Wednesday, May 26, 2004

The Guardian's best books list

...via Jenica...
I've read those highlighted.

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan I'm giving myself credit for this, even though I read the children's version: I read it about 12 times before I turned 10.
3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
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 Dickensassigned
17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte assigned but I've read it about 4 times since then
18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte assigned, but read it several times since then, once on a train in Siberia
19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne assigned, repeatedly
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville assigned, but didn't read the last 80 pages or so
22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert assigned
23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins I think??
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll see my reading list elsewhere
25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope
27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky assigned
30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James assigned; I should read this again
31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain assigned
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
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 assigned
47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster
48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald assigned; I love this book!
49. The Trial Franz Kafka assigned
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 assigned
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
65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies William Golding another one I read in Siberia
67. The Quiet American Graham Greene
68. On the Road Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass last year
71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee Love this book too!
74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller assigned; a friend read my copy in Rome
75. Herzog Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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
90. Money Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie
95. L.A. Confidential James Ellroy
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
97. Atonement Ian McEwan
98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass, in the USA)
99. American Pastoral Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald

(assigned = assigned AND READ; there are quite a few on the list that were assigned and UNread...)
There are a few here I think I've read, but didn't mark because I don't remember. About 10% of those I didn't mark I actually have started, but gave up on, so I don't think they count.
Conclusions: I need to read some "modern classics." And I'm glad they are considering kiddie lit!

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