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

None, i'll get my coat!

I've read a fair amount of Hardy but nothing on earth would entice me to read Jude the Obscure. Just depressing for the sake of it.

I've read 9, and there are others that I started and didn't like enough to finish (Moby Dick, Women in Love, Parade's End). I know I am never going to plough through ADTTMOT, and I don't think I've ever heard of Party Going.

Well the cake analogy is a bit flip as there are only a few dozen (at most) possible cakes, surely.

But there are many thousands of great novels , so it’s a shame someone who is such a great reader was unable to push the boundaries a bit. I already know I’m supposed to love Bleak House and Middlemarch. I’d just welcome some new ideas.

I’m not a classics hater, like I say, I love Austen and Fitzgerald and Hardy. But I feel that this list is a bit like John Peel’s Festive 50 - where people picked the record they thought they should, not their actual fave. Is Tom Jones really one of the best 30 novels written in English?

21, but most I wouldn't re read again.

I agree with PPs, it is a very odd list and I can think of many more enjoyable books to read!

I’ve read 10 of them but a long time ago .

I read a lot and have read loads of books that are considered classics, but I have only read 4 of those. And I have no desire to read any of the rest of them tbh.

I have read five of them. I did enjoy Bleak House and Gullivers Travels though I haven’t read either in over 20 years. I didn’t mind Persuasion but preferred Mansefield Park.

I would have to Keep The Aspidistra Flying even though Animal Farm and 1984 are better known. I also enjoyed An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestly and Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier.

Believe me you missed nothing. I have to finish books and Moby Dick was the literary equivalent of the vegetables you'd be sat at the table trying to force down hours after everyone had had dessert.

As for the OP assertion that it's some kind of inclusive snobbery to critisise the list, how rude! It's not about inclusion for me (although <yawn> at all the dead white blokes) it's that some of these books aren't very good. I'd rather read every book Dostoyevsky wrote than Moby Dick again.

I suppose it depends what ‘best’ means. If you mean the best written then I disagree with this list although might include some of them. I enjoy a different style more but would say a best list would include a variety of styles.

Read 4 and enjoyed them, started some others and abandoned them but have read others by the same authors
I read widely and only for pleasure so I don't stick with a book that doesn't appeal.

Moby Dick was the literary equivalent of the vegetables you'd be sat at the table trying to force down hours after everyone had had dessert.

That’s a great way of putting it, @MrsTerryPratchett .

None. But I've seen the films of some, does that count?

8! And I wrote my RPR (no idea if it's still called that - the loooong literature review you did in Higher English) on one of them :)

Jane Eyre I could have done without (did that one at school)

I enjoyed the first part about her school life but the governess stuff bored me to tears. I've tried to read it several times but can't get to the end.

Just so relieved I'm not the only one who found Moby Dick... well... dickish

Moby Dick but no Oscar Wilde?

what a travesty.

I think I’ve figured out I’m just not a great fan of 19th century fiction!

None on that list. I have read other books by some of the authors on there though.

9, but mostly they're ones I would count in the "I read those because I felt I ought, wouldn't bother again"

I would disagree with her list of best novels.

But she compiled a list of what she thinks are the best novels written in English – the best works of art, if you like. I didn't ask her to list the books she thinks offer the widest perspective. An 'inclusive' list would have been different.

You've set up a dichotomy here between quality and diversity which could be quite unpleasant

I don't think they are the best. But if you're talking about the history and development specifically of literature from England (with obviously a couple of exceptions) I do think she's listed some seminal works. But if that's what she was intending to do where's Tristram Shandy?

My favourite book is Bridget Jones's Diary.

It'll probably come as no surprise that I haven't read any of the list!

Good point! No Oscar Wilde, who is actually enjoyable to read.

14 for me.

2 of those. I've read other books by the same authors though.
I'd say I've read fairly widely; I have A level English Literature, and studied it as part of my degree, but that list hasn't intersected with my reading.

I probably wouldn't choose to read most of the ones on that list, but each to their own.