Organized by author but spanning thousands of years in time and a fairly wide geography as well, this selection of 1,000 books to read before you die takes you on a roller coaster of entries where Lark Rise to Candleford is followed directly by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which is followed directly by children’s favorite, Eloise. Each listing captures what about the book makes it special and worth reading. Whether you agree with every selection or not, if want to read across many genres, it’s a great exploration that’s sure to make your TBR pile even larger.

An absolute treasure to have on hand not only to search for future reading but to refer to as one might an extensive bibliographic encyclopedia, complete with index and sub-groups. Also of note is that it offers a diverse selection of literature, including modern works.

There are a lot of these types of books/lists, and a lot of them feature the same titles/authors. This one has a lot of those perennial "read before you die" mentions (i.e. The Bible, Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte's Web, William Faulkner/Ernest Hemingway/John Steinbeck/most other famous white male authors), but there are a lot of other titles and others I had never heard of included. There was a decent diversity to it as well with many women and minority writers, however as mentioned above the majority of titles were by white male authors (not necessarily the fault of Mustich and more the fault of the world of literature in general). You can tell Mr. Mustich is a very well-read man, and his descriptions of titles were eloquent and well done. As a children's librarian, I liked that there were children's/YA books mixed in too. A lot of the books skewed to the old side - it was almost like the 21st century didn't exist in literature - but it's still worth skimming through. I can't imagine how laborious this process must have been but the end result was a well-written and compiled anthology of books worth reading.

Also, I loved the "Miscellany of Special Lists" in the back that grouped books from the list into different subjects like "Read in a Sitting," "12 Books to Read Before You're 12" and "Listen Up! 12 Terrific Audiobooks."

This book is valuable for those interested in readers advisory, as well as those interested in exploring a wide variety of literature and other writing. I was surprised by the breadth of works recommended, such as the 9/11 Commission Report, though a list of 1,000 books will require some breadth. The author's style is somewhat personal, which some may find engaging and others may find mildly obtrusive.

I requested an advance reader's copy of this book and cannot be happier that I did. As a librarian, this book is an excellent reader's advisory resource. As a lifelong reader (not to mention as a somewhat snooty English major who thinks they've seen it all), this book truly impressed me - and I am hard to please when it comes to book lists. It's just so incredibly well done, full of thoughtful notes on both books and their authors, photos and illustrations relevant to the works discussed, and cross-referenced with related books, themes, and subject matters. It also includes thoughtful critiques on each work and on the styles of each author, making it an especially good resource for literature students. This all-inclusive reference guide has a little bit of everything, encompassing all genres, age groups, and eras - no small feat in the history of world literature. I'll be looking for a paper copy to keep and carry so that I can more easy flip through the pages and share with others. Very highly recommended for all readers.

Okay, I did not need this. My book stack is giraffe high! But, what a fabulous resource. Thank you.

An amazing resource for any avid, or burgeoning, reader to add to their collection. I especially enjoyed the referencing of like titles offered at the end of each book’s description.

This is a great resource to have on your shelf as a reference/a way to pump up your TBR List!

This is a useful list, but as all such lists it’s subjective. It will be particularly useful as a starting point for people who want to get serious about their reading as well as to voracious readers eager to fill in gaps in their reading knowledge.

If there is anything better than a book, it's a book about books. The joy of reading is suffused with the anticipation of reading the amazing titles put before you. Wishlists and bookshelves fill along with our literary hearts.

There are similarly titled books-on-books out there, sure, but I'm really liking this one. Let me list the reasons why:

- Other tomes list what you *should* read, like literary brain veggies. Mustich takes a different tack: if he had a bookstore that held exactly 1,000 books these would be the ones he includes. There's something for every reading mood - books to ponder over, books to gulp down whole, books for children, books for when you need an escape, and more.

- Most people will likely dip in and out as the mood strikes but, me being me, I blew through the entire thing front to back. It holds up! The books are in alpha order by author, perfect for brushing up against a writer you've never heard of.

- Unlike many of these lists about half of the selections are non-fiction of the well-wearing sort - memoirs, travelogues, nature writing, history, food writing, etc. A large part of the TBR I assembled is nonfiction, to my pleasant surprise.

- Each entry has a bevy of info attached - bibliographic details, related works, recommended editions and translations, adaptations, and more. And if you've already read a book there's several more by different authors to try.

