March 19, 2009

1000 Must Read Books - or Not

I see there's been a lot of talk going around about the 1000 Books You Must Read Before You Die published in January at the Guardian.

The books are divided into categories, Love, Comedy, Family, etc. And the lists are long. Yes, with more books I admit to having never looked at.

Book lists, of course, are subjective, with a "to each their own" feeling. None of us will agree on what books are "musts."

As my interests lie mostly with mystery, I found the crime section interesting. A lot of Raymond Chandler and other "classic" authors, though they're not my cup of tea, er, whisky. A few authors weren't familiar to me. Others I haven't gotten to yet. I did see books I've read in the other categories, but I'll stick to the Crime list for now. A few I read:

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (and read many others)
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (didn't finish it, loved the movie I saw on Mystery!)
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (I probably read every Sherlock book)
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (Never really thought of this as "crime" though what they did was)
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (this is one I have read several times)
Dolores Claiborne - Stephen King
Misery - Stephen King (interesting King choices)

What's missing:
No new, cozy mysteries. A genre of its own? But still enjoyable, at least to me.

** What are some of your favorite mystery or crime books? Are they listed - or not?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The link doesn't work. :(

I'm surprised they grouped Jurassic Park in with the Crime novels. It was surely a crime to make those sequels to the movie, though!

CA Verstraete said...

ok fixed it. why does blogger change the link after you put it in? grr.

I thought it odd that Jurassic Park was under crime too!

Mary Cunningham said...

Interesting how many crime novels have been made into movies!

I think I'm writing the wrong genre. :>(

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