One Hundred Books on my TBR Pile
I put this list together after having previously rather carelessly posted a shabbily curated list of 100 (actually 99) books that, it was claimed, was put together by the BBC and that of which, supposedly (no proof offered) the average person had only read 6. The list also included a couple of strange duplicates, too many books by certain writers, and a couple of (in my opinion) egregiously bad books. On the other hand, most of the books on the list were actually pretty good, so it was fun discussing it.
But then, I thought -- this might be more interesting. This list is one I made essentially from looking at my (literal and also figurative) To Be Read pile -- books I've known about for years, own in most cases, and think are awfully interesting. Some are fairly recent books (many SF) that I've been meaning to get to, others are older books, mostly in the category of "classics". Some people have noted that some of them seem like the lesser-known, and arguably "lesser", books of great writers. There are two reasons for this: some are books by writers whom I've already tried, but want to read further. So, I've read Henry Esmond and Vanity Fair, and I want to read more Thackeray, hence Pendennis. I've read Middlemarch, and want to read more Eliot, hence Daniel Deronda. I've read lots and lots of Byatt, but never got to Babel Tower, hence it's there. The other reason is that I don't necessarily agree that all these books are "lesser" ... speaking as one who hasn't read them. Is Anna Karenina "lesser" than War and Peace? I don't know, but it seems pretty major to me. Is The Blind Assassin lesser than The Handmaid's Tale? I don't think so (can't say I know) ... it's just the book that hasn't become a famous miniseries.
Anyway -- what's not on this list. First -- nothing I have already read. So don't ask me why there's no Jane Austen -- I've read her complete works. Same with Kingsley Amis. Anthony Powell. Robertson Davies. Penelope Fitzgerald. Flann O'Brien. Kipling. Flannery O'Connor. W. M. Spackman. Karen Joy Fowler. etc. etc. etc.
It is my list, and I read only English (a failure of mine, not any sort of virtue), so it's very English-language-centric, and beyond that rather Western-centric, with some attempts to broaden that. Parts of it are pretty idiosyncratically me -- but what would be the fun if that wasn't true? And this is a shame-free zone, I hope -- if you haven't read these, great! Neither have I! That just means we have more to look forward to!
I have also expanded my additional list to include some excellent suggestions offered after my original Facebook post. Those appear at the end.
I put this list together after having previously rather carelessly posted a shabbily curated list of 100 (actually 99) books that, it was claimed, was put together by the BBC and that of which, supposedly (no proof offered) the average person had only read 6. The list also included a couple of strange duplicates, too many books by certain writers, and a couple of (in my opinion) egregiously bad books. On the other hand, most of the books on the list were actually pretty good, so it was fun discussing it.
But then, I thought -- this might be more interesting. This list is one I made essentially from looking at my (literal and also figurative) To Be Read pile -- books I've known about for years, own in most cases, and think are awfully interesting. Some are fairly recent books (many SF) that I've been meaning to get to, others are older books, mostly in the category of "classics". Some people have noted that some of them seem like the lesser-known, and arguably "lesser", books of great writers. There are two reasons for this: some are books by writers whom I've already tried, but want to read further. So, I've read Henry Esmond and Vanity Fair, and I want to read more Thackeray, hence Pendennis. I've read Middlemarch, and want to read more Eliot, hence Daniel Deronda. I've read lots and lots of Byatt, but never got to Babel Tower, hence it's there. The other reason is that I don't necessarily agree that all these books are "lesser" ... speaking as one who hasn't read them. Is Anna Karenina "lesser" than War and Peace? I don't know, but it seems pretty major to me. Is The Blind Assassin lesser than The Handmaid's Tale? I don't think so (can't say I know) ... it's just the book that hasn't become a famous miniseries.
Anyway -- what's not on this list. First -- nothing I have already read. So don't ask me why there's no Jane Austen -- I've read her complete works. Same with Kingsley Amis. Anthony Powell. Robertson Davies. Penelope Fitzgerald. Flann O'Brien. Kipling. Flannery O'Connor. W. M. Spackman. Karen Joy Fowler. etc. etc. etc.
It is my list, and I read only English (a failure of mine, not any sort of virtue), so it's very English-language-centric, and beyond that rather Western-centric, with some attempts to broaden that. Parts of it are pretty idiosyncratically me -- but what would be the fun if that wasn't true? And this is a shame-free zone, I hope -- if you haven't read these, great! Neither have I! That just means we have more to look forward to!
