The 67 Books That I MUST Read Before I die, According to my Buddies on Facebook

I read a lot, but that doesn't mean that I'm an exeptionally well-read person. I tend to stick to the bizarro, horror, and sci-fi/fantasy genres and I'd like to broaden my pitifully narrow horizon when it comes to literature. Almost everyone has heard of the "1001 Books You Should Read Before You Die" list and yesterday I decided to check it out. You can peruse it here:

1001 Series

The site doesn't just host the book list, but also 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, Songs You Must Hear, etc. I browsed through the list and the rest of the site. Seemed decent enough until I realized that I couldn't figure out just WHO made these lists. That didn't sit well with me. While I'm sure that the books on the 1001 are worth a gander, as I think that most books are, I decided to go a different route to increase the breadth of my literary knowledge: I asked my friends on Facebook with this status update:

"Name a book that I MUST read before I Die"

Comments and suggestions poured in immediately. Of all of my friends' suggestions, I'd only read about four of them. I wrote them all down on slips of paper and put them in a coffee can so I can select one blindly, read the book, and then pull another title out of the hat. Rinse and repeat.

The List:

The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: the Rediscovered Diaries of Opal Whitely

Simon Logan's I-O series

Swan Song – Robert McCammon

Story of B – Daniel Quinn

Papillon – Henri Charriere

Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut

Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fannon

Sexual Politics of Meat – Carol Adams

Thomas the Rhymer – Ellen Kushner

The Hour of Star – Clarice Lispector

House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski

The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood

Lolita – Nabakov

Pale Fire – Nabakov

World According to Garp – John Irving

Cider House Rules – John Irving

Mao II – Don DeLillo

A Scanner darkly

Everville – Clive Barker

A Choir of Ill Children – Tom Piccirilli

The Indifference of Heaven – Gary Braunbeck

The Tao Te Ching

Dante's Vita Nuova

Dubliners

Die, You Doughnut Bastards – Cameron Pierce

Private Midnight

Pick Your Battle – Douglas Lain

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

The Big Sleep

Naked Lunch

Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever

The Odyssey

Haunted:Tales of the Grotesque – Joyce Carol Oates

Short Stories of Dunsany

The Essential Ellison

Maus

Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a world without God.

The Killing Joke

Siren Promised

The Razor's Edge

The Stand – Stephen King

The Bhagavad Gita

Walt Whitman, anything by

The Age of Reason – Thomas Paine

V for Vendetta

Siddhartha

Walden – Thoreau

Renascence

Joseph Campbell, anything by

Prometheus Rising – Robert Anton Wilson

Junky -burroughs

Dark Gods – Ted Klein

Deltora Quest series

Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

Smonk - Tom Franklin

 Autumn of the Patriarch

 The Shadow of the Torturer

 Shriek

 Random Acts of Senseless Violence

 Perdido Street Station

 Crow With No Mouth

 Nova

 Silent Spring

 Night of the Crabs

 Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Start to Bleed a Bit

 The Girl on the Refrigerator -  Etgar Keret

With so many responses, I'll be busy for quite some time. Last night I pulled THE HANDMAID'S TALE out of the can, so I'll be acquiring a copy of that soon. I'm very excited about this endeavor. I think that it's one of my better ideas.

READ ON, EVERYBODY!