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

Everything apart from Updike and Bellow.

It's a list I'd think a lot of people would have read, a nice foundation, though I'm sure everyone will have their own favourite omissions from it.

It's also a list which will stand the test of time, notwithstanding the deadness and maleness of its authors, I'll bet no-one is going to be reading Donna Tart or Margaret Atwood in a hundred years time, just like no-one reads Somerset Maugham or Anthony Burgess now.

If I'm ever in receipt of another copy of Nostromo I will personally hurl it into the fucking sea where it belongs.

13, I did a degree in English lit

Would I read them now? I don't often read heavy trad literature because it's hard work and I have young children and a fried brain.

Reading should be for pleasure, not trudging through novels so you can say you've read them. Maybe I'll come back to heavyweight stuff but for now lighter modern stuff is fine.

I've read 14 and did an Eng Lit degree. A lot of them I've read because I read them for my degree. I couldn't finish Ulysses or the Great Gatsby. Agree it's very canon-heavy and not overly interesting or varied (although perhaps the ones I haven't read are better). I love long, 'difficult' books, but they have to capture my attention or it's just a slog, and who has time for that. This seems like a list of books you're supposed to say you like.

I do think there's worth in reading (some of) these classics so that you can better appreciate and fully understand later works. But equally, it's incredibly subjective and every person will have a different opinion on what is 'best' - even academics. There is no right answer.

Bleak House is worth reading just for Skimpole. What a character! One of my favourites in all of Dickens (well, all the Dickens I've read, at least).

Apparently he was based on a real person, Leigh Hunt, and you can tell how much Dickens despised him by how fervent he is in the way he writes about Skimpole. And let's face it, we've all known a Skimpole or two.

I’ve read ZERO of them.
Ive watched Persuasion and Jane Eyre though.

It’s all relative. People will have totally different reading lists.
It matters not a jot and it’s just what people like or don’t like.

19. But I didn't read everrry Updike because the rabbit series is so dull/miserable

Agree murakami should be in here -such a unique voice /writing style

Murakami isn't English language though.

One and have read a number of 'classics' just none of these. I believe you should read what you love and many books others have raved about, I've failed to engage with.

Same! I read 2 books a week but nothing dull.

19. Also an English Lit grad. Some amazing books there but others I endured rather than enjoyed.

None. I've read some classics but none of those appeal to me.

I love Bleak House as well and I find Dickens reallyk gripping. It's that and A Tale of Two Cities that are my favourites. Once you click into his style, I find them real page turners.

I think he writes in English first, then translates it into Japanese.

I’ve read two. I did a literature degree as well but not English.

11 of them. It is not a bad list of classics I suppose but missing some beautiful novels, for example Gilead by Maryanne Robinson.

I think part of the reason I think it's a dull list is how bloody joyless some of them are. A few notable exceptions, but I'd rather poke m yself in the face than reread Jude The Obscure or Lolita or Moby Bloody Dick.

A list with them and no PG Wodehouse or Pratchett is heavily skewed towards worthy but glum.

Pat Barker is one of the greatest writers in English in the past 40 years. There's Anne Tyler, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Martel, Sarah Waters... I think their writings are all beautiful and moving, and aren't tick box exercises. I'd certainly pick them over Updike and Wolfe

I've read six of them, and I agree it's a very old-school canonical list. Also I think claims that books become 'classics' on purely aesthetic grounds is quite disingenuous and ignores the fact that aesthetic criteria are also culturally determined.

I've read 15 and did English at uni. There's a couple on there that I've started and will never finish - Ulysses and Moby Dick.

It's a very traditional white male list. I'm pleased my kids are studying a much wider variety of literature at school these days.

Why feel 'ashamed' to have only read three of them? Reading is subjective and this woman's qualifications don't make her an impeccable arbiter of quality literature - not saying she doesn't have an informed opinion but she isn't the only person who does. What if you've read different Jane Austen novels but not Persuasion? Is that less worthy? What if these books aren't to your taste, does it make you intellectually inferior? Shame shouldn't come into it - what do we read for? Pleasure, escapism, to broaden our minds and experience new perspectives and to feel a connection to humanity, to give us empathy and to learn in a way that's enjoyable for us, the individual reader.

A lot of those are reasons why I think it's so important not to just read dead, white men by the way - I've gained plenty from doing so, but it would be incredibly limiting to stop there. And if you want to read Homer - which, yes, is wonderful, you can read Emily Wilson's translations if you can't read Ancient Greek; I'm pretty sure these are going to be definitive and long-lasting translations which happen to be by a woman in the 21st century which are immensely powerful and groundbreaking. So there's a way of not jettisoning a long-dead man (not white though, also maybe not one man - who knows?) but also reading a contemporary woman at the same time. There is so much to be gained in exploring that in itself - how and why it makes a difference, what is enriched in comparison to reading an older translation by another old white man for example.

Reading more broadly isn't inclusivity over merit; it's an understanding of how reading is a unique way of living in someone else's head and recognising that expanding that out across cultures, time, class and gender is a great opportunity to experience so much more than you ever can by living in one very narrow stream (sorry for mixing my metaphors here).

It depends on how you value reading and for what, I guess. But I look at that list and I don't feel excited; I feel like it's a wasted opportunity to discover so much more.

2 both at school

only 5....

thank you for adding to my reading list :-)

although I disagree that these are best books available in the English language as it doesn't include my favourites - the selfish crocodile and three men in a boat.

It's very pale, male and stale, isn't it? I've read 6 off that list, but I've read more widely and am struck more by what's missing. There's nothing outside the mainstream - no classic science fiction, nothing feminist, nothing that is both 'genre' but also excellent. I'm happy with Keats and Blake, but where's Seamus Heaney, where's Emily Dickinson, where's T.S. Eliot? Why would you have multiple books by the same author when there's so much more out there?

I got annoyed by the frilly language "Hast thou eaten, O Lama of Tibet?" type stuff. But I am interested in The Great Game so maybe I'll give it another go one day.

I tried Vanity Fair in my teens and didn't get it at all, but I loved it as an adult.

I think my biggest disparity of opinion was Katherine by Anya Seton. Was on a BBC top 100 books and is my friends favourite book ever. I was, like, what is this romantic trash?!

That's interesting. The versions that you can buy in English are translated by other people though.