my list of 200 books to read before I die

2000s
1 Animal's People
Indra Sinha

2 Falling Man
Don DeLillo

3 The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid

4 Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

5 The Kindly Ones
Jonathan Littell

6 The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai

7 Against the Day
Thomas Pynchon

8 Carry Me Down
M.J. Hyland

9 Mother's Milk
Edward St Aubyn

10 Measuring the World
Daniel Kehlmann

11 A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Marina Lewycka

12 The Sea
John Banville

13 The Accidental
Ali Smith

14 The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst

15 2666
Roberto Bolano

16 Small Island
Andrea Levy

17 The Book about Blanche and Marie
Per Olov Enquist

18 The Plot Against America
Philip Roth

19 The Master
Colm Tóibín

20 Suite Francaise
Irene Nemirovsky

21 The Swarm
Frank Schatzing

22 Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell

23 Your Face Tomorrow
Javier Marias

24 A Tale of Love and Darkness
Amos Oz

25 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
Mark Haddon

26 What I Loved
Siri Hustvedt

27 Lady Number Thirteen
Jose Carlos Somoza

28 The Successor
Ismail Kadare

29 Vernon God Little
DBC Pierre

30 The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri

31 Islands
Dan Sleigh

32 Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami

33 Everything is Illuminated
Jonathan Safran Foer

34 Nowhere Man
Aleksandar Hemon

35 Snow
Orhan Pamuk

36 Platform
Michel Houellebecq

37 The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen

38 Life of Pi
Yann Martel

39 Austerlitz
W.G. Sebald

40 Atonement
Ian McEwan

41 Soldiers of Salamis
Javier Cercas

42 I'm Not Scared
Niccolo Ammaniti

43 The Feast of the Goat
Mario Vargas Llosa

44 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon

45 The Devil and Miss Prym
Paulo Coelho

46 Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
Ismail Kadare

47 The Heart of Redness
Zakes Mda

48 Under the Skin
Michel Faber

49 White Teeth
Zadie Smith

50 The Human Stain
Philip Roth

51 Small Remedies
Shashi Deshpande

52 Celestial Harmonies
Péter Esterházy

53 Bartleby and Co.
Enrique Vila-Matas

1900s
54 Fear and Trembling
Amélie Nothomb

55 The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
Dubravka Ugresic

56 In Search of Klingsor
Jorge Volpi

57 Pavel's Letters
Monika Maron

58 As If I Am Not There
Slavenka Drakulic

59 Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee

60 Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolano

61 Dirty Havana Trilogy
Pedro Juan Gutierrez

62 The Talk of the Town
Ardal O'Hanlon

63 Elementary Particles
Michel Houellebecq

64 The Heretic
Miguel Delibes

65 All Souls Day
Cees Nooteboom

66 The Hours
Michael Cunningham

67 Veronika Decides to Die
Paulo Coelho

68 The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver

69 Crossfire
Miyuki Miyabe

70 Enduring Love
Ian McEwan

71 Underworld
Don DeLillo

72 Jack Maggs
Peter Carey

73 Money to Burn
Ricardo Piglia

74 The Life of Insects
Victor Pelevin

75 Margot and the Angels
Kristien Hemmerechts

76 The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy

77 Silk
Alessandro Baricco

78 Fall on Your Knees
Ann-Marie MacDonald

79 A Light Comedy
Eduardo Mendoza

80 Hallucinating Foucault
Patricia Duncker

81 Fugitive Pieces
Anne Michaels

82 The Ghost Road
Pat Barker

83 Forever a Stranger
Hella Haasse

84 Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

85 The Clay Machine-Gun
Victor Pelevin

86 Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood

87 The Unconsoled
Kazuo Ishiguro

88 Morvern Callar
Alan Warner

89 Santa Evita
Tomas Eloy Martinez

90 The Reader
Bernhard Schlink

91 A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry

92 Love's Work
Gillian Rose

93 The End of the Story
Lydia Davis

94 The Late-Night News
Petros Markaris

95 Troubling Love
Elena Ferrante

96 Whatever
Michel Houellebecq

97 Land
Park Kyung-ni

98 Our Lady of Assassins
Fernando Vallejo

99 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami

100 Pereira Declares: A Testimony
Antonio Tabucchi

