Don't feel too bad, in the version of the list I saw, the newspaper itself misspelled the title of their number one hundred pick (it is My Ántonia, not My Antonia - they did not make the same mistake with Pedro Páramo, slightly higher in the list).
-Of the books that made the list (and I'll admit I haven't read the vast majority), my favorite is The End of the Affair.
-The general bias against literature if it is "genre lit" is predictable, if unfortunate. I'm not a colossal fan of Tolkien and wouldn't vote for him myself, but it does feel silly to entirely leave out a monstrously popular and influential book that is, at a minimum, pretty good. Of course, if Tolkien can't get in, then guys like Mervyn Peake or CS Lewis don't have a shot.
-The list is mostly not that woke, but Beloved at #2 is stupid. Things Fall Apart at #22 also, bluntly, feels like affirmative action.
-We actually align on 2/3 of the books we'd recommend from authors who were left off. I've never read Updike; in his place I'd probably put Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, who is completely doomed by being in the genre lit ghetto (though he's a writer that other writers seem to like a lot). If I rope in authors who made the list anyway, I'd want to include Demons, which is my favorite Dostoevsky (and seems to be gaining esteem lately as people notice how powerfully it captures a lot of modern political radicalism patterns).
I tried Updike. I read Couples, which was terrible; and then Rabbit, Run, which I actually threw in the trash after a few chapters. I’m not sure I’ve read any fiction since.
Are you the one who recommended I read Demons after I finish The Brothers Karamozov? I've since received two recommendations that I read The Idiot next instead. I'm surprised how enjoyable The BK is. I find that the official good literature is hit or miss WRT how much I enjoy it.
I do keep recommending Demons all over; I read it after the Psmith book review Substack had a great review of it a couple years back. IMO it's the sort of review that makes you immediately want ot give it a read: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-demons-by-fyodor-dostoevsky
I've been somewhat obsessed with *Demons* (and don't take that the wrong way) since I read it for the first time about five years ago. I'd read D's more famous heavyweights, i.e. The Brothers K and Crime and Punishment, years ago, but Blake is on the nose above in identifying the almost uncanny sense of recognition and relevance reading Demons evokes in The Current Year.
Demons are very current year both as a metaphor and (to some people) as literal entities. A friend of mine has some thing about people in silicon valley who think that AI is demonic and that a super intelligent AI in the future creates a time machine and goes back to ancient Babylon to give the Jews in exile numerology so that someday the AI will be invented. The story doesn't make a lot of sense to me but a lot of right leaning people are talking about demons this past year or two
I haven't looked at the list but your comment about Toni Morrison at #2 reminds me of what happened at Stanford in 1989. The women students demanded a blanket exemption from having to read any book by a "dead white male." The administration caved in, and I presume the movement made its way across the country. I wonder if I'm justified in thinking that we now have tens of millions of women in their 40s and 50s who've never read a serious book of any kind.
Gene Wolfe is the writer whose fame and powers are to me the most inversely related, sadly. His books are so dazzling and erudite and profound -- but his reputation was, and seemingly still is, locked up in genre jail.
I haven't read it, but I did read half of Morrison's "Song of Solomon," which was a lot better than I expected, although the genre, magical realism, doesn't do much for me.
She was one of the worst nonfiction writers I ever read. One reason I started writing was because Morrison was publishing these really bad, dopey, politically correct columns in Time Magazine. I figured I could I do better than this famous authoress could.
But the one novel I later semi-read by her was quite good.
Daughter C read Beloved as a requirement for her undergrad degree. Having been raised by Father C, she was not expecting too much from Toni and some of the other fashionable 20th-century novels she was assigned, but she said Beloved was pretty good -- of course nowhere near #2-all-time good, but worthy of its place on a modern lit survey course reading list.
I hate hate hate magic realism (I despised the Guardian's #17, i.e. One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example), so I'm continuing to resist reading Beloved, and can report that I'm holding the line solidly.
Yeah I read Song of Solomon and was surprised by how good it was. Not Nobel Prize in literature good but much better than I was expecting. Agreed that her non-fiction was awful…
It may be a post-woke list but I counted 12 black novels which still seems a little high for an all-time great list. Still in 2020 “Beloved” would probably have been #1.
