How many have YOU read?

Every so often someone or another comes out with a list of books everyone MUST read, dahling. I have to admit, such claims always make me picture plump, snooty women holding their lorgnettes and and round, bald men in evening wear all looking down their noses at anything they haven't deemed "literature".

But this month's list by the staff of The Guardian, London's daily paper decided they didn't want the same old list of DWMA (Dead White Male Authors). While some of those works certainly should be read by everyone, the staff decided they needed a broader range of genre and authors on their list.

And how many books should they include? Well, if one reads a book a month his or her entire life and then throws in an extra book (because, after all, some books are really very short...) and lived till the age of 77...one would have read a total of 1000 books.

A thousand books. I look around my own personal library and know I have about that many (probably more) in just this room alone. Granted, some of them are Nancy Drew mysteries and a LOT of them are plays. And no, I haven't personally read all the books in my personal library. My husband's philosophy books from college take an entire shelf -- up high because no one's looked at them in years -- and I'm in no hurry to take them down and spend a torturous month with any of them.

I think of my mother-in-law who reads voraciously. She's widowed and doesn't drive, so she's mostly housebound. She reads a romance a day, on average. Sometimes it takes her a day and a half. Most months she manages 28-30 books. At this rate, she'll have read 1000 books in 2 years, 7 months.

So although a thousand books sounds like a lot at first glance, it's very do-able, and I suspect most of us already have finished off (or surpassed) that number already. What makes The Guardian's list different from our own reading?

For one, they broke the list into genre: War & Travel; Science Fiction & Fantasy, Love, Crime, State of the Nation, Comedy, Family Life. For two, they didn't require the authors to be dead. Or white. Or male. And for three, the list is representative of many cultures and many ideas, broadening horizons as good literature (or good lists) should.

Of course the first thing I did was go down the list and see how many I'd read. You can find the list here in the original posting at The Guardian, or here in list form (where I downloaded it...warning: there are 46 pages of it, so if you print it out...go get a cup of coffee and come back). The second list has the advantage of being collated by a mathemetician and also includes a companion list showing how many times an author appears on the original list. Jane Austen, for example, is mentioned six times as all six of her novels are included.

For my total, I counted all the books I'd started, whether I finished them or not (Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man -- I just couldn't get through it. I tried. I really tried. Counted it anyway). It was also somewhat distressing to see authors I'd read, but not the particular book I'd read by that author. Chaim Potok is on the list with two books, but The Chosen, the only book of his I've read, is not one of them. So I didn't count him.

My total? A dismal 101 books.

Now, if I went with the attitude "No, but I saw the movie..." I would be able to check off several hundred more. And this week, partly because of the list, I finally read Kate Chopin's The Awakening. So I'm officially at 102 now.

Okay...here's my challenge: Go check out the list -- how many have YOU read? And are there any on the list that surprised you?