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

15 but it’s an addiction

9 of them. But I always preferred Wuthering Heights to Jane Eyre, loved its rather pagan wildness. Jane Eyre always seems to be considered more important in schools and colleges, but not sure why.

12, and I've not done Eng Lit since GCSE.

I read Ulysses this time last year, and I enjoyed most of it, except the dream sequence.

I heard Moby Dick as a classic serial kn R4 some years back and decided life was too short to ever read it

It took me 5 years to get through Tristram Shandy. It does pick up in the second half, possibly because he has finally been born by then.

Grew up in Dorchester, so have had a lot of Hardy in my life. Done because we are too menny is possibly the most depressing line ever.

12

Zero. I’ve read some books by the named authors though,

Nothing notable written since 1985 and a scarce handful
since 1950? Nah.

I’ve read 15.

To be fair Nabokov and Camus didn’t write in English
Here’s Columbia’s year 1 literature list. All students take the class, even science majors.
Iliad odyssey oriestia trilogy
Oedipus Rex
Euripides Medaeu
Bacchae
Aristophanes comedy
Hirodites
Peloponnesus war
Plato symposium
Hebrew Bible Genesis Job-read as literature
New Testament Luke John
Virgil aeniad
Illyad odyssey homer
Augustine confessions
Dante inferno
Decameron C13th 14th
Montaigne
King Lear
Faust
P&p
Crime and Punishment
To the lighthouse
Arcadia

Posted as an interesting list- not claiming it’s definitive just to put the OPs list in a bigger context.

10. Vanity Fair took a bit of doing.

My DS is obsessed with Ulysses and has read it several times, for fun.

He’s also a big fan of Moby Dick.

I’ve read 7 of that list.

@Lamelie I make that more Greeks than women on Columbia's list. A good reason to avoid them. One of the only people with anything to say from the point of view of half the world's population throughout history is Woolf?

Four I finished, maybe 3 or 4 I started. I don't care if the Rabbit books are modern classics (there you go guys, 20th century): they are awful. The radio adaptation was terrible, too. The most who-cares-about-the-characters ever. Waste of life to try to read.

Virgin (book 6, anyway) was a set text in my Latin A-level.

Yes, that’s quite the omission isn’t it!

This has already been covered, but Nabokov absolutely did write in English, apart from his early stuff.

I like the Columbia list actually. It's presumably not "these are the best writings of all time", more "this is the stuff that you've never actually got around to reading which everything else builds on/quotes/retells." It gives you the message right at the beginning that if you want to study here you need to work from original sources (albeit in translation I guess) not the Cliff Notes.

I'd love to know the rationale behind their 20th century choices though. It looks like someone took pity on the students at the last minute and subbed in Woolf for Ulysses to represent the Modernists. And while Arcadia (assuming they mean the Stoppard play?) is by far my favourite play of the 20th century I have no idea what it's doing on that list. Especially because there's no Byron to go with it.

5

This looks like the most recent Columbia list. More women, starting with Sappho, more writers of colour.

https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/lithum/texts

I read the whole of A Dance To The Music of Time (actually 9 books!) on my Kindle while stuck in hospital for 3 weeks in March. Enjoyed it.

Ditto Bleak House, though I’d previously read it years ago.

I love the Columbia list! I've read them all except Arcadia, Crime and Punishment, the Confessions and the Peloponnesus.

I've also got a soft spot for Gawain and the Green Knight.

8.5. Two unfinished from my list of 10. Middlemarch and Ulysses. I lost Ulysses and just could not finish Middlemarch - even in audible!!!!

I think my maths is out! Basically I read 10 of the books on the list but two were unfinished!

It's funny about Middlemarch. It really is a love it or hate it book.

11, English lit degree was responsible for most. Some things I've read other things but the same author, but not the book she's mentioned. A lot of them seem like they were from the same two uni modules though!

Like this list! Wouldn't say it's it's a 'best of' list but it would give a decent grounding in western literature. I'd expand the later stuff though, and am I the only person who would go for Mrs Dalloway over To The Lighthouse?! Think the former has a lot more going for it personally, especially concerning the female experience (though I admit I barely remember the latter as it bored me!)

I also seem to be the only person who loves Vanity Fair.

@callmej yes! Mrs Dalloway is wonderful and ‘more important’.
And thank you for articulating what it is- a grounding in western literature. Including more women would sadly not reflect what was influencing thought and culture. I’ve messaged my friend to see if the list is the same- this was 10 years ago.