The attention given to women actually helps the political pluralism: novelists like Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Ursula K. LeGuin, Patricia Highsmith, Muriel Spark, and Jane Austen are politically unorthodox and hard to classify.
I was mildly surprised to see two books by Thomas Hardy in the top 100, an author who seems to have fallen out of critical attention. A lot of voters seem to say that the choice of only ten books pushes them to ones they read in their impressionable adolescences, which again helps the traditionalism of the list.
It's a superb novel, and it's very crisply written -- it might be the shortest book on the list. It's a great starting place for anyone looking to consult this list for something new to read.
12/100 is close to the fraction of the US population that is black (though not the UK--who cares I guess). So that should be exactly what you'd expect ;)
As soon as I saw that you had submitted three alternates to the Guardian, I knew one would be The Bonfire of the Vanities. I reread it every few years, just to see how much today's New York resembles the novel's gloomy outlook. Wolfe correctly predicted that minorities -- blacks and Hispanics -- would eventually elect minority mayors and district attorneys. He might be mildly surprised that NYC hasn't had a Hispanic mayor yet, although he would recognize that blacks vote more reliably as a bloc than Latinos, who are nowhere near as monolithic as they're commonly thought to be. (Legal immigrants are often violently opposed to illegal immigrants, whom they view as queue-jumpers. Then there's the tension among the various Hispanic subgroups: Mexicans and Dominicans don't necessarily see themselves as brothers; the same holds true for Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans; and none of the above particularly like Puerto Ricans, whose language they don't recognize as truly Spanish.)
Finally, Wolfe's masterpiece failed to account for the disappearing Jewish presence in NYC (and state) politics. From Ed Koch to Eric Adams (and his Ugandan successor, whose ascendancy might have shocked even Wolfe), from Robert Abrams to Letitia James, from Robert Morgenthau to Alvin Bragg: where did the Jewish politicians go? Chuck Schumer's the last high-level one standing, and this is likely to be his final term in the Senate: right now, Occasional Cortex would beat him in a primary. And she's probably not the only one.
I felt really good about these three choices since they represent obviously very high quality books by three major 20th Century writers of a type that The Guardian's system seems prejudiced against.
I'd vote for "Brideshead Revisited", "Disgrace" by Coeztee, "The Radetzky March" by Joseph Roth, "Buddenbrooks" by Mann, "Brothers Karamazov", "Limonov " by Carrere, something from Houellbecq (perhaps Submission), something from Mario Vargos Llosa (perhaps The War at the End of the World). Something from Jules Verne (perhaps Journey to the Centre of the World), something from PG Wodehouse (Code of the Woosters). Something from James Clavell (Shogun). Something from Cormac Macarthy (Blood Meridian). For a bit of fun "Fatherland" by Robert Harris, and "Rogue Male" by G Household. Oh, yes, and "The Lord of the Rings". I wouldn't vote for Kim, I think Kipling is too intense for novels, he's much better at poetry and short stories.
I thought Houellebecq’s “The Map and the Territory” was a lot of fun. “Submission” seemed less inspired, and over reliant on the structure of “1984”, but on the other hand it turned out to be oddly predictive of the strange days of 2020.
Yes indeed, The Road was almost too much, though I'd say it's a different sort of intensity, Kipling is just so rich and so good with words, he doesn't need the space a novel gives. He was the one who came up with "Known Unto God" for the graves of unknown soldiers after WW1.
I admire Kipling a great deal. He pulled strings to get his only son, who had very poor vision, into a Guards regiment. His son was KIA at Loos in 1915. I don’t think his body was ever found. My own great Uncle was killed on the first day of the Somme and could very well lie under a grave marked with that epitaph.
The opening of Heinlein's juvenile novel "Citizen of the Galaxy" is clearly borrowed from the opening to "Kim," so I went back and reread Kim's first chapter to see how big of a gap in literary quality there is between Heinlein and Kipling.
Wow. It's huge. And that's not saying anything against Heinlein.
I think Salman Rushdie pointed out that Kipling was the first to capture South Asia's characteristic sensory overload in high literature.
