I just hit 6%! I was really excited until I realized that I had 94% to go. Oy. I must think optimistically! =)

6%? I'm optimistic with my 1% haha.

At least you are young. I'm at 15%, but I need to read 34 books a year to finish the list before I die. God Willing.

While I wasn't paying attention (and not updating my list), I made it past 300 books, so I'm now at 31%. Thank you guys for being such great motivators. I've veered off my exact schedule of reading in reverse chronological order, but I'm still sort of keeping to it...

I'm holding pretty steady at 12% because I've been reading several off-list books recently and savoring the time I spend with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I'm closing in on the 15% mark. This list is daunting!

Just counted everything up...

I currently have 67 books from the list sitting on my bookcase unread! How sad is that??? And that is just from this list (don't get me started on all the other 'unreads'...there is probably three times that number just sitting here waiting for me to pick them up).

The problem is that I am working on so many different lists. Sometimes the books cross over, but sadly, not often enough.

I'd have to have another lifetime just to get all the reading done that I've planned.

>I currently have 67 books from the list sitting on my bookcase unread!

Hey, at least you won't run out of stuff to read any time soon. ;-)

I'm trembling on the cusp of 30%, at 29.97%. I need to pick up something short to bump me over, because I think the next couple of books I have at home are Ivanhoe and Fingersmith, and either of those is going to take a while.

I suspect I'm way older than most of you, plus I was an English major in college so that gave me an early boost.

Cathy, I just saw that you are reading the Siege of Krishnapur. Please let me know your thoughts when you are finished, it's been sitting on a shelf here for a few months and I am an absolute sucker for literature set in India.

I'm at 3.6% without even knowing about the list! I'm currently reading Phantom of the Opera (not on the list) but then I'm going to pick some from here. I own a lot of them myself and I know my parents own a lot of them, so it shouldn't be a problem getting through a few of them!

I have just checked and am only a 3.3%! least I have quite a few of them so I can add some on fairly quickly and it will stop me from watching so much television!

I'm at 11%, but I'm not really actively trying to read through this list... yet. Reading all the Pulitzer fiction winners this year (and probably going for work by Nobel laureates next year) may inadvertently boost my percentage, though.

Just found out about this list (and this site actually)

I'm at 9% but don't think I'll actively try to complete it. I think, though, that I'll use it to get some ideas of books my contemporary authors to read.

Melissa, you should now be able to go to the book shelves for the group and see how many you'll mark off if you read the Pulitzers and the Nobel laureates. We have added those shelves, and its quite a few!

Currently hovering at 2.6% The problem is I have other book challenges I need to do before I pick up anything from this list.

hi all. i just joined this group. im a sucker for a good list. upon joining i'm at 2.5% (and i, like many of you, have started a bunch more...). i have a busy few months ahead but come september im moving from a big city/stressful job to a small town/unstressful job so hopefully it'll pick up then!

It's a daunting list! I checked off the ones I've read, which puts me at 7%--not bad for an inveterate reader of low-brow fiction. I think some of the older books I'll have to listen to; otherwise, I may never get through all the descriptions.

I downloaded Arukiyomi's spreadsheet, and I checked off all the books from the list that I have read. But there's a catch. I have probably read 10 or 15 more of the books than I marked. There are so many that I know I have read, for pleasure, in high school or in college, but don't remember. If somebody asked me about the content or the plot of Anna Karenina, for example, I'd say "Russia." That's it. There are so many books that I just don't remember. What good would it do me to mark them, just to say I had read a higher percentage of the list, if I don't even remember them? I think I have decided to read a lot of them again. I won't read books that I'm not interested in, whether I have read them before or not. But I do feel a strong need to read some of these again. I know from lurking around here that this question comes up a lot. :) To read again or not to read again? Any comments? Oh, I am 1% into the list, not counting any of the above mentioned books.

Thanks!

Kara

Kara, I appreciate your honesty and I agree with you that if you don't remember a book you should not mark it as "read" for the list. Are you sure you don't remember anything else about Anna Karenina though? It is not a forgetable book. But Then again, Tolstoy is one of my favorite authors. Happy reading.

I took a different course on this issue. I marked them as read, but also put the great ones that were foggy in my memory on my "to read" list. I've already re-read a couple and am still doing so with
"The Temple of My Familiar". Actually, some books NEED to be read more than once -- especially at different times in our lives when they may seem to have an entirely different message for us!

Kara,

I did something similar when I went through the spreadsheet. I'm at 4.3% read, mostly because I was fortunate enough to have read and studied some of the books in grad school. However, if I had read lazily, and/or couldn't remember what I got out of a book, I didn't mark it.

I, obviously, applied the same logic to books I didn't like well enough to finish. Will I finish them now that they're on this list? Hard to say. Part of me wonders what other people got out of them, and part of me wonders if life is too short to read something that doesn't much interest me.

