Book List

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while now, you’ll know I love lists. Here’s another list for a Sunday morning. Got the idea from Kimbofo’s Yet (Another) Book list. Time magazine’s literary critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo have published a list of what they consider to be the 100 best English language novels published since 1923 (I wonder why 1923?). Kimbofo lists the books she’s read out of the list, and I’m copying her.

What I’ve read:
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume*
Read this one as a teenager. I don’t really remember it now…
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger*
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
I love this book. Every time I read it (three times now), I get all interested in ancient Roman history. Pity the interest is never sustained for very long.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
Lord of the Flies by William Golding*
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
I’m stretching it a bit, saying I read this one. It’s more like I dipped into it – it’s one of those books that (I find) is impossible to read page by page.
1984 by George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
Possession by A. S. Byatt*
This book was one of the few English language books I had access to during my year in China. I really enjoyed it and read it something like four times during that year. I find I don’t really remember it all that well – my memories of China are stronger. Must re-read.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark*
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Trivia: This author is widely known to handwrite his novels, using a fountain pen. (I wonder what type of pen?)
Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
My all-time favourite, I think.

18% is not very impressive. (The titles marked * are books I don’t own at present.)

What amuses me is the fact that of the list the number of books I own but haven’t read is larger (19%) than the number that I have read:

Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
A Death in the Family by James Agee
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Native Son by Richard Wright
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Looking at the list of books I have but haven’t read, it seems to me that I don’t really need to go to the library or buy any new books for a while – I have more than enough to keep me going!

Categories: books, reading