I've seen a bunch of similar lists, but I was kind of drawn to this one because there were a lot of titles I didn't recognize. That said, I still have some (ill-informed) opinions, and I've still read a few!
Books I've Read:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
It's been a while on this one; I read it in middle school. Might be worth a reread if I feel like it; it wasn't a slog to get through by any means.
The Handmaid's Tale
Read for fun in high school. Not my favorite of the dystopian future-type books, but one of the better ones, for sure. Still, it didn't leave the strongest impact. Maybe I should read it again.
The Grapes of Wrath
Read for class in high school, and THANK GOD, because there's no way I'd get through this one on my own. I guess it was "important," but I didn't care for the book. All that really stuck with me is the poor turtle. Whatever happened to the turtle?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I read this in fourth grade, so I'll definitely be doing a reread. I hardly remember a thing, and I don't think I really understood it the first time, anyway.
Things Fall Apart
I think I was one of the only kids in the class who actually kind of liked this one; I know my sister hated it when she had to read it.
Frankenstein
Another one I liked from high school. I named the monster Phinneas. I felt so bad he didn't have a name! I really do think everyone should read Frankenstein, if only because the Frankenstein monster has become so distorted in modern times. It's a shame.
Ulysses
Well, I didn't actually read this one. I tried, I really did. And I'll try again. But this book is pretty much impossible. We'll see how far I get.
1984
Read it because I felt like I should. Absolutely amazing; my favorite of the dystopian future books.
Wuthering Heights
Okay, I haven't read this one, either. I got through a chapter during free period once, and was completely befuddled. But now I actually have a vague sense of the plot, which I think will help. Even though I don't really care for the Brontes.
Pride and Prejudice
I don't care for the Bronte sisters, as I said, and so I hate that they and Jane Austen are so often lumped together. They have totally different styles and purposes. I love you, Jane Austen! I love you, Mr Darcy! The only book on the list I've read multiple times.
Jane Eyre
Read it because my peers were all reading it, and I felt left out. Better than I expected, I must say, but I still felt like there was so much moralizing going on! And I didn't really get the appeal of Rochester, sorry.
Wow, only 11. I'm a little ashamed.
Books I'm Looking Forward to:
On the Road
I've been wanting to read this since I learned the show Supernatural was vaguely inspired by it. Which is maybe a horrible reason, but hey, whatever gets you to pick up a book!
Wide Sargasso Sea
Recently there was a kerfuffle in which self-righteous authors condemned fanfiction. Well guess what, bitches, here's a piece of fanfiction on a list of classics! Look, there's a lot of crappy fanfic, but there's a lot of crappy original writing, too. Where you get your inspiration doesn't determine the quality of the writing produced.
Catch-22
I feel bad about using the term "Catch-22" without having actually read the book. Also this way I'll stop conflating Catch-22 with Slaughterhouse 5 in my head.
The Trial
I read Metamorphosis back in 8th grade, and that was insane and amazing! So I'm more than willing to give Kafka a second look.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Okay, I don't know a thing about this book, but I've loved the title for years, so hopefully that's a good sign.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
I've been on a Holmes kick lately, but I haven't gotten to Baskervilles yet, and I'm super-excited. This will probably be my first read.
Middlemarch
A lot of people seem to be crazy about this book. Hopefully I haven't been misled.
Books I'm Dreading Already:
The Tale of Genji
I've studied Japanese. I love Japan. I think Murasaki Shikibu is awesome. But I have friends who've read this for class, and thought it was pointless and dragged. So. This may be one of those "important" but not actually worthwhile reads.
The Name of the Rose
I think my sister read this one and didn't care for it. And just know that I always judge books when the author's name is about three times as big as the title on the cover. That always bugs me.
The "Rabbit" books
Okay, they sound interesting, and are Pulitzer-winners, but is it really fair to put a SERIES on a list of novels? I think that's kind of cheating.
The Great Gatsby
I have this irrational aversion to those books everyone's supposed to read in high school. Maybe it'll be amazing! We'll see.
Les Miserables
I have the musical pretty much memorized. I love it. But...the book is SO LONG. And I have this problem where I hate any "alternate" version of a story. I think the Harry Potter movies are an abomination, because I read the books first. I thought the book Sense and Sensibility was a letdown because I saw the movie first. I can't bring myself to read the Kathy Reichs books because I watch Bones on TV, and it's already won my allegiance. I suspect the same thing will happen with Les Mis, because I already know the musical so well!