Jenn

Can anyone tell me why, when I add a new book, goodreads automatically puts it on my already read shelf, even when I haven't read it? I know this doesn't relate directly to the 1001 group, but it did start happening right after I added a 1001 books to read shelf. Does it have something to do with the "exclusive" and "non-exclusive" shelves? I really appreciate the help!

Kara

I'm at 5.49% right now. I decided not to count books that I have read, but don't remember. This includes loads of Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Dickens that I was not interested in when it was assigned reading in high school, but that I might enjoy more now. There are also books like Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Fountainhead, and Gulliver's Travels. I remember loving them as a young adult, but couldn't give any plot specifics now.

I am already a rereader, so I doubt I'll ever "finish" any of my lists. Maybe I just have to live forever so I can keep at it!

I am way excited I just starting to read the books on this list and I am already at 6.4%. If I keep this up I will be at 50% when I die. It might be easier if I would stop buying books about books and deciding to read all the books in those lists also. I currently have 4 lists. I may need an intervention soon. The sad part is not that many books overlap!!!!

Hi Erika,

I downloaded this spreadsheet, and I think a lot of others have also. It helps readers keep track of which books they have read and will calculate the percentage as you go along. It even tells you how many books you will need to read per year, for the rest of your life, in order to finish the whole list. :)

http://johnandsheena.co.uk/books/?page_i...

I just went through and did some math on the 10,000 books in a lifetime claim. Probably not a bad guess, although I'm going to say that if you count picture books (I do) it's going to be a bit higher.

Here's how the math works out, assuming you have a 70 year active reading life.

A book a week: About 4,000 lifetime books
3 books a week: About 9,000 lifetime books
A book a day: About 25,000 lifetime books

Assuming that most voracious readers are like me, and read somewhere between 3 and 7 books a week, that probably puts you around 10,000 lifetime books, unless you quit your job and do nothing else, and even then you'd have to read some darn short books!

Wow -- now I feel really annoyed that I wasted one of those slots on "Clan of the Cave Bear"!

ok, sincere question here. How do people read 3-7 books a week?? I think even if I read 24/7 I couldn't read that much. Are you speed readers? I am really interested to know, because I'd like to increase the number of books I read in a month. I know if I stayed off the internet I could read a lot more. :) But any tips would be appreciated. I am impressed!

I am also quite amazed: thre to seven books a WEEK??? That sounds horrible, how are you guys even remembering what you have read!
Anyway, I don't really care for this obsession on having to read so and so many books or having to finish that and that list.
I do like the list but then I also like chick-lit and a bunch of other reads in-between. And, by the way, I really enjoyed the first Clan of the Cave Bear book :-)

I have to lol at you Meg. I'm always doing the same thing with statistics. :)

I am at around 5% on this particular list. But for me the goal is not the amount of books read so much as the enjoyment I get from reading and the sense of accomplishment I get when I have reached a goal, along with the sheer knowledge I gain from the books (that is why I like historical books so much). I have to say my main personal goal is to learn. I might take 4 years on a book or 3 days, depending on how difficult it is for me to absorb.

In addition to this particular list I have a couple of other lists I am working on as well.

1. The best of the worlds best books; about 260, mostly classics-- both fiction and non-fiction.
2. Modern library giants; about 120. But don't let the word modern fool you. These are also mostly classics with books such as St. Augustine's City of God and plays by Eugene O'Neill as well as Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Poe, Hugo, Dickens...you get the idea.
3. Best 100 books of the 1900's. About 50 non fiction books.
4. Everything by Plato. (That by itself would take me about 20 years.)
5. Greek literature such as Homer, Aescheles and Sophocles.
6. A short list of books on my particular interest. These books include Confessions of a Justified Sinner by Hogg, By Way of Deception by Victor Ostravsky, books by certain gnostic authors such as Elaine Pagels, and books by Carl Jung and his daughter Emma.
7. A Modern library's 100 best nonfiction books.
8. Anything at the time that I find interesting on my favorite subject of history (This is what I have been concentrating on lately.)

These lists sometimes overlap and when I get a new list that I find interesting I go through it and cross off all the books that overlap.

I don't expect to finish them. they are just goals like my goal of traveling the world. I guess you could say my standards are kind of high and maybe a little unrealistic but, hey, it's a challenge and it helps me learn.

I would say I am about 10% finished with all my lists put together. I started reading when I was 5 and there are times I read 3 books a week. Most often, however, I read about 1 book every 3-4 weeks. You know life kind of gets in the way sometimes.

I LOVED the first Clan of the Cave Bear book when I first read it in my teens. It was whole world I would never have even begun to think of, with these compelling characters and all this information about how one survives without technology. Awesome. The rest of the books--well, I've read them, because I want to know the story, but by the last book I was ready to shoot her the next time we had to hear about how amazed people were to see the animals. THAT took 10 years?

As to the statistics--obviously very few people read THAT consistently; figuring that way is just a way to estimate the logic of statistics.

I read 3-7 books a week, but I read for plot. I want to know what happens; description and all of that aren't interesting to me. Occasionally I find a book that I want to give more attention to, or that is more difficult to slog through (Master and Margarita, right now) but I read for fun and those books are not fun to me.

