2017

So, in 2017 I’m going to have a go at filling in the blanks and reading some of the (many) classic novels that have passed me by so far.

With any project there must be rules. These are the rules:

1. I’m not reading Ulysses.
2. Or D.H. Lawrence
3. Er, that’s it.

But how to choose which books to read? There are lots of resources available on the interwebs and my first port of call was the Guardian 2015 list of the Top 100 Novels Written in the English Language. I’ve crossed out and made blue the ones I’ve already read.

1. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
3. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
4. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
5. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
6. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)
7. Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
8. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
9. Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (1818)
10. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838)
11. Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
13. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
14. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
15. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
16. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
17. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
18. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
19. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
20. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
21. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
22. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)
23. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
24. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
25. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
26. The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
27. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
28. New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
29. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
30. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
31. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
32. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
33. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
34. Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
35. The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
36. The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
37. Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
38. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
39. The History of Mr Polly by H. G. Wells (1910)
40. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1911)
41. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
42. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
43. The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
44. Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham (1915)
45. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
46. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
47. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
48. A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)
49. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)
50. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
51. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
52. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
53. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
54. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
55. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
56. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
57. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
58. Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)
59. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
60. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
61. Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)
62. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
63. Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
64. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (1939)
65. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
66. Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
67. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
68. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
69. The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
70. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
71. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
72. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
73. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
74. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
75. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
76. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
77. Voss by Patrick White (1957)
78. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
79. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)
80. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
81. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
82. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
83. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
84. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
85. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
86. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
87. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)
88. Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
89. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
90. A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
91. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
92. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981)
93. Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis (1984)
94. An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)
95. The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
96. Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1988)
97. Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)
98. Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)
99. Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)
100. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000)

 

I think it’s fair to say that I have a few issues with this list. It’s not actually a list of the 100 best novels, because it seems to be operating a “one novel per author” rule. So only one Austen, one Dickens, one Eliot and no Gaskell. And I can’t really respect any such list which omits Tolkien. However, it has thrown up some interesting suggestions for my reading.

Next up, and in the interests of journalistic balance, the Telegraph’s list of 100 Novels Everyone Should Read, also from 2015. This one includes translated works.

Middlemarch by George Eliot Moby Dick by Herman Melville Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse Brighton Rock by Graham Greene Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy Scoop by Evelyn Waugh The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne 1984 by George Orwell A Passage to India by E. M. Forster Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Ulysses by James Joyce The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Tom Jones by Henry Fielding Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec Atonement by Ian McEwan Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement, Winter by Anthony Powell Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis Les Misérables by Victor Hugo The Warden by Anthony Trollope The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy by John Updike Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Beloved by Toni Morrison Underworld by Don DeLillo The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald The Tin Drum by Günter Grass The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño London Fields by Martin Amis One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul Crash by J. G. Ballard If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque Waiting for Mahatma by R. K. Narayan Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee The Trial by Franz Kafka Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco The Stranger by Albert Camus Germinal by Émile Zola The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas The Red and the Black by Stendhal Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac On the Road by Jack Kerouac Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing Under the Net by Iris Murdoch The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Arabian Nights by Muhsin Mahdi The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

This was a bit more like it, though they also operate the one book per author rule, leading to the frankly outrageous exclusion of War and Peace. Sure, we can have a debate about which of Tolstoy’s two great novels is the greatest, but to set up any list like this which can’t include both just isn’t honest. No matter. I’ve now got lots of reading ideas for next year and will try and select at least 10 from the unread books listed above. Happy New Year.