Spreadsheet of spreadsheets

Thanks to Reading Matters for the pointer to this amazing spreadsheet: Arukiyomi’s 1001 books spreadsheet.

What they’ve done is taken the book titles listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and put them together in a spreadsheet that allows you to track all the books you’ve read in the list, and all the books you might want to add to your To Read pile. Even better, they have annotated almost all the titles with links to Wikipedia and Google Books so you can get a bit more information on specific titles if you want it.

According to the spreadsheet, at the rate I’m going, I will need to read an average of 22 books per year to finish the list, assuming I am a “typical Western female”. I think the formula calculates a life expectancy of 80 years.

I have read a mere 59 out of this list of 1001 books:

• Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time – Mark Haddon
• The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
• Life of Pi – Yann Martel
• The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
• Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
• A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
• The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
• Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
• The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
• The Crwo Road – Iain Banks
• Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
• Wild Swans – Jung Chang
• Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
• Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
• Perfume – Patrick Suskind
• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• Clear Light of Day – Anita Desai
• The Sea, the Sea – Iris Murdoch
• Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
• The Dispossessed – Ursula Le Guin
• Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
• One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
• The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
• Stranger in A Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
• To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
• Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
• The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
• The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
• Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
• 1984 – George Orwell
• Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
• Animal Farm – George Orwell
• The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead
• Their Eyes were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
• The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
• Untouchable – Mulk Raj Anand
• Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
• Passing – Nella Larsen
• All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
• The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
• A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
• Call of the Wild  – Jack London
• The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Little Women -Louisa May Alcott
• Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

I have marked 46 books in the list “To Be Read”. (I could have marked all the as yet unread books “TBR” but I decided to be realistic; there are some in that list that I am extremely unlikely to read, and having a humungous list would be a lot of pressure!)

Given that I can read around 100 books a year (to date 37 books read), I could quite conceivably read these 46 books, but that would mean a lot of discipline and not reading things on a whim. This would take a bit of the pleasure out of reading for me, I think. Still, it’s quite fun to have such a list to look at and work through. I love how people can share such lovely tools using the Web – thank you, John (Arukiyomi), and thanks again kimbofo for posting the link in the first place!