My favorites are war-related: Catch22, King Rat by James Clavell, and A prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. Irving and Clavell wrote several other successful novels but Joseph Heller disappointed me with his other efforts.
If great literature is something you can read again and again then for me it is the Thomas Cromwell trilogy by Hilary Mantel, also several of the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian (Richard Patrick Russ) starting with Master and Commander and the three best sci-fi-fantasy by Anne McCaffrey, Dragonflight and a couple of others. I’ve read them all several times.
Clearly I’m not a highbrow, I gave up on Ulysses pretty early.
Notable that for a person of my political beliefs two were women, they just wrote good books!
I dunno: if you plow through it and don't get bogged down in trying to figure stuff out it's a pretty great experience. I felt duty-bound to read it after inheriting one of the 1,000 copies of the first edition, and I'm glad I did. But you do have to just let it wash over you.
(I inherited it because my grandmother's first husband was a consumptive WWI US Navy veteran and literary critic who was a fan of Modernism and somehow got the banned book smuggled into the country, the preposterously-named Schuyler Ashley. He died about six months after they were married.)
By the way, as is true of all hefty books it's much less of a physical challenge if you download the text to your Kindle or whatever, which you can do free of charge. I'm currently taking that approach with Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Austen's P&P, Emma, Persuasion (yes, it deserves a spot) and several Trollopes bore multiple re-readings for me, unlike Eliot. Also, Maugham's Cakes and Ale, which blighted the career of Hugh Walpole with a caustic sendup.
Persuasion is my favorite Austen. I was happy to see it rank so highly, and likewise delighted to see Mansfield Park on the list at all. P & P generally gets all of the love, and it's of course utterly delightful, but Persuasion and MP are more mature and ultimately profound works, IMHO.
Elizabeth Bennet is such a memorable character for me. I tend not to find female characters in literature all that interesting or memorable, but some of Austen's characters are an exception, and Bennet is the exemplar.
That said, Emma is probably my favorite Austen novel. I didn't like MP so much though. I haven't read Persuasion.
Agree with Ralph L that I would be much more inclined to reread Austen over Middlemarch.
Actually two unread JA novels: I also haven't read Northanger Abbey.
I first read Jane Austen the summer before my senior year in high school in preparation for an AP English class: I just picked the first book off the list that had been given to us, it was in alphabetical order, so naturally Austen was at the top of it. I expected to be bored out of my mind with a sappy love story where no one does much of anything other than walk and talk, and consequently was totally unprepared for how much I ended up liking it.
I read S & S as an undergrad, and didn't connect with it at all. (Why my Brit Lit survey professor chose that particular novel as the Austen item is beyond me, but so it goes.)
I then read through the whole set of JA novels in quite quick succession when I was in my 40s, at which point I appreciated Austen's genius to a far greater extent.
Hemmingway seems way too low (personal fave is "The Sun Also Rises," but "A Farewell to Arms" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" are both superior).
For quintessentially "male" literature, I'd toss in "Fight Club," "American Psycho" (or Bright Lights, Big City), "Catch-22," "Blood Meridian," and "The Stranger" (although we can probably guess why that one dropped off). "Bonfire of the Vanities" is indeed also an excellent social critique. And many literary men go through an Ayn Rand phase, so "Atlas Shrugged" might be up for consideration, even though it's not a particularly great novel in and of itself.
I finally read "American Psycho" after all these years. The amazing thing about it is how much of the character's interiority is detailed opinions about the kind of consumer products that would have interested a man in his twenties with a good job in the early 1990s. It sounds like a gimmick or something that would only happen once or twice in the novel, but it builds and works well.
Bonfire of the Vanities, of course, and Vonnegut's unmatched masterpiece, Cat's Cradle. Followed at a distance by Mother Night and, for those who are willing, Slapstick.
I've never believed, for all its fine qualities, that Slaughterhouse 5 is Vonnegut's best work. And Breakfast of Champions is far, far from it. But those are his best known works today.
I’ve read a lot of these books but can now add the rest to my retirement reading list. I’m disappointed not to see Children of Men. My favorite and one I’ve read 10’s of times.
Sorry, it may not be Woke at a superficial level but the list is a hot mess, and the product of an unseemly blend of a half educated middlebrow and, in fact, a pious Woke sensibility.