- As a result the one thousand main entries are the tip of the iceberg - six thousand more books are referenced throughout. The index, it is epic.

- While some picks are obvious, some are not. Mustich will name check an author's most famous work while highlighting another that he feels is underappreciated or a better entry point into their oeuvre.

- Instead of espousing why the content of a book is important, we're told why it's a good read. A touching memoir, thrilling mystery, a book that will stay with you for the rest of your life - hearing the why makes the selections even more alluring for me.

All of that being said, as you'd expect with any arbitrary selection of books, I have some quibbles.

- The author is a well-meaning white guy and the list reflects that in many ways. First, he obviously made an effort to include women and people of color, as well as dip into world literature, which is much appreciated. And I want to say up front - it's hard to hold one thousand books in your head and I may be missing a few. However.

- By my estimate women only make up 20-25% of the authors listed in the thousand. Out of the 45 authors with more than one book I only see six women, or 13%. Better than the "expected" 8% mentioned in How to Suppress Women's Writing but still well short of half. Boo.

- Looking at the books written by people of color, most by Western authors are squarely centered on the POC experience (James Baldwin's Collected Essays, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, etc.). These are all great and worthy books, but it perpetuates the myth that non-white people are only qualified to write about themselves. I would have liked to see a larger range, maybe by throwing in fantasy like The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin or a book by Octavia Butler. (No, Butler is not on this list. There are two Butlers but not her. I know.)

- In the same vein, LGBTQIA+ folks don't get their full due. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel is here, huzzah, but that's about it. Other than classic authors whose Queerness gets a passing mention (Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, etc.) I have a hard time remembering another book related to the gay experience. With all the nonfiction how about And the Band Played On, about the AIDS epidemic, or Columbine, by a gay author? Again, I may be missing a couple, but even then it's slim pickings.

- There are so. many. books. about. war. The history of war, soldier memoirs, the politics and tactics of war... ugh.

- Many of the travel books about a white dude traveling to a place populated by black or brown people. I just... no thank you.

- While some genres are lovingly included (sci-fi, mysteries, thrillers), others are largely ignored. There is precious little fantasy (and most is sword and sorcery at that), and there's only one romance. Huzzah for Georgette Heyer but considering the attempt at inclusiveness it made me sad.

Laid out like that my criticisms may look harsh but overall I really liked 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. I'm planning on getting a hard copy and marking it up (in pencil!) with notes about the books I've read. There are also illustrations and pictures on almost every page, making the already impressive volume an attractive gift.

Curating a selection like this is an incredibly hard task and Mustich does better than many. Perfect for readers who love books about books.

I am not usually someone who would normally choose a book with a title such as ‘1,000 Books to Read Before You Die’. I have seen many different iterations of books along the same lines and have been disappointed.

But not this time.

This book is phenomenal. The author has clearly thought about absolutely everything they could possibly consider including and then presented it in a truly accessible format.

There is a wide breadth of genres included and this book does not suffer from ‘book snobbery’. It includes classics, contemporary fiction, children’s fiction, and many more.

The descriptions of the books struck me as being carefully considered and are in plain, simple language. The end of each description also includes the following information:

What (Genre), When, Award, Also by, Further reading, Try, and Adaptation.

This allows the reader to explore other books in the same area or watch an adaptation. The inclusion of adaptations made me incredibly happy as although there are some terrible adaptations out there, there are also some fantastic ones. (I’ll forgive the author for neglecting to mention that Alan Rickman featured in Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility…).

In the acknowledgments, the author mentions that this book is a culmination of fourteen years’ of work and it shows.

I could go on about this book all day but I’ll stop here. But one thing I will say is that I never buy physical copies of books I review on NetGalley - however, this is my exception. I have a copy on pre-order and I cannot wait to receive it.

An easy and solid five stars.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Workman Publishing for providing a copy of this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Wow! What a great resource! My TBR has grown twofold! I love the way the book is organized. Discussing books as well as authors and the specialty lists in the back of the book are very useful. I just wish I could print the checklist off so I had it in my purse all the time. This will be one my book loving friends will debate and reference for years to come.

This book is one to read slowly. It has so much information about books and authors and just a joy. However, my book list has expanded due to this and I will never have enough reading time!

