Courtesy of Bibliobibuli, yet another list of things read or to be read. This one, “100 novels everyone should read“, appears to be in reverse order of importance. The ones I’ve read are in bold, the ones I’ve started and not finished, in italics. Books in my collection (read or not) are underlined.
100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
96 One Thousand and One Nights Anon
95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
83 Germinal by Emile Zola
82 The Stranger by Albert Camus
81 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
68 Crash by JG Ballard
67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
59 London Fields by Martin Amis
58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
50 Beloved by Toni Morrison
49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
47 The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (I’ve read Tom Sawyer, but not Huck Finn)
41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
38 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
24 Ulysses by James Joyce (two copies, even!)
23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
22 A Passage to India by EM Forster
21 1984 by George Orwell
20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (have started this, but currently stalled)
5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
1 Middlemarch by George Eliot
I’ve not done very well in this list: a paltry 13 titles!
On the other hand, I own 52 of these titles. What does this say? 1) I have an extensive library; 2) I ought to read more of the books I already own, rather than acquiring new ones.
As it happens I am rereading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook at the moment, and in the preface to the book, Ms Lessing says:
I say to these students who have to spend a year, two years, writing theses about one book: ‘There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down — even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written — and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this — are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the truth in words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book, or one author means that you are badly taught — you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need: that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people.’
(from the online edition)
She’s right about not reading a book “out of its right time for you”: I first read The Golden Notebook in the early 1990s and I don’t remember it at all. I don’t think it made much of an impression on me at all because I didn’t have the life experience to appreciate it. This time around I picked it up off the shelf and started reading and only reluctantly put it down to go to sleep.
I like the idea of reading “your way from one sympathy to another, … learning to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need”, too.
3 Comments
Yes – I agree with the right time thing too. And this:
“browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement”
appeals to me too.
Although, I don’t think it is a bad thing to be challenged out of my normal reading path which is what I hope this book circle thing will do for me.
I should try Ulysses again… the writing style floored me the first time.
78. The thing about reading classic old stuff is that they set templates that are still with us today. Moby Dick has been retold in various forms amillion times, as has Huck Finn, Don Quixote, Frankenstein etc. The more you read the old stuff, the greater the richness you get from the new stuff.
I really must get around to reading the 1001 Nights.
Ulysses is one book that I think I’m scared of, Penny. But that “fear” is from years ago, maybe I’m ready for it now.
You’re right about the classic old stuff, Tom. Looking at the list, I was struck by how much of our cultural references come from these books – it makes sense to become familiar with them.