How Many of These Books Have you Read?

[JaneyGee]

I belong to an amazing book group. The members are great – no one shows off, or disagrees just for the sake of it, or tries to impress you with what they know. They all come just for the love of books. Anyway, one of the members is a retired university lecturer. She's published several books and can talk for hours on Chaucer, Milton, Blake, Keats, etc. We're all in awe of her (though she's very humble and sweet). Anyway, I asked her what she thought were the best novels in the English language. She emailed me her list (roughly in chronological order). Here they are. (I'm ashamed to admit I've only read three of them.)

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
Jonathan Swift: Gullivers Travels
Jane Austen: Persuasion
Dickens: Bleak House
Thackery: Vanity Fair
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Hermann Melville: Moby Dick
Henry James: Portrait of a Lady
Joseph Conrad: Nostromo
Kipling: Kim
Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure
James Joyce: Ulysses
D. H. Lawrence: Women in Love
Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Ford Madox Ford: Parade's End
Henry Green: Partygoing
Nabokov: Pale Fire
Nabokov: Lolita
Evelyn Waugh: Scoop
Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Anthony Powell: Dance to the Music of Time (considered as one novel)
Saul Bellow: Augie March
John Updike: The Rabbit novels (considered as one novel)
Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian

I’ve read 6 (and I did an English Literature degree!)

6 of those only.

12! I’m surprised at that!

I've read a few of them. I'd say they're mostly classics and all of a similar type if that makes sense? It's a bit dull dare I say

9 amazingly. I did go through a phase of thingbi 'ought' to read the classics.

I've read 15. It's a strange list though.

I've read 9 of them, but I didn't enjoy 2 of them!

12 but I'd take issue with her list of "best". She's entitled to her view but it's a very heavily canon-leaning list that misses most of what has been published in the last few decades and skews very heavily towards dead white men.

i did Eng lit at uni. I’ve read 17 of them.

Definitely dull!!

I’ve read 6 and agree this is a very limited list. Not much global or modern literature on there.

None - I know they are classic but they are not the type of books I enjoy reading. As a PP says, I would consider them a bit dull (although admittedly I wouldn't actually know this as I haven't read any of them!)

I’d agree it’s a limited and rather dull list.

13 with a few I'm meaning to read.

I've read one, The Great Gatsby which I found quite disappointing, and have some of the others, but couldn't get into them.

I have an English degree and I've only read Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Eyre, The Portrait of a Lady, Jude the Obscure, The Great Gatsby and Parade's End, so six. Have also read other stuff by Joyce, Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.

I have to say it reads a bit like a list of A level/first year of an English degree texts; it's pretty unimaginative and shallow.

Yes, that's what I meant, I think.
But if she talks a lot about Chaucer, Milton, Blake and Keats, she sounds very much like she only knows about/is interested in a narrow 'canon'.

Four. I don't bother reading novels by men, and that is a very male-heavy list.

6 and I only enjoyed 2.

8

Others I've started but not wanted to persevere. Dance to the music of time is on my to read list, but it's been there for a while.

It's a limited list...

I’ve read nine but apart from Austen and Fitzgerald that’s a very dull list.

No-one reads Moby-Dick or Ulysses these days. Honestly. And <looks hard> I cannot see anything from the 21st C and very little from the latter part of the 20th.

Where are Donna Tartt, Margaret Atwood, Bernadine Evaristo, Ann Tyler? Lots of DWM, huh.

Really, some of my favourite novels are by men, I'd have been so sad to have missed out on them.

Only 3.
But I have read Catch 22, Captain Correlli's Mandolin, Picture of Dorian Grey, Catcher in the Rye, Handmaids Tale, Brave New Word all of which could be on a 'do you read widely' list.

I used to, and I just never enjoyed them half as much as I did female ones - with the possible exception of Stephen King.

nine