A Dance to the Music of Time
Seriously, another "saga"? Cheaters.
Tess of the D'Ubervilles
I read three pages, then gave up out of boredom. Hopefully it gets better with persistence.
In Search of Lost Time
Okay, if you want to sell me on something, describing it as a "seven-volume meditation on memory" isn't the way to do it. Nothing about that sounds appealing.
Austerlitz
Um, what exactly does the summary mean by "paragraph-free"? Because that sounds terrifying and awful.
Books I Might Have to Skip:
The Three Musketeers
I just. Really? I am so not interested, it isn't even funny.
Moby Dick
I read the Wishbone version; wasn't that enough?
My hope is to read most of these books, and write out what I think of them. I'm no English major, so I won't have much of worth to say. What I am is a social-science major, so I also want to analyze the content of the list as I go. How many of the books were written in English? By women? By people of color? When were they written? How many of the main characters are women? Straight? People of color?
I ask in part because, when reviewing the list, so many of the books seemed to be about man-things that, honestly, don't interest me that much. It looks like they tried to represent women and non-WASPs, but I'm worried all get sick of these themes of conquest and war and male bonding and men coming of age. If it gets too old, I might have to replace a few of the books with some off a list of books every woman should read. Because I'm a cheater like that.
And finally... Missing Books:
Shakespeare
I get that he didn't write novels, per se, but if you're going to bend the rules and put series of novels on, you could also bend them to include the most famous and influential writer of fiction ever. I'm thinking the Tempest, maybe.
Vonnegut
No Vonnegut? That seems criminal to me. I've only read three of his novels, but they are both AMAZING and deep. I suspect most people would advocate for Slaughterhouse 5, but I'm going to come out in favor of Cat's Cradle.
Rand
Maybe? I'm kind of surprised Atlas Shrugged didn't make the list. That said, I can't pretend to be all that disappointed.
A Clockwork Orange
I've only seen the movie, but I think this should be on the list. Just to torture people with. I don't have a better reason than that.
Animal Farm
Another of those books everyone is supposed to read. I saw a play version; does that count?
The Ancient Classics
Ulysses made the list; where's the Odyssey then? Or the Iliad? Or Oedipus? I know, I know, maybe we're stretching it on the "novel" front again, but I don't care. Also, Oedipus was way better than I expected. Also, Antigone? Medea? No? Fine.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Meet the Books
See, I used to read ALL THE TIME. You couldn't tear me away from my novels. But then I grew up, and I didn't care so much for these adult books. Also, I discovered the internet, the biggest time-suck ever.
I've told myself over and over, if only someone would direct me toward actual good books, I'd read more! But I keep getting distracted by shiny things.
So now I'm taking The Telegraph's list of 100 books everyone should read, and I'm going to read it! With a few caveats. Here's the list and summaries:
100) The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
WH Auden thought this tale of fantastic creatures looking for lost jewellery was a “masterpiece”.
99) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A child’s-eye view of racial prejudice and freaky neighbours in Thirties Alabama.
98) The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears.
97) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic.
96) One Thousand and One Nights Anon
A Persian king’s new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution.
95) The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already engaged. Woe is he!
94) Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth.
93) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
Nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
92) Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Hilarious satire on doom-laden rural romances. “Something nasty” has been observed in the woodshed.
91) The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And the world’s first novel?
90) Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
89) The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Lessing considers communism and women’s liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls “inner space fiction”.
88) Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love.
87) On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Beat generation boys aim to “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”.
86) Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism. The anti-hero “Rastingnac” became a byword for ruthless social climbing.
85) The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his “force d’ame”.
84) The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
“One for all and all for one”: the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady.
83) Germinal by Emile Zola
Written to “germinate” social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.
82) The Stranger by Albert Camus
Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts “the gentle indifference of the world”.
81) The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastry.
80) Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he can’t move a glass church 400km.
79) Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Prequel to Jane Eyre giving moving, human voice to the mad woman in the attic.
78) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Carroll’s ludic logic makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
77) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Yossarian feels a homicidal impulse to machine gun total strangers. Isn’t that crazy?
