Saturday, May 5, 2012

The Guardian's 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read

Of the Guardian's 1000 novels everyone must read, I have read a somewhat depressing 53. The list is broken up by genre. No surprises: my weakest genre was comedy, my strongest love. Life is very short and the canon grows faster than one can read. Comment with how many you've read. Winner wins a book from the list.


The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Cakes and Ale - Or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard by W Somerset Maugham
Thank You Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan DoyleThe Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
A Time to Kill by John Grisham
The King of Torts by John Grisham
Cover Her Face by PD James
A Taste for Death by PD James
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Possession by AS Byatt
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
Atonement by Ian McEwan
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowling
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

1 comment:

  1. I have ready 89 of these books! But that's probably far fewer than Will has read. I was surprised that my largest category was science fiction & fantasy. Here's my list:

    Comedy (6)
    Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
    The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
    High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
    Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor
    A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
    Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

    Crime (8)
    And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
    The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
    Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
    American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
    A Time to Kill by John Grisham
    To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
    No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
    Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

    Family and self (13)
    Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
    The Outsider by Albert Camus
    The Awakening by Kate Chopin
    Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
    The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
    One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
    The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
    The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
    The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
    East of Eden by John Steinbeck
    The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
    To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

    Love (16)
    Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
    Emma by Jane Austen
    Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
    Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
    The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
    The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
    Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald
    Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
    The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
    A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
    Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
    The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
    The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
    Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
    Lolita, or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male by Vladimir Nabokov

    Science fiction and fantasy (24)
    The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
    Weaveworld by Clive Barker
    A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
    Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
    Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
    House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
    Lord of the Flies by William Golding
    Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
    The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
    The Trial by Franz Kafka
    Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
    The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
    The Road by Cormac McCarthy
    Beloved by Toni Morrison
    Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
    Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
    Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowling
    Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
    The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
    Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
    The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
    Dracula by Bram Stoker
    The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
    The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

    State of the nation (11)
    Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
    White Noise by Don DeLillo
    Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
    The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
    Middlemarch by George Eliot
    The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
    The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
    Animal Farm by George Orwell
    The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
    White Teeth by Zadie Smith
    The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

    War and travel (11)
    Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
    The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
    For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
    On the Road by Jack Kerouac
    One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
    Everything is Illuminated by Jonathon Safran Foer
    Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
    Candide by Voltaire
    Slaughter-House Five by Kurt Vonnegut

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