Cider House Rules — John Irving
• Contact — Carl Sagan
• The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
• Neuromancer — William Gibson
• Shame — Salman Rushdie
• The Life and Times of Michael K — J.M. Coetzee
• The Color Purple — Alice Walker
• Broken April — Ismail Kadare
• The Name of the Rose — Umberto Eco
• A Bend in the River — V.S. Naipaul
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams (*)
• The Sea, The Sea — Iris Murdoch
• In the Heart of the Country — J.M. Coetzee
• The Shining — Stephen King
• Song of Solomon — Toni Morrison
• Interview With the Vampire — Anne Rice
• Ragtime — E.L. Doctorow
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — Hunter S. Thompson (*)
• The Wild Boys — William Burroughs
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou
• Slaughterhouse-five — Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• The Godfather — Mario Puzo
• Ada — Vladimir Nabokov
• 2001: A Space Odyssey — Arthur C. Clarke
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip K. Dick (*)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garci­a Marquez
• In Cold Blood — Truman Capote
• The Magus — John Fowles
• Catâ’s Cradle — Kurt Vonnegut
• The Graduate — Charles Webb
• The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — Ken Kesey
• A Clockwork Orange — Anthony Burgess
• Franny and Zooey — J.D. Salinger (*)
• To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
• Naked Lunch — William Burroughs
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s — Truman Capote
• Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe
• The Midwich Cuckoos — John Wyndham (*)
• On the Road — Jack Kerouac
• Doctor Zhivago — Boris Pasternak
• The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Talented Mr. Ripley — Patricia Highsmith
• Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov (*)
• The Quiet American — Graham Greene
• The Last Temptation of Christ — Nikos Kazantzákis
• Bonjour Tristesse — Francoise Sagan
• Lord of the Flies — William Golding
• Casino Royale — Ian Fleming
• The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway (*)
• Day of the Triffids — John Wyndham
• The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger (*)
• The End of the Affair — Graham Greene
• I, Robot — Isaac Asimov
• Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell (*)
• Doctor Faustus — Thomas Mann
• The Plague — Albert Camus
• Animal Farm — George Orwell
• The Razor’s Edge — William Somerset Maugham
• The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupery (*)
• The Outsider — Albert Camus
• For Whom the Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway
• The Power and the Glory — Graham Greene
• The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
• Finnegans Wake — James Joyce
• Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day — Winifred Watson
• Nausea — Jean-Paul Sartre
• Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck
• The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien
• Out of Africa — Isak Dineson
• Gone With the Wind — Margaret Mitchell
• Burmese Days — George Orwell
• Brave New World — Aldous Huxley (*)
• The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett
• A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway
• The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
• Les Enfants Terribles — Jean Cocteau
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence
• The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway (*)
• The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Trial — Franz Kafka
• A Passage to India — E.M. Forster
• Siddhartha — Herman Hesse
• Ulysses — James Joyce
• The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce (*)
• Rashomon — Akutagawa Ryunosuke
• Tarzan of the Apes — Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Sons and Lovers — D.H. Lawrence
• Ethan Frome — Edith Wharton
• A Room With a View — E.M. Forster
• Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad (*)
• The Hound of the Baskervilles — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Kim — Rudyard Kipling
• The Turn of the Screw — Henry James
• The War of the Worlds — H.G. Wells
• The Invisible Man — H.G. Wells
• Dracula — Bram Stoker
• The Time Machine — H.G. Wells
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy
• The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde
• La Bete Humaine — Emile Zola
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson
• Germinal — Emile Zola
• Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson
• Nana — Emile Zola
• The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
• Ben-Hur — Lew Wallace
• Around the World in Eighty Days — Jules Verne
• Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There — Lewis Carroll
• War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy
• The Idiot — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Little Women — Louisa May Alcott
• Journey to the Centre of the Earth — Jules Verne
• Les Miserables — Victor Hugo (*)
• A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens
• Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
• Walden — Henry David Thoreau
• The Scarlet Letter — Nathaniel Hawthorne
• David Copperfield — Charles Dickens
• Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë
• Jane Eyre — Charlotte Bronte
• Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray
• The Count of Monte-Cristo — Alexandre Dum
• The Three Musketeers — Alexandre Dumas
• The Pit and the Pendulum — Edgar Allan Poe
• A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
• The Fall of the House of Usher — Edgar Allan Poe (*)
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby — Charles Dickens
• Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame — Victor Hugo
• Ivanhoe — Sir Walter Scott
• Frankenstein — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
• Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen
• Justine — Marquis de Sade
• Confessions — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Dangerous Liaisons — Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
• Tristram Shandy — Laurence Sterne
• Candide — Voltaire (*)
• A Modest Proposal — Jonathan Swift
• Gulliver’s Travels — Jonathan Swift
• Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe
• Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
• The Thousand and One Nights — Anonymous (*)
• Metamorphoses — Ovid
• Aesop’s Fables — Aesopus

Not as extensive as I would like, so it looks like I have a whole lot more reading to go before I die.

How many of the 1001 have you read? Are there any I missed that you consider a must-read? Let me know.