I won’t waste much time on this pointless parlour game, but “Beloved” at #2 and two unreadable Virginia Woolf novels in the Top Twenty is indefensible and disqualifying.
I’m a big fan of your work but we’ll have to agree to (strongly) disagree about the value of The Guardian’s list.
Surely #18 is Persuasion by Jane Austen?
Uh-oh.
Don't feel too bad, in the version of the list I saw, the newspaper itself misspelled the title of their number one hundred pick (it is My Ántonia, not My Antonia - they did not make the same mistake with Pedro Páramo, slightly higher in the list).
As for my thoughts on the list itself:
-Of the books that made the list (and I'll admit I haven't read the vast majority), my favorite is The End of the Affair.
-The general bias against literature if it is "genre lit" is predictable, if unfortunate. I'm not a colossal fan of Tolkien and wouldn't vote for him myself, but it does feel silly to entirely leave out a monstrously popular and influential book that is, at a minimum, pretty good. Of course, if Tolkien can't get in, then guys like Mervyn Peake or CS Lewis don't have a shot.
-The list is mostly not that woke, but Beloved at #2 is stupid. Things Fall Apart at #22 also, bluntly, feels like affirmative action.
-We actually align on 2/3 of the books we'd recommend from authors who were left off. I've never read Updike; in his place I'd probably put Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, who is completely doomed by being in the genre lit ghetto (though he's a writer that other writers seem to like a lot). If I rope in authors who made the list anyway, I'd want to include Demons, which is my favorite Dostoevsky (and seems to be gaining esteem lately as people notice how powerfully it captures a lot of modern political radicalism patterns).
I tried Updike. I read Couples, which was terrible; and then Rabbit, Run, which I actually threw in the trash after a few chapters. I’m not sure I’ve read any fiction since.
I had to read Rabbit, Run in HS, which ruined Updike for me. Likewise The Great Gatsby and a Styron book.
Are you the one who recommended I read Demons after I finish The Brothers Karamozov? I've since received two recommendations that I read The Idiot next instead. I'm surprised how enjoyable The BK is. I find that the official good literature is hit or miss WRT how much I enjoy it.
I do keep recommending Demons all over; I read it after the Psmith book review Substack had a great review of it a couple years back. IMO it's the sort of review that makes you immediately want ot give it a read: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-demons-by-fyodor-dostoevsky
You're a reader after my own heart. The Psmiths are great, and that review is ideal for anyone looking to tackle Demons.
Might have been Blake; might have been me.
I've been somewhat obsessed with *Demons* (and don't take that the wrong way) since I read it for the first time about five years ago. I'd read D's more famous heavyweights, i.e. The Brothers K and Crime and Punishment, years ago, but Blake is on the nose above in identifying the almost uncanny sense of recognition and relevance reading Demons evokes in The Current Year.
Demons are very current year both as a metaphor and (to some people) as literal entities. A friend of mine has some thing about people in silicon valley who think that AI is demonic and that a super intelligent AI in the future creates a time machine and goes back to ancient Babylon to give the Jews in exile numerology so that someday the AI will be invented. The story doesn't make a lot of sense to me but a lot of right leaning people are talking about demons this past year or two
who? rod dreher?
Does he write about demons?
I haven't looked at the list but your comment about Toni Morrison at #2 reminds me of what happened at Stanford in 1989. The women students demanded a blanket exemption from having to read any book by a "dead white male." The administration caved in, and I presume the movement made its way across the country. I wonder if I'm justified in thinking that we now have tens of millions of women in their 40s and 50s who've never read a serious book of any kind.
Gene Wolfe is the writer whose fame and powers are to me the most inversely related, sadly. His books are so dazzling and erudite and profound -- but his reputation was, and seemingly still is, locked up in genre jail.
The End of the Affair is very good indeed.
I've never read "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, but wouldn't it be a bow to Wokeism to put it at #2 among its competition?
Yes I think that's the wokest item on the list.
I haven't read it, but I did read half of Morrison's "Song of Solomon," which was a lot better than I expected, although the genre, magical realism, doesn't do much for me.
She was one of the worst nonfiction writers I ever read. One reason I started writing was because Morrison was publishing these really bad, dopey, politically correct columns in Time Magazine. I figured I could I do better than this famous authoress could.