A great collection of books to read before you die. Naturally, when it comes to such a selection, we shall all have our preferences, but I think this book has managed to include works to please everyone to a certain extent: there are classics, there are books you always meant to read but haven't got to do so yet, and there are titles you've never heard of.

You might not read all the 1000 books mentioned but you can certainly find a lot to put on your TBR list!

I'm really glad that I read in a digital format, though, as due to the length, a physical copy could be really heavy and thus tiring to hold.

1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List by James Mustich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

1,000 Books to Kill You.

I don't know if this list is quite as life-changing as it purports, but I will grant it this: It is very eclectic and a wide-reaching list of true classics interspersed with the best of the best B-List books you've probably never heard of or you might have heard in passing before they slipped beneath the waves of all the other books on the high seas.

That being said, this book is a beautiful doorstopper. Enormous, picturesque, fully annotated and researched, and each book is picked with love.

Do I have any issues with this tome? Perhaps. There is a pretty obvious bias to it that may not be fully realized because of the preponderance of outright classics herewithin.

The unknowns are generally packed to the gills with 30's to 50's popular books.

It wasn't obvious to me until fairly late into my reading, from first to last page, alphabetical by author, because the old classics were heavily represented and the new modern classics are also there like quota victims. You know, like the random science text, a book or ten on travelogues, or ones that kind of surprised me like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Quicksilver, and Underground Railroad. Others are a gimmie like Hitchhiker's Guide and Harry Potter... even Among Us!

But for the most part, the heaviest weight of the books belong to the beginning of the Baby Boomers. The kinds of books that might have been on the shelves of that generation's parents. Growing dusty and perhaps picked up right at the time that those children hit their 20's.

I'm not saying this is wrong or that this list of a thousand books to read before you die ought not to be targeted to this aging population. Indeed, that sounds about right. They might pick this up and be proud of themselves as they go, "Hey! I read that!"

I know I did. I've probably read around a 1/3 of these books, myself. I also made a huge list of books I want to read, too, sinking my To Read shelf to new and unplumbed depths.

Alas.

Still, I'm quite happy to have read this. Even with the reservations. And not all books tickled my fancy... by a long shot... but it was very fun to browse.

I just ask one thing... Did SF just peek it's head out during the 30's and 50's and then just GO AWAY or something? So silly. There are only a FEW SF books in here. Definitely a major failing.

This is a must-read for every bookworm, written by an acclaimed bookseller and avid reader who suggests a vast number of books, covering a wide variety of genres. The categorization of the titles is simple as it follows the alphabetical order and proves that Mustich's aspiration was not to introduce just one more book list but to give the reader an initiation in order to explore further his own reading interests and preferences. This is not a book that you can read in one sitting but rather acts as a helpful companion volume for all those who are ''obsessed'' with quality reading.

I liked the recommendations that were made, It was an easy, and nice book to read. I had read a few of the suggestions that were made and completly agreed with the presence of these books to read in these pages

This is an excellent resource and unmissable for any real bibliophile! I already have a ridiculous amount of books on my to-be-read list (both on Goodreads and on the bookshelves in my bedroom) but I am always looking for more. There are a lot of interesting titles featured here.

I very much appreciated the way it was set out too. There are books from across the genres and era's meaning it will appeal to a multitude of people. Each title has information about the plot and the author and are arranged alphabetically which is appealing.

I have no doubt that I will refer back to this time and time again. Recommended.

Many thanks to Workman Publishing Company for an ARC. I was not required to post a review and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

I am going through this slowly and getting sidetracked with some of the suggestions.... I like to keep books like this around when I am on the hunt for something new to read.

I absolutely love everything about this book! I am addicted to "books you must read" lists so this was a natural choice for me, but it also stands out beside the others for its colorful images, easy-to-navigate formatting and the extra info at the end of each entry. After every book on the list, we are presented with a short section with info on editions,sequels and further reading (etc.). Even the most prolific reader could find a lifetime of reading suggestions in this book. Ah, if only there was more time to read...

As I said before, books about books are some of my favorite because they gave me the opportunity of finding new titles to add to my never ending "to read list".

Come ho giá detto in precedenza, i libri sui libri sono tra quelli che prediligo, perché mi danno l'opportunità di allungare la mia giá infinita lista di libri da leggere.

THANKS NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!