The Observer's top 100 novels had me interested. I know the whole idea of a list of the 'best' books ever is a bit dodgy but I can't resist having a look, if only to get outraged at novels that are missing. For the most part I'm with the Observer, although sometimes I would have chosen a different novel for the author ('Unbearable Lightness of Being' instead of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' for example). I've nicked an idea from this site and have bolded those that I've read. I'm pretty ashamed of the amount of unread ones but I guess it gives me something to work towards...
By the way, where's 'Heart of Darkness'?1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan
3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding (well, ¾ of it- I’ll finish it one of these days, I promise!!)
6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne (I've seen the brilliant film with Steve Coogan, but I don't think that counts)
8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock
12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal
14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens (Twice, I love it!!)
17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott (Many times, when I was a kid)
26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope
27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith
36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy (and still devastated by the suicide scene)
37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild Jack London
39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad
40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence
43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan
45. Ulysses James Joyce
46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf
47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster
48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Trial Franz Kafka
50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh
55. USA John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford
58. The Plague Albert Camus
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
62. Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor
63. Charlotte's Web E. B. White
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien (yes, and feel I wasted too many hours of my life in doing so)
65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis (the speech he gives while drunk is one of my favourite scenes in literature)
66. Lord of the Flies William Golding
67. The Quiet American Graham Greene
69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov (recently and loved it)
70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller
75. Herzog Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez (bleh, hugely overrated)
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre
79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge
81. The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
88. The BFG Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi (and loved it)
90. Money Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey (yay, an Australian)
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie
95. LA Confidential James Ellroy (brilliant!)
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
97. Atonement Ian McEwan
98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman (yes, and the rest of the trilogy- love it)
99. American Pastoral Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald (well, I own it and have read 2/3…. :-) )
2 comments:
Jess, thank you for the comment about The Stone Reader. It's a lovely film, although I started reading the Stones of Summer this morning and put it down after half an hour. The prose is purple and it's just not well-written at all. A shame to see such product from an Iowa Workshop grad. Dow Mossman needed an editor.
I like the 100 novel list. I'm making my own, nicking an idea from Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, an excellent book about the form that has its own annotated list.
I'm sorry to hear that about the novel, I'd always hoped it would be an 'undiscovered masterpiece'.
I'm looking forward to your list. I've been thinking more about the Observer's list and seeing further flaws, such as very token inclusion of novels written in languages other than English, and I think that some of the children's novels might be sentimental inclusions rather than merit-based (although maybe that's ok?). Lists are so fraught with problems!
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