BBC "The Novels That Shaped Our World" list

[Rivergreen]

Anyone else been having a look at this list? I haven't been following the radio discussions, but I have to admit I think some are very strange choices.

I was also surprised by how few I had read or even heard of! And there seemed to be some of the usual literary pretensions going on with a few of the choices (such as preferring Cannery Row to Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden or Of Mice & Men for example).

I've copied the list out below, but it's also here www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/494P41NCbVYHlY319VwGbxp/explore-the-list-of-100-novels-that-shaped-our-world

Identity
Beloved Toni Morrison
Days Without End Sebastian Barry
Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels
Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Homegoing Yaa Gyasi
Small Island Andrea Levy
The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath
The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy
Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
White Teeth Zadie Smith

Love, Sex & Romance
Bridget Jones’s Diary Helen Fielding
Forever Judy Blume
Giovanni’s Room James Baldwin
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
Riders Jilly Cooper
Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston
The Far Pavilions M. M. Kaye
The Forty Rules of Love Elif Shafak
The Passion Jeanette Winterson
The Slaves of Solitude Patrick Hamilton

Adventure
City of Bohane Kevin Barry
Eye of the Needle Ken Follett
For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway
His Dark Materials Trilogy Philip Pullman
Ivanhoe Walter Scott
Mr Standfast John Buchan
The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins
The Jack Aubrey Novels Patrick O’Brian
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy J.R.R. Tolkien

Life, Death & Other Worlds
A Game of Thrones George R. R. Martin
Astonishing the Gods Ben Okri
Dune Frank Herbert
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Gilead Marilynne Robinson
The Chronicles of Narnia C. S. Lewis
The Discworld Series Terry Pratchett
The Earthsea Trilogy Ursula K. Le Guin
The Sandman Series Neil Gaiman
The Road Cormac McCarthy

Politics, Power & Protest
A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini
Brave New World Aldous Huxley
Home Fire Kamila Shamsie
Lord of the Flies William Golding
Noughts & Crosses Malorie Blackman
Strumpet City James Plunkett
The Color Purple Alice Walker
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
V for Vendetta Alan Moore
Unless Carol Shields

Class & Society
A House for Mr Biswas V. S. Naipaul
Cannery Row John Steinbeck
Disgrace J.M. Coetzee
Our Mutual Friend Charles Dickens
Poor Cow Nell Dunn
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Alan Sillitoe
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne Brian Moore
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro
Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys

Coming of Age
Emily of New Moon L. M. Montgomery
Golden Child Claire Adam
Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood
So Long, See You Tomorrow William Maxwell
Swami and Friends K. Narayan
The Country Girls Edna O’Brien
The Harry Potter series J. K. Rowling
The Outsiders E. Hinton
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ Sue Townsend
The Twilight Saga Stephenie Meyer

Family & Friendship
A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth
Ballet Shoes Noel Streatfeild
Cloudstreet Tim Winton
Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons
I Capture the Castle Dodie Smith
Middlemarch George Eliot
Tales of the City Armistead Maupin
The Shipping News E. Annie Proulx
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Anne Brontë
The Witches Roald Dahl

Crime & Conflict
American Tabloid James Ellroy
American War Omar El Akkad
Ice Candy Man Bapsi Sidhwa
Rebecca Daphne du Maurier
Regeneration Pat Barker
The Children of Men P.D. James
The Hound of the Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle
The Reluctant Fundamentalist Mohsin Hamid
The Talented Mr Ripley Patricia Highsmith
The Quiet American Graham Greene

Rule Breakers
A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
Bartleby, the Scrivener Herman Melville
Habibi Craig Thompson
How to be Both Ali Smith
Orlando Virginia Woolf
Nights at the Circus Angela Carter
Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
Psmith, Journalist P. G. Wodehouse
The Moor’s Last Sigh Salman Rushdie
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name Audre Lorde

Also, including series as one seems a bit of a cop out. I suppose that the Lord of the Rings, for example, could be described as one novel / story split into multiple books. But Discworld series, as amazing as it is, is made up of relatively standalone stories.

Also, the Dickens choice? I've not read A Mutual Friend, but surely A Christmas Carol is his most influential novel. For many people, it's become a fundamental part of Christmas. Most of our Christmas traditions are Victorian in origin and the scenes described add to our image of urban Christmasses as snow dusted cobble streets, Christmas Eve shopping and eating goose.

Thanks for this list - I’d entirely missed it.

I would have scrubbed out ‘Identity’ as a category. The entire function of (literary) fiction is to interrogate our individual and collective identities in relation to other human beings and the known and unknown world. Interesting to see who they decided should be gathered there.

And what possessed them to yoke Crime and Conflict together? In fictional terms they’re the antithesis of each other.

I seem to have read a little over half of these. Only about three whose titles were completely unknown to me - and it’s good to see some surprisingly new books in the list. Should be fun to share with younger generations of readers over the Christmas holidays.

It’s an odd sort of list which, inevitably, doesn’t reflect my own reading experience. Only a tiny handful - barely a handful - of pre-20th century writing, whereas at least half (probably more) of the literature that I grew up reading, so the most influential tranche, was written in earlier centuries.

I applaud their efforts at ‘diversity’ - but anyone young or un-bookish would be led to believe from this list that no not-white person ever scratched a mark on a surface (throughout the whole of history!) until the 1900s.

There doesn’t seem to have been a Russian enthusiast amongst the list makers either. That also makes it feel a mite insubstantial.

