In Which We Discuss the Telegraph's List of a Hundred Novels Everyone Should Read

According to my GoodReads account, I read over 250 books in 2012 and I've 131 so far in 2013. In 2012, 184 of those were new to me, and so far in 2013, 84 of them were previously unread by me. 

Incidentally, in 2010 I started 189 books, but I didn't keep track of how many I was reading for the first time, and I didn't finish everything I started.  As for 2011...I only joined Goodreads in September of that year.  In that time, I read 75 books, 42 of them for the first time.

The point I'm trying to make with all these numbers is - well, you'd think I'd be well-read, wouldn't you?  I'm broadly read, and I don't want to say I'm not well-read because that seems disparaging to the books I choose to read, and I don't want to do that.  When you read more than ten times as many books as the average person, then you can be judgmental about what I throw in there.

Anyway.  Point I was making.  There are lots of books out there that I feel like I ought to have read, just for the sake of completeness.  For the ability to pick up references, for instance, or to understand another author's inspiration.  For instance, apparently Pratchett's Night Watch has a lot in common with Les Miserables.  I had no idea, never read it.

To this end, I spent a few minutes googling for one of those 'hundred books everyone should read' lists.  I did find a list of a thousand books everyone should read, but decided to leave that for now.   I found two I liked, from the Telegraph and the BBC.  When I started writing this, I only had the Telegraph's list in mind, but I had to google again to find that thousand linked, and the BBC popped up.

At this stage, I only intend to record how many I've read.  The Telegraph's list will go in this post, and the BBCs in another.  Maybe when I've gotten through my current goal, of getting my unread pile down from 204 to 150 throughout May, I'll have a go at completing the lists.  Maybe.

So;  The Telegraph, in handy groups of ten.

1. Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien  [ ]
2. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [X]
3. The Home and the World - Rabindranath Tagore [ ]
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams [X]
5. One Thousand and One Nights - Anon [ ]
6. The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [ ]
7. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie [ ]
8.  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré [ ]
9. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons [ ]
10. The Tale of Genji - Lady MurasakiShikibu [ ]

I've started The Tale of Genji, but never actually finished it.  It was heavy going for a fifteen-year-old.  I've also read several adaptations of and stories from The Thousand and One Nights, but I don't think I've read the original.

1. Under the Net - Iris Murdoch [ ]
2. The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing [X]
3. Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin [ ]
4. On the Road - Jack Kerouac [ ]
5. Old Goriot - Honoré de Balzac [ ]
6. The Red and the Black - Stendhal [ ]
7. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas [ ]
8. Germinal - Emile Zola [ ]
9. The Stranger - Albert Camus [ ]
10. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco [ ]

...hrm.

I'm not actually sure whether or not I've read The Three Musketeers.  It might have been an abridged version.

1. Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey [ ]
2. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [ ]
3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll [X]
4. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller [ ]
5. The Trial - Franz Kafka [ ]
6. Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee [X]
7. Waiting for the Mahatma - RK Narayan [ ]
8. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Remarque [ ]
9. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [ ]
10. The Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin [ ]

I read Cider with Rosie when I was sixteen, if I recall correctly.  I don't remember much about it.  Alice in Wonderland I read when I was seven, and in hospital with a broken arm.  I have Catch 22 in my unread pile; I'll get to it someday.  I tried reserving Wide Sargasso Sea at the library after my feminist bookclub read Jane Eyre, but they never got ahold of a copy.

1. The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa [ ]
2. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino [ ]
3. Crash - JG Ballard [ ]
4. A Bend in the River - VS Naipaul [ ]
5. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [ ]
6. Dr Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [ ]
7. The Cairo Trilogy - Naguib Mahfouz [ ]
8. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson [ ]
9. Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift [X]
10. My Name Is Red - Orhan Pamuk [ ]

I might have read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide.  Or it might have been another abridged version.  I'm not totally sure.

I've read Orhan Pamuk's Snow.  An ex of mine leant it to me (while we were dating).  It was a bit of a slog but interesting enough.  I stuck with it because I assumed we were sharing reading matter out of common interest.  Apparently not.  When I gave it back, he smugly told me "that ought to get you back into reading literature".  Arse.  I am no one's Eliza Dolittle.