I have also expanded my additional list to include some excellent suggestions offered after my original Facebook post. Those appear at the end.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Richard Adams, Watership Down
Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night
Eleanor Arnason, Daughter of the Bear King
Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
Margeret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot
John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
Lauren Beukes, Zoo City
Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories
Wu Cheng’En, Journey to the West
C. J. Cherryh, Cyteen
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
John Crowley, Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Samuel R. Delany, Tales of Neveryon
Thomas M. Disch, On Wings of Song
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Fyodor Dostoyevksy, The Brothers Karamazov
Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
E. M. Forster, A Room With a View
George Macdonald Fraser, Mr. American
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
Alasdair Gray, Lanark
Henry Green, Doting
Elizabeth Hand, Curious Toys
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
Tsao Hsueh-Chin, Dream of the Red Chamber
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
Henry James, The Ambassadors
Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf
N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
James Joyce, Ulysses
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Margaret Laurence, Rachel, Rachel
Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Eleanor Lerman, Radiomen
Doris Lessing, Canopus in Argus
Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds
George MacDonald, Lilith
Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Toni Morrison, Sula
Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox
Edgar Pangborn, Wilderness of Spring
Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Alexander Pushkin, The Captain’s Daughter
Mary Renault, The King Must Die
Sally Rooney, Normal People
Matt Ruff, The Mirage
Karen Russell, Swamplandia
Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian
Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Francis Spofford, Golden Hill
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Hard to Be a God
Elizabeth Taylor, Angel
William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
John Updike, The Centaur
Jack Vance, Lyonesse: Suldrun’s Garden
Jo Walton, Lent
Janwilliam van der Wetering, The Corpse on the Dike
Edith Wharton, Summer
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
John Williams, Stoner
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Xenophon, Anabasis
Margaret Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Stefan Zweig, The Royal Game
New Additions:
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Lawrence Durrell, Constance; or, Solitary Practices
Jaraslav Hasek, The Good Solider Svejk
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Leena Krohn, Collected Fiction
Chen Quifan, Waste Tide
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
Voltaire, Candide
Edward Whittemore, Quin's Shanghai Circus
Richard Adams, Watership Down
Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night
Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
Margeret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot
John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
Lauren Beukes, Zoo City
Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower
Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories
Wu Cheng’En, Journey to the West
C. J. Cherryh, Cyteen
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
John Crowley, Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Samuel R. Delany, Tales of Neveryon
Thomas M. Disch, On Wings of Song
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Fyodor Dostoyevksy, The Brothers Karamazov
Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
E. M. Forster, A Room With a View
George Macdonald Fraser, Mr. American
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
Alasdair Gray, Lanark
Henry Green, Doting
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
Tsao Hsueh-Chin, Dream of the Red Chamber
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
Henry James, The Ambassadors
Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf
N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Margaret Laurence, Rachel, Rachel
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Eleanor Lerman, Radiomen
Doris Lessing, Canopus in Argus
Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds
George MacDonald, Lilith
Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Toni Morrison, Sula
Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox
Edgar Pangborn, Wilderness of Spring
Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Alexander Pushkin, The Captain’s Daughter
Mary Renault, The King Must Die
Sally Rooney, Normal People
Matt Ruff, The Mirage
Karen Russell, Swamplandia
Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian
Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Francis Spofford, Golden Hill
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Hard to Be a God
Elizabeth Taylor, Angel
William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
John Updike, The Centaur
Jack Vance, Lyonesse: Suldrun’s Garden
Janwilliam van der Wetering, The Corpse on the Dike
Edith Wharton, Summer
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
John Williams, Stoner
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Xenophon, Anabasis
Margaret Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Stefan Zweig, The Royal Game
New Additions:
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Lawrence Durrell, Constance; or, Solitary Practices
Jaraslav Hasek, The Good Solider Svejk
Leena Krohn, Collected Fiction
Chen Quifan, Waste Tide
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
Voltaire, Candide
Edward Whittemore, Quin's Shanghai Circus
I've only read five. I could count another seven that I read in school but they were assigned and I 'just read through them,' rather than 'reading read' them.
ReplyDeleteTurning a blind eye to many, many the books that you've read and I have not, I have read Great Expectations, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I would suggest that you add Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia to your to be read pile. It is a weird, one of a kind book that takes you to a place that just has to be real.
ReplyDeleteGiven that I thought you had read _everything_, I'm absolutely delighted to report that I've read four (possibly five) books you haven't: Watership Down, On Wings of Song, Wolf Hall, Candide, and I think The Trial when I was a teenager--not sure I got much out of that one at the time :)
ReplyDeleteI won't publish my list on 100 books, as I suspect you could return the favour by mentioning that you'd read 95 of them.
Huh. Well, TBR @GR
ReplyDeletehttps://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8101737?shelf=to-read
1398, as of today. Pretty silly. Includes a fair number of "Probably won't read" (132) and TBR-Maybes (490). I don't know if the Not-interested (53) are in the TBR, as the GR system is, well, arcane.
Your #1 entry Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart. Heh. My copy sits unread (as it has) for YEARS.
I did like Richard Adam's Watership quite a lot, years ago.
[Browsing now] Gosh, Jack Vance, Lyonesse: Suldrun’s Garden!
That's a *wonderful* book, Rich. Arguably his best: AYK, the trilogy is really just one long novel. My review isn't up at GR. I should look for it!
Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night
IIW you, I wouldn't bother: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2721072332 Starts well, then falls apart. Too bad!
OK, Deep enough! ⚒︎
I've read ten. I would say that Anna Karenina is the greatest work of fiction I've ever read, but of course there must be some intelligent, literate person somewhere who can't stand it. (I wouldn't want to be trapped on an elevator with him or her, though. Come to think of it, I just wouldn't want to be trapped on an elevator at al...)
ReplyDeleteOne thing about getting older (and I think we're about the same age, Rich) is that you have to come to terms with the fact that you're never going to read every book you want to read; the list of great things that you'll never get to grows longer every day, and with every book you read, you lose more ground. If you take it the right way, it actually frees you up!
One addition I'd urge you to make, if you haven't already read it: Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.