But the one novel I later semi-read by her was quite good.
Daughter C read Beloved as a requirement for her undergrad degree. Having been raised by Father C, she was not expecting too much from Toni and some of the other fashionable 20th-century novels she was assigned, but she said Beloved was pretty good -- of course nowhere near #2-all-time good, but worthy of its place on a modern lit survey course reading list.
I hate hate hate magic realism (I despised the Guardian's #17, i.e. One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example), so I'm continuing to resist reading Beloved, and can report that I'm holding the line solidly.
Yeah I read Song of Solomon and was surprised by how good it was. Not Nobel Prize in literature good but much better than I was expecting. Agreed that her non-fiction was awful…
It may be a post-woke list but I counted 12 black novels which still seems a little high for an all-time great list. Still in 2020 “Beloved” would probably have been #1.
The attention given to women actually helps the political pluralism: novelists like Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Ursula K. LeGuin, Patricia Highsmith, Muriel Spark, and Jane Austen are politically unorthodox and hard to classify.
I was mildly surprised to see two books by Thomas Hardy in the top 100, an author who seems to have fallen out of critical attention. A lot of voters seem to say that the choice of only ten books pushes them to ones they read in their impressionable adolescences, which again helps the traditionalism of the list.
E.g., the heroic Miss Jean Brodie is a pro-fascist Scottish Tory who lectures her pupils on the iniquities of the Ramsay MacDonald government.
I haven't read the book, but Maggie Smith's performance in the movie adaptation is one of the best actress performances I've ever seen.
The book is hilarious, which is all the more impressive for not having overt jokes like Waugh and Wodehouse.
It's a superb novel, and it's very crisply written -- it might be the shortest book on the list. It's a great starting place for anyone looking to consult this list for something new to read.
Are you sure Ursula K. LeGuin is politically unorthodox?
She certainly wasn’t a standard-issue liberal.
Fair enough.
12/100 is close to the fraction of the US population that is black (though not the UK--who cares I guess). So that should be exactly what you'd expect ;)
As soon as I saw that you had submitted three alternates to the Guardian, I knew one would be The Bonfire of the Vanities. I reread it every few years, just to see how much today's New York resembles the novel's gloomy outlook. Wolfe correctly predicted that minorities -- blacks and Hispanics -- would eventually elect minority mayors and district attorneys. He might be mildly surprised that NYC hasn't had a Hispanic mayor yet, although he would recognize that blacks vote more reliably as a bloc than Latinos, who are nowhere near as monolithic as they're commonly thought to be. (Legal immigrants are often violently opposed to illegal immigrants, whom they view as queue-jumpers. Then there's the tension among the various Hispanic subgroups: Mexicans and Dominicans don't necessarily see themselves as brothers; the same holds true for Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans; and none of the above particularly like Puerto Ricans, whose language they don't recognize as truly Spanish.)
Finally, Wolfe's masterpiece failed to account for the disappearing Jewish presence in NYC (and state) politics. From Ed Koch to Eric Adams (and his Ugandan successor, whose ascendancy might have shocked even Wolfe), from Robert Abrams to Letitia James, from Robert Morgenthau to Alvin Bragg: where did the Jewish politicians go? Chuck Schumer's the last high-level one standing, and this is likely to be his final term in the Senate: right now, Occasional Cortex would beat him in a primary. And she's probably not the only one.
Unless Occasional Cortex gets elected as President in 2028. Democrats luv her.
I felt really good about these three choices since they represent obviously very high quality books by three major 20th Century writers of a type that The Guardian's system seems prejudiced against.
Ah gezunten zummer to you and yours. It's good to see you back in the Sailersphere.
I'd vote for "Brideshead Revisited", "Disgrace" by Coeztee, "The Radetzky March" by Joseph Roth, "Buddenbrooks" by Mann, "Brothers Karamazov", "Limonov " by Carrere, something from Houellbecq (perhaps Submission), something from Mario Vargos Llosa (perhaps The War at the End of the World). Something from Jules Verne (perhaps Journey to the Centre of the World), something from PG Wodehouse (Code of the Woosters). Something from James Clavell (Shogun). Something from Cormac Macarthy (Blood Meridian). For a bit of fun "Fatherland" by Robert Harris, and "Rogue Male" by G Household. Oh, yes, and "The Lord of the Rings". I wouldn't vote for Kim, I think Kipling is too intense for novels, he's much better at poetry and short stories.