"Our Mutal Friend" is my favourite Dickens' novel @Rivergreen.

There is a very good BBC adaption of it featuring Keely Hawes.

It definitely has a heavy bias for 20th/21st century books. I think my teen DCs have probably read more of that list than I have - Hunger Games, Twilight Zone, HIs Dark Materials, Noughts and Crosses etc.

Thanks @NightLion. I’m aware of the story, but am questioning it’s inclusion on a list describing itself as “shaping our world”.

Having said that it must have been difficult to put aside favourites and pick those with greatest influence regardless. Influence doesn’t necessarily mean popularity either though, so i’d be interested to hear why some books were chosen!

I have to agree about a pp’s comment about the categories, they’re also very subjective.

I sound like I’m just doing a lot of moaning, but I am going to pick up some of the books I haven’t heard of and it has made me notice a pattern in the types of books I read. I had read most of the family category, but very few of the crime and conflict ones so I’m going to consciously step outside my comfort zone!

@SurpriseSparDay Yes! Not even a Tolstoy! That is remiss...

I wouldn't necessarily question Dickens' inclusion on the list: he did 'shape our world' by drawing attention to the plight of the Victorian poor and working class and arguably, helped to bring about social change. However, it would be possible to substitute any number of his novels under the category of class and society.

I rather like "Our Mutal Friend" because it is not overtly sentimental, and quite scathing in it's satire.

Oversll, I think the list is a bit meh, and not definitive by any means.

Hah! Just noticed this a completely (almost completely?) English as first language list! WTF?

So when they say “our world” they mean the world from the viewpoint of a monolingual English person who has never cared for literature in translation.

Okay. I get it now ...

I hadn’t noticed that @SurpriseSparDay but i think you’re right.

There’s nothing I can spot about SEAsia or South America either (in addition to your Russia comment). I know very little about writing from those regions, but there must be some!! (Gabriel Garcia Marquez for example) It’s not really a “world list” is it...

I feel like if I wrote my own list of novels that changed me, it would probably suffer from many of the same problems, because of my individual ignorance of much of the world’s literature. But then again, I read only for pleasure, with no “training” beyond gcse and I am not publishing this list as a definitive guide.

It seems to be a deliberate decision to use only English-language novels, which is fair enough.

I think that grouping them into categories is a bit silly.

I've read 39 of them, but I found some of the choices a bit strange, with slightly too much bias towards the contemporary.

How can they justify the inclusion of Roald Dahl's misogynist twaddle 'The Witches'?

It doesn't really read like a list of novels that 'shaped the world'. It reads like a list of novels the person compiling the list personally enjoyed, thrown together with little coherence.

There was a panel of six people:

Radio 4 Front Row presenter and Times Literary Supplement editor Stig Abell, broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, authors Juno Dawson, Kit de Waal and Alexander McCall Smith, and Bradford Festival Literary Director Syima Aslam (photo in the OP’s link).

Ho hum.

Madame Bovary has stayed my hand from clicking ‘Buy’ a thousand times.

Portrait of a Lady has, more than any book except The Magician’s Nephew, which they do include, impressed upon me the essential iniquity of adults - I’ve never been the same person since I read it.

No Gormenghast?

Actually. Where on God’s earth are Henry James, Patrick White, James Joyce??? Not to speak of A. Trollope, Dorothy L. Sayers and Elinor Brent-Dyer? Left to the panel’s list my world would have been only partially framed, rocked and completed by literature.

Actually, it’s not the panel - it’s ... novels. Surely no human being’s life hasn’t been primarily shaped by myths and poetry?

Quite impressed Elif Shafak is on there.

Well, I could've guessed those arch back-scratchers at Radio 4 had a hand in it.

Perhaps mumsnet should write our own list? Novels that changed our "world", ie our individual ways of thinking?
I'd be interested in reading the books on that list!

For me, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things really opened up the difference in people's lives to me, even those in close proximity. I was at uni when I read it and it was one of the books that took me out of selfish single-minded teenager mode. I know people argue about the way Jon McGregor writes, but I love it.

The other book, which is on the original list, is The God of Small Things. This affected me in a more integral way, but I still feel an ache in my heart when I think of this book.

I would add The Trick Is To Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway

Still keep zami which is on the BBC list.

More by Alice walker. The Third Life of Grange Copeland.

Something by Bernadine Evaristo. Maybe Mr Loverman because it's so British.

Something by Marian Keyes. Rachel's Holiday maybe?

Still something by Toni Morrison.

Still something by Toni Morrison.

Beloved is the first book on the list.

A MN list would be interesting. As the OP said, I'd read pretty much everything in the family section except Cloudstreet which I've never even heard of so might need to look that up.

Still something by Toni Morrison.

I understood this to mean that even in a different list the poster would still have something by TM. They were acknowledging the fact that she was on the original list, not ignoring it.

Yep exactly. She's amazing but I worry she's known for one or two books when her whole oeuvre is so wonderful.

@SurpriseSparDay I thought it was a list of books written in the English language only? Hence no Russians, or anyone else not writing in English...

@SurpriseSparDay Oops, sorry, I see now you'd realised that.
But i agree - no Henry James? James Joyce?
And really Judy Blume and Jilly Cooper?
But very happy to see Fugitive Pieces on there - I often feel like I'm the only person who's ever read this, I've never met anyone who has.

Oh, and where is George Orwell? Have I missed him too?

They may have shaped their world but who are 'they'? They're certainly not steeped in Literature!