101 City Sister Silver
Jáchym Topol

102 How Late It Was, How Late
James Kelman

103 Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Louis de Bernieres

104 Felicia's Journey
William Trevor

105 Deep River
Shusaku Endo

106 Disappearance
David Dabydeen

107 The Invention of Curried Sausage
Uwe Timm

108 Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light
Ivan Klima

109 The Shipping News
E. Annie Proulx

110 Birdsong
Sebastian Faulks

111 Looking for the Possible Dance
A.L. Kennedy

112 The Twins
Tessa de Loo
113 On Love
Alain de Botton

114 What a Carve Up!
Jonathan Coe

115 A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth

116 The Stone Diaries
Carol Shields

117 The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides

118 The Holder of the World
Bharati Mukherjee

119 Remembering Babylon
David Malouf

120 The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Alvaro Mutis

121 The Secret History
Donna Tartt

122 Before Night Falls
Reinaldo Arenas

123 Life is a Caravanserai
Emine Özdamar

124 The Discovery of Heaven
Harry Mulisch

125 Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture
Apostolos Doxiadis

126 The Triple Mirror of the Self
Zulfikar Ghose

127 All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy

128 Possessing the Secret of Joy
Alice Walker

129 The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje

130 Indigo
Marina Warner

131 The Crow Road
Iain Banks

132 Written on the Body
Jeanette Winterson

133 The Dumas Club
Arturo Perez-Reverte

134 Smilla's Sense of Snow
Peter Høeg

135 The Butcher Boy
Patrick McCabe

136 Asphodel
Hilda Doolittle

137 Memoirs of Rain
Sunetra Gupta

138 Hideous Kinky
Esther Freud

139 Arcadia
Jim Crace

140 Wild Swans
Jung Chang

141 Mao II
Don DeLillo

142 Typical
Padgett Powell

143 Regeneration
Pat Barker

144 Astradeni
Eugenia Fakinou
145 Faceless Killers
Henning Mankell

146 The Laws
Connie Palmen

147 American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis

148 Vertigo
W.G. Sebald

149 The Daughter
Pavlos Matesis
150 Get Shorty
Elmore Leonard

151 Amongst Women
John McGahern

152 Stone Junction
Jim Dodge

153 The Music of Chance
Paul Auster

154 The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien

155 The Midnight Examiner
William Kotzwinkle

156 The Shadow Lines
Amitav Ghosh

157 The Buddha of Suburbia
Hanif Kureishi

158 Like Life
Lorrie Moore

159 Sexing the Cherry
Jeanette Winterson

160 Moon Palace
Paul Auster

161 London Fields
Martin Amis

162 Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro

163 The Melancholy of Resistance
László Krasznahorkai

164 The Great Indian Novel
Shashi Tharoor

165 The Trick is to Keep Breathing
Janice Galloway

166 The History of the Siege of Lisbon
José Saramago

167 Like Water for Chocolate
Laura Esquivel

168 A Prayer for Owen Meany
John Irving

169 Inland
Gerald Murnane

170 Obabakoak
Bernardo Atxaga

171 Gimmick!
Joost Zwagerman

172 Foucault's Pendulum
Umberto Eco

173 Paradise of the Blind
Duong Thu Huong

174 Wittgenstein's Mistress
David Markson

175 The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie

176 The Swimming Pool Library
Alan Hollinghurst

177 Oscar and Lucinda
Peter Carey

178 The Last World
Christoph Ransmayr

179 The First Garden
Anne Herbert

180 Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga

181 Cigarettes
Harry Mathews

182 Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Douglas Adams

183 Kitchen
Banana Yoshimoto

184 The Radiant Way
Margaret Drabble

185 The Afternoon of a Writer
Peter Handke

186 The Black Dahlia
James Ellroy

187 The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe

188 Black Box
Amos Oz

189 The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster

190 All Souls
Javier Marias

191 Beloved
Toni Morrison

192 Of Love and Shadows
Isabel Allende

193 The Pigeon
Patrick Süskind

194 World's End
T. Coraghessan Boyle

195 Enigma of Arrival
V.S. Naipaul

196 Ballad for Georg Henig
Viktor Paskov

197 The Taebaek Mountains Jung Rae Cho

198 Lost Language of Cranes
David Leavitt

199 Anagrams
Lorrie Moore

200 Matigari
Ngugi wa Thiong'o