‘1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die’ is the book version of clickbait
You know you shouldn’t but you just can’t resist
You cannot die until you’ve finished every book that Peter Boxall, Professor of English Literature at the University of Sussex, thinks you should read.
Once you have achieved this feat, you won’t have read anything by Russell Hoban, Aimé Césaire, Penelope Fitzgerald, Nick Hornby, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rachel Carson or Edward Gibbon. You will be blissfully ignorant of all the poetry and plays ever written.
But you will have battled your way through four Dickens, five works by Thomas Mann and John Updike’s entire Rabbit series.
And most important of all you will be able to die in peace, safe from the tortures awaiting those who give up before the end of War and Peace.
So what will be the consequences for these literary shirkers? Boxall clears things up for us in his Preface to the second edition:
The contributors to this book are not interested in producing an exclusive list, a list that can achieve a transnational and transcultural consensus about which books we should read before we die.
Oh. So those big words on the cover were… a lie?