I thought Houellebecq’s “The Map and the Territory” was a lot of fun. “Submission” seemed less inspired, and over reliant on the structure of “1984”, but on the other hand it turned out to be oddly predictive of the strange days of 2020.
Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" was #68 and "The Road" made the list too.
Right about Kipling being too intense for novels.
Kipling more intense than McCarthy?! I started The Road when my son was about the age of the boy in the novel. I had to put it down for a few years.
Yes indeed, The Road was almost too much, though I'd say it's a different sort of intensity, Kipling is just so rich and so good with words, he doesn't need the space a novel gives. He was the one who came up with "Known Unto God" for the graves of unknown soldiers after WW1.
I admire Kipling a great deal. He pulled strings to get his only son, who had very poor vision, into a Guards regiment. His son was KIA at Loos in 1915. I don’t think his body was ever found. My own great Uncle was killed on the first day of the Somme and could very well lie under a grave marked with that epitaph.
The opening of Heinlein's juvenile novel "Citizen of the Galaxy" is clearly borrowed from the opening to "Kim," so I went back and reread Kim's first chapter to see how big of a gap in literary quality there is between Heinlein and Kipling.
Wow. It's huge. And that's not saying anything against Heinlein.
I think Salman Rushdie pointed out that Kipling was the first to capture South Asia's characteristic sensory overload in high literature.
Read "Disgrace" about 20 back when I still did read a little fiction.
Indeed very good. And very depressing.
South Africa is just a depressing "what might have been" place. A whole lot of lessons there for America.
My favorites are war-related: Catch22, King Rat by James Clavell, and A prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. Irving and Clavell wrote several other successful novels but Joseph Heller disappointed me with his other efforts.
Interesting to find that Heller found the idea of Yosarian in The Good Soldier Schweik.
Heller was a one-hit wonder. He shares that distinction with some other great writers.
Its fun to see Kim on the list, i read it early and thought it was for children or young adults.
The Great Game, how badly that played out over the years.
Who reads Tristan Shandy these days? And what happened to Joseph Conrad?
“Heart of Darkness” is #41.
Thanks
It’s no Nostromo.
Steve Coogan made a movie about trying to make a movie out of Tristan Shandy. It's very post-modern, despite being 250+ years old.
The book, not the movie.
It says something that the title is TristaM Shandy, and no one else noticed.
And it says even more that the title is actually actually TristRam Shandy!
Well, it's over fifty years ago that I saw it. My roommate in college in Hobart, Tasmania, had the book on his reading list.
If great literature is something you can read again and again then for me it is the Thomas Cromwell trilogy by Hilary Mantel, also several of the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian (Richard Patrick Russ) starting with Master and Commander and the three best sci-fi-fantasy by Anne McCaffrey, Dragonflight and a couple of others. I’ve read them all several times.
Clearly I’m not a highbrow, I gave up on Ulysses pretty early.
Notable that for a person of my political beliefs two were women, they just wrote good books!
Ulysses was like an SNL skit. An interesting idea, but hundreds of pages too long. O’Brien is unsurpassed.
I too gave Ulysses more than one try and gave up. Haven't sold it yet, but I'm not likely to try again soon.
Life’s too short.
I dunno: if you plow through it and don't get bogged down in trying to figure stuff out it's a pretty great experience. I felt duty-bound to read it after inheriting one of the 1,000 copies of the first edition, and I'm glad I did. But you do have to just let it wash over you.
(I inherited it because my grandmother's first husband was a consumptive WWI US Navy veteran and literary critic who was a fan of Modernism and somehow got the banned book smuggled into the country, the preposterously-named Schuyler Ashley. He died about six months after they were married.)
By the way, as is true of all hefty books it's much less of a physical challenge if you download the text to your Kindle or whatever, which you can do free of charge. I'm currently taking that approach with Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Thanks. I have no doubt the fault lies with me, not Joyce. What good fortune to have inherited such a volume. Cheers!