76) The Trial by Franz Kafka
K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But “innocent of what”?
75) Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
Protagonist’s “first long secret drink of golden fire” is under a hay wagon.
74) Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
73) All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage soldier.
72) Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
Three siblings are differently affected by their parents’ unexplained separation.
71) The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
70) The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Garibaldi’s Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the “jackals” ousting the nobility, or “leopards”.
69) If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
68) Crash by JG Ballard
Former TV scientist preaches “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology”.
67) A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
East African Indian Salim travels to the heart of Africa and finds “The world is what it is.”
66) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.
65) Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Romantic young doctor’s idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
64) The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
Follows three generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.
63) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson’s “bogey tale” came to him in a dream.
62) Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Swift’s scribulous satire on travellers’ tall tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s).
61) My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
60) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
59) London Fields by Martin Amis
A failed novelist steals a woman’s trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
58) The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
57) The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules.
56) The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Madhouse memories of the Second World War. Key text of European magic realism.
55) Austerlitz by WG Sebald
Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
54) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Scholar’s sexual obsession with a prepubescent “nymphet” is complicated by her mother’s passion for him.
53) The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
After nuclear war has rendered most sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding.
52) The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Expelled from a “phony” prep school, adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.
51) Underworld by Don DeLillo
From baseball to nuclear waste, all late-20th-century American life is here.
50) Beloved by Toni Morrison
Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery.
49) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
“Okies” set out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity.
48) Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
Explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlem’s African-American community.
47) The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, it can’t matter.
46) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.
45) The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach. If so, who heard?
44) Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on.
43) The Rabbit books by John Updike
A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
42) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum “sivilisation”.
41) The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
40) The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue.
39) Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A Nigerian yam farmer’s local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival.
38) The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
A mysterious millionaire’s love for a woman with “a voice full of money” gets him in trouble.
37) The Warden by Anthony Trollope
“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” said W?H Auden.
36) Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
An ex-convict struggles to become a force for good, but it ends badly.
35) Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl.
34) The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” in this hardboiled crime noir.
33) Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
32) A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Twelve-book saga whose most celebrated character wears “the wrong kind of overcoat”.
31) Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied France.
30) Atonement by Ian McEwan
Puts the “c” word in the classic English country house novel.
29) Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian apartment block. Plus empty rooms.
28) Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sewing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.
27) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Human endeavours “to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” have tragic consequences.
26) Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
25) The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Hailed by T?S Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels”.
24) Ulysses by James Joyce
Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest “sentences” in English literature: 4,391 words.
23) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Buying the lies of romance novels leads a provincial doctor’s wife to an agonising end.
22) A Passage to India by EM Forster
A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India.
21) 1984 by George Orwell
In which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired.
20) Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
19) The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles.
18) Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
17) Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.
16) Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene’s literary Punch and Judy show.
15) The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s personal gentleman.
14) Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s “souls”. Then he storms off.
13) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Debt and deception in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows.
12) Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island.
11) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Every proud posh boy deserves a prejudiced girl. And a stately pile.
10) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.
9) Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Septimus’s suicide doesn’t spoil our heroine’s stream-of-consciousness party.
8) Disgrace by JM Coetzee
An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
7) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
6) In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
5) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
“The conquest of the earth,” said Conrad, “is not a pretty thing.”
4) The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
An American heiress in Europe “affronts her destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.
3) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”.
2) Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale which ate his leg.
1) Middlemarch by George Eliot
“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf.
I suspect this post is now unbearably long, so I'll put my thoughts in the next one.
I've told myself over and over, if only someone would direct me toward actual good books, I'd read more! But I keep getting distracted by shiny things.
So now I'm taking The Telegraph's list of 100 books everyone should read, and I'm going to read it! With a few caveats. Here's the list and summaries:
100) The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
WH Auden thought this tale of fantastic creatures looking for lost jewellery was a “masterpiece”.
99) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A child’s-eye view of racial prejudice and freaky neighbours in Thirties Alabama.
98) The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears.
97) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic.
96) One Thousand and One Nights Anon
A Persian king’s new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution.
95) The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already engaged. Woe is he!
94) Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth.
93) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
Nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
92) Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Hilarious satire on doom-laden rural romances. “Something nasty” has been observed in the woodshed.
91) The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And the world’s first novel?
90) Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
89) The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Lessing considers communism and women’s liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls “inner space fiction”.
88) Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love.
87) On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Beat generation boys aim to “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”.
86) Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism. The anti-hero “Rastingnac” became a byword for ruthless social climbing.
85) The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his “force d’ame”.
84) The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
“One for all and all for one”: the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady.
83) Germinal by Emile Zola
Written to “germinate” social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.
82) The Stranger by Albert Camus
Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts “the gentle indifference of the world”.
81) The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastry.
80) Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he can’t move a glass church 400km.
79) Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Prequel to Jane Eyre giving moving, human voice to the mad woman in the attic.
78) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Carroll’s ludic logic makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
77) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Yossarian feels a homicidal impulse to machine gun total strangers. Isn’t that crazy?
76) The Trial by Franz Kafka
K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But “innocent of what”?
75) Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
Protagonist’s “first long secret drink of golden fire” is under a hay wagon.
74) Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
73) All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage soldier.
72) Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
Three siblings are differently affected by their parents’ unexplained separation.
71) The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
70) The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Garibaldi’s Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the “jackals” ousting the nobility, or “leopards”.
69) If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
68) Crash by JG Ballard
Former TV scientist preaches “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology”.
67) A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
East African Indian Salim travels to the heart of Africa and finds “The world is what it is.”
66) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.
65) Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Romantic young doctor’s idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
64) The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
Follows three generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.
63) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson’s “bogey tale” came to him in a dream.
62) Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Swift’s scribulous satire on travellers’ tall tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s).
61) My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
60) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
59) London Fields by Martin Amis
A failed novelist steals a woman’s trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
58) The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
57) The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules.
56) The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Madhouse memories of the Second World War. Key text of European magic realism.
55) Austerlitz by WG Sebald
Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
54) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Scholar’s sexual obsession with a prepubescent “nymphet” is complicated by her mother’s passion for him.
53) The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
After nuclear war has rendered most sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding.
52) The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Expelled from a “phony” prep school, adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.
51) Underworld by Don DeLillo
From baseball to nuclear waste, all late-20th-century American life is here.
50) Beloved by Toni Morrison
Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery.
49) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
“Okies” set out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity.
48) Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
Explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlem’s African-American community.
47) The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, it can’t matter.
46) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.
45) The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach. If so, who heard?
44) Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on.
43) The Rabbit books by John Updike
A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
42) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum “sivilisation”.
41) The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
40) The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue.
39) Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A Nigerian yam farmer’s local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival.
38) The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
A mysterious millionaire’s love for a woman with “a voice full of money” gets him in trouble.
37) The Warden by Anthony Trollope
“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” said W?H Auden.
36) Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
An ex-convict struggles to become a force for good, but it ends badly.
35) Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl.
34) The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” in this hardboiled crime noir.
33) Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
32) A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Twelve-book saga whose most celebrated character wears “the wrong kind of overcoat”.
31) Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied France.
30) Atonement by Ian McEwan
Puts the “c” word in the classic English country house novel.
29) Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian apartment block. Plus empty rooms.
28) Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sewing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.
27) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Human endeavours “to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” have tragic consequences.
26) Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
25) The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Hailed by T?S Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels”.
24) Ulysses by James Joyce
Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest “sentences” in English literature: 4,391 words.
23) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Buying the lies of romance novels leads a provincial doctor’s wife to an agonising end.
22) A Passage to India by EM Forster
A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India.
21) 1984 by George Orwell
In which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired.
20) Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
19) The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles.
18) Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
17) Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.
16) Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene’s literary Punch and Judy show.
15) The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s personal gentleman.
14) Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s “souls”. Then he storms off.
13) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Debt and deception in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows.
12) Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island.
11) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Every proud posh boy deserves a prejudiced girl. And a stately pile.
10) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.
9) Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Septimus’s suicide doesn’t spoil our heroine’s stream-of-consciousness party.
8) Disgrace by JM Coetzee
An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
7) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
6) In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
5) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
“The conquest of the earth,” said Conrad, “is not a pretty thing.”
4) The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
An American heiress in Europe “affronts her destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.
3) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”.
2) Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale which ate his leg.
1) Middlemarch by George Eliot
“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf.
I suspect this post is now unbearably long, so I'll put my thoughts in the next one.
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