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez [ ]
2. London Fields - Martin Amis [ ]
3. The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño [ ]
4. The Glass Bead Game - Herman Hesse [ ]
5. The Tin Drum - Günter Grass [ ]
6. Austerlitz - WG Sebald [ ]
7. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov [ ]
8. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood [X]
9. The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [ ]
10. Underworld - Don DeLillo [ ]

Okay.  This is embarassing.

Catcher in the Rye is also in my unread pile.  I've put that and Catch 22 on top, and I'll get to them this month.  I've also rescued Lolita from my 'donate' pile.  Pages are falling out of my copy; the glue's so old it's dried out and started to break.  I was intending to wait, and buy it as an eBook someday, because it was so hard to hold.  I guess I can read it first, though, and then buy an ecopy if I ever fancy reading it again.

1. Beloved - Toni Morrison [ ]
2. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [ ]
3. Go Tell It On the Mountain - James Baldwin [ ]
4. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera [ ]
5. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark [ ]
6. The Voyeur - Alain Robbe-Grillet [ ]
7. Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre [ ]
8. The Rabbit books - John Updike [ ]
9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain [ ]
10. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle [X]

I may have read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a child.  I'm not totally certain.  Beloved is in my unread pile, and I've put it over with Catch 22 et al.

The Telegraph has little descriptions under each of these in the original article.  I like the one for The Hound of the Baskervilles - "A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors".

1. The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton [ ]
2. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe [ ]
3. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald [ ]
4. The Warden - Anthony Trollope [ ]
5. Les Misérables - Victor Hugo [ ]
6. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis [ ]
7. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler [ ]
8. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson [ ]
9. A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell [ ]
10. Suite Francaise - Irène Némirovsky [ ]

 If I ever do work through this list, I'd like to do this batch of ten first.  Not just because this is the first group in which I've not read any of them, but because they all sound interesting.  And at least a few are out of copyright (until my new job starts, this is very important to me).

1. Atonement - Ian McEwan [ ]
2. Life: a User’s Manual - Georges Perec [ ]
3. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding [ ]
4. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley [X]
5. Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell [ ]
6. The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins [ ]
7. Ulysses - James Joyce [ ]
8. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert [ ]
9. A Passage to India - EM Forster [ ]
10. 1984 - George Orwell [X]

Atonement is in my unread pile as well. I used to have a copy of Cranford; it was super old.  It didn't have an ISBN number or anything, and the author's signature was engraved into the cover.  I donated it to a charity shop (having owned it for fifteen years without ever opening the cover) and the lady in the shop was stroking it reverently and whatnot.  I wish her much joy of it (though, if she sold it on eBay for hundreds of pounds, I will be mildly ticked off with myself).  I'll get the eBook.  I have an eBook of The Moonstone, having given away my physical copy of that, too.  I've been meaning to get around to it for ages, especially after a friend highly recommended it.

1. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne [ ]
2. The War of the Worlds - HG Wells [X]
3. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh [ ]
4. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy [X]
5. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene [ ]
6. The Code of the Woosters - PG Wodehouse [ ]
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë [ ]
8. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens [ ]
9. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe [ ]
10. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen [X]

I can't abide Austen. And I hated pretty much every character in Tess of the D'Urbervilles.  That book made me so angry.  I guess that was kind of the point, to show up how sexist and awful Victorian times could be.  Though that said, in today's world, I'm sure you could find people who consider her equally to blame for the rape.

1. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes [ ]
2. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf [ ]
3. Disgrace - JM Coetzee [ ]
4. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë [X]
5. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust [ ]
6. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad [ ]
7. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James [ ]
8. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy [ ]
9. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville [ ]
10. Middlemarch - George Eliot [ ] 

As I said earlier, I finally got around to reading Jane Eyre because of a bookclub.  I didn't like any of the characters in that either.  Particularly not Rochester, who decides that locking his mentally ill wife in the attic while he preys on a young girl is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

So, I've read 14 books off that list.  That doesn't seem like a great deal, but I can get it up to twenty just by reading through my unread pile, and then reading one of the out-of-copyright books on my Kobo.  We'll see if I want to accept the challenge.