1,000 Books to Read Before You Die
A Life-Changing List
by James Mustich
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Oct 02 2018 | Archive Date Oct 02 2018
Talking about this book? Use #1000booksToReadBeforeYouDie #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
“If there’s a heaven just for readers, this is it.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
Celebrate the pleasure of reading and the thrill of discovering new titles in an extraordinary book that’s as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the 1,000-plus titles it recommends.
Covering fiction, poetry, science and science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children’s books, history, and more, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die ranges across cultures and through time to offer an eclectic collection of works that each deserve to come with the recommendation, You have to read this. But it’s not a proscriptive list of the “great works”—rather, it’s a celebration of the glorious mosaic that is our literary heritage.
Flip it open to any page and be transfixed by a fresh take on a very favorite book. Or come across a title you always meant to read and never got around to. Or, like browsing in the best kind of bookshop, stumble on a completely unknown author and work, and feel that tingle of discovery. There are classics, of course, and unexpected treasures, too. Lists to help pick and choose, like Offbeat Escapes, or A Long Climb, but What a View. And its alphabetical arrangement by author assures that surprises await on almost every turn of the page, with Cormac McCarthy and The Road next to Robert McCloskey and Make Way for Ducklings, Alice Walker next to Izaac Walton.
There are nuts and bolts, too—best editions to read, other books by the author, “if you like this, you’ll like that” recommendations , and an interesting endnote of adaptations where appropriate. Add it all up, and in fact there are more than six thousand titles by nearly four thousand authors mentioned—a life-changing list for a lifetime of reading.
“948 pages later, you still want more!” —THE WASHINGTON POST
Advance Praise
"Every so often, a reference book appears that changes the landscape of
its area of focus. In the case of reading and readers' advisory, this is
one such book....lively, witty, insightful prose...It might be wise to
invest in several copies of this wonderful meditation on life lived with
and enhanced by the written word."
—Booklist, Starred Review
“Chief among the thousands of pleasures here is the delightfully erudite
company of James Mustich. Look up your favorite books; find ones you
don’t know; argue about the list with friends. Read!”
—Jean Strouse, author, Alice James and Morgan: American Financier
“James Mustisch’s book is aimed at a society engulfed in words but
desperately poor in the talents that reading can bring—judgment, taste,
empathy, wit. The book is not a list of canonical works, though many
classics are listed and lovingly described. No, the “1000 Books to Read”
is an invocation of the pleasures to be had from many kinds of
books—genre fiction, journalism, poetry, history, and memoir, the good
and the great, the illustrious and the semi-forgotten, all summoned by
Mustich’s taste. You open it at any point and jump from author to
author; you follow his hints and read related works by other writers,
and you find your own taste emerging, proud and strong, from Mustich’s
provocations. 1,000 Books is surpassingly useful as well as good.”
—David Denby, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World
“If you’ve ever doubted that books were the greatest invention of all
time, and that they carry within them our collective memories and
dreams, as well as any semblance of intelligence we have as a species, pick up James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die and start reading.”
—Ken Burns
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781523504459 |
| PRICE | $40.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 960 |
Average rating from 105 members
Readers who liked this book also liked:
John Kotter; Holger Rathgeber
Business, Leadership, Finance, Nonfiction (Adult)
© 2025 NetGalley LLC
• All Rights Reserved