Some people read more slowly, groking the books as they go. I don't think there's really any reason to change that, as long as you are enjoying how you read--who knows but what I would enjoy books more if I weren't such a plot addict?

I've been reading all the posts about lifetime goals and reading, etc. And I have to ask - how do you guys read a book a week? I MIGHT be able to do 2-3 books a month, but it's quite a stretch. I guess I am a slow reader, but I always get into that phase when I'm reading that I just have so much I want to read. Sorry, I am rambling this morning. But I am amazed by you guys!

Ditto that question for me, Kara. I'm doing well if I can get one read every two weeks now that spring and gardening are here.

Judith, Gardening and landcaping is one of my other obsessions. I love making my home and yard beautiful.

When I was a little girl I read more continuously than I do now. I used to be able to sit and read for hours at a time. But I am 42 now and I have two difficulties with reading. First, my eyesight; though I don't have bifocals yet, I dread the day with morbid anticipation. I fear I might die the day I can no longer read because of my eyes. Second, my stiff neck; I just cannot sit in one place for a long time as I used to be able to do. It is rather frustrating. I guess that is why I have started watching more movies.

I am treating the list as a way to expose myself to books I might not pick up on my own. I am reading about one book per month from the list, more or less, in addition to my books clubs, professional reading, and YA lit. In fact, the bulk of my reading is YA lit, so I can recommend books to my students.

I think that the 1001 books list should be fun--a way to get people READING, thinking, and talking about important books. I'm not stressing about how many books I have read from the list or competing with others. I have enough stress in my life already and reading is my escape!

The number of books we read is not nearly as important as the joy and knowledge we gain from them.

Kristen. Reading is what I do in my spare time. I work 30 hours a week. No husband no kids and I like the outdoors from the comfort of my living room (I have really bad allergies). So I can zoom through books pretty fast due to almost no interuptions. If I had a life I would read less.

maybe the selectors just hate the post-modernists? Personally, I would think that Discipline & Punish should be read by everyone, but I'm a nerd like that. Also the Rousseau and Sartre works on the list are fiction rather than their straight-up philosophical works.

I just tallied up 50/1001 so that comes out to just around 5%. I seriously doubt I will read all of these before I die, but it's a fun goal. I'm also trying to read books that have won various awards...I've got a whole other database of award winning books. And then I've got a Classics list that I've been compiling the last few years. Luckily, many of those overlap with the 1001 list.

I need to get the actual 1001 book so I can actually see WHY I should read these before I die!

I am finding myself asking the same question! Why should I? I have never been one to do as I am told!

I have read many of the books on the list. And, while I was gung-ho to dedicate my life (not really) to reading all the books on the list, I am having a hard time agreeing to read Dickens and some of the others...(obviously, Dickens is at the top of my list of books I DON'T want to read!) I will continue to push through, reading those that I already own and haven't read. That is actually the best thing this list has done for me; it has gotten me to start reading the actual books that I do own, which has also helped my pocketbook, as I am not letting myself buy anymore books until I have read at least 10.

Happy reading everyone!

4.6%!! haha
if i live to be at least 74, i can read 19 a year and get there.
totally do-able!!!

I just found this list today. Checking off what I've already read I'm at 3%. I don't think I'll be able to read solely off this list, but it'll definitely give me ideas of things to read next. I've still got 8 or 9 books on my "to read" list that aren't even on the list!

Amen! Reading is just something I love to do. It's my escape. The list is a mere tool.

I just finished checking off the list--I have read 15%--but what a long way to go. Lots of ideas for future reading though. I can't wait to share it with my classics book discussion group.

3% and I just turned 18...Hope to make it a teast 6% in the next 3 years. But to be honest there are some books which I would not read anyway so it is a bit pointless to keep a track of progress/

just thought I'd see what percentage I'm at and turns out I'm at almost 5%, not bad so far. if I live to be 80 I'll only have to read 16 books a year, and that means there's room for at least 60 other books each year. I don't think I'll finish the list though, I choose my books for other reasons.

I just joined this group. I copied the list in word and tracked the changes as I "deleted" the ones I've read. I'm at 1.69% due to high school and college reading, as well as a few I've chosen myself as an adult. Guess I better get reading.....

I'll never be at 100%, I skipped a lot of the books that didn't seem interesting to me. Maybe after I've gotten through my consolidated list of 400, I will add more from the list then.

Wow, this spreadsheet is way more useful than the rudimentary one I set up for myself. Starting off, I'm at 10.39%. Something about the double-digits make the other 89.6% seem much more manageable. I was really surprised by how much 1800s lit I've read. Thank you, English major. Onward! It's fun to be able to track my reading, and I feel like the looming presence of the list encourages me to read when it might be easier to turn on the tv.

I just started tracking this... sadly, 3% to begin with. Sigh...

Hey, no sense in getting sad at having a low percentage. Just think of how many great books are still out there for you!