Austen's P&P, Emma, Persuasion (yes, it deserves a spot) and several Trollopes bore multiple re-readings for me, unlike Eliot. Also, Maugham's Cakes and Ale, which blighted the career of Hugh Walpole with a caustic sendup.
Persuasion is my favorite Austen. I was happy to see it rank so highly, and likewise delighted to see Mansfield Park on the list at all. P & P generally gets all of the love, and it's of course utterly delightful, but Persuasion and MP are more mature and ultimately profound works, IMHO.
Elizabeth Bennet is such a memorable character for me. I tend not to find female characters in literature all that interesting or memorable, but some of Austen's characters are an exception, and Bennet is the exemplar.
That said, Emma is probably my favorite Austen novel. I didn't like MP so much though. I haven't read Persuasion.
Agree with Ralph L that I would be much more inclined to reread Austen over Middlemarch.
I think Austen vs Eliot is no contest, but obviously many cultured readers disagree . . . .
I envy you having an unread JA novel.
Actually two unread JA novels: I also haven't read Northanger Abbey.
I first read Jane Austen the summer before my senior year in high school in preparation for an AP English class: I just picked the first book off the list that had been given to us, it was in alphabetical order, so naturally Austen was at the top of it. I expected to be bored out of my mind with a sappy love story where no one does much of anything other than walk and talk, and consequently was totally unprepared for how much I ended up liking it.
I read S & S as an undergrad, and didn't connect with it at all. (Why my Brit Lit survey professor chose that particular novel as the Austen item is beyond me, but so it goes.)
I then read through the whole set of JA novels in quite quick succession when I was in my 40s, at which point I appreciated Austen's genius to a far greater extent.
Agree - that Hilary Mantel trilogy was genuinely brilliant.
Hemmingway seems way too low (personal fave is "The Sun Also Rises," but "A Farewell to Arms" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" are both superior).
For quintessentially "male" literature, I'd toss in "Fight Club," "American Psycho" (or Bright Lights, Big City), "Catch-22," "Blood Meridian," and "The Stranger" (although we can probably guess why that one dropped off). "Bonfire of the Vanities" is indeed also an excellent social critique. And many literary men go through an Ayn Rand phase, so "Atlas Shrugged" might be up for consideration, even though it's not a particularly great novel in and of itself.
Cormac McCarthy has two books in the top 100. Dying recently might have given him a boost, or maybe he really is one of the all-time greats.
I was a huge Hemingway fan as a young man, but I can’t abide his novels these days. His short stories still hold up for me.
I finally read "American Psycho" after all these years. The amazing thing about it is how much of the character's interiority is detailed opinions about the kind of consumer products that would have interested a man in his twenties with a good job in the early 1990s. It sounds like a gimmick or something that would only happen once or twice in the novel, but it builds and works well.
Bonfire of the Vanities, of course, and Vonnegut's unmatched masterpiece, Cat's Cradle. Followed at a distance by Mother Night and, for those who are willing, Slapstick.
Yes, absolutely Cat's Cradle is the best thing he wrote. Way better than Slaughterhouse 5.
Wallowing in pleasant recollections is certainly pleasurable, isn’t it?
Several of these books are highlights of my experience on earth.
Will these books survive our current educational approach? I’m not so sure.
Surprised Lord of the Rings is not there - peerless cultural influence. Slaughterhouse 5? Lonesome Dove?
I've never believed, for all its fine qualities, that Slaughterhouse 5 is Vonnegut's best work. And Breakfast of Champions is far, far from it. But those are his best known works today.
I’ve read a lot of these books but can now add the rest to my retirement reading list. I’m disappointed not to see Children of Men. My favorite and one I’ve read 10’s of times.
Sorry, it may not be Woke at a superficial level but the list is a hot mess, and the product of an unseemly blend of a half educated middlebrow and, in fact, a pious Woke sensibility.
I won’t waste much time on this pointless parlour game, but “Beloved” at #2 and two unreadable Virginia Woolf novels in the Top Twenty is indefensible and disqualifying.
I’m a big fan of your work but we’ll have to agree to (strongly) disagree about the value of The Guardian’s list.