Friday, June 08, 2007

My top 120 novels

Next in the series (after my top 140 films and my top 100 albums), this one had me scrambling.
How do you compare Tolstoy with Martin Amis? Or Roddy Doyle with Borges? Or books from 1790 with books from 1990? Or books I read last week with books I read 20 years ago, for that matter? Tricky.
I ended up restricting myself to one book per author (otherwise I would probably have included the whole oeuvre of Jane Austen, and most of those of Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie, etc, and the choices just narrowed down too much).
I have tried to include those books which have had most impact on me for a whole variety of reasons, whether they impressed me with their ideas or the quality of their writing, or whether they seemed to me ahead of their times, or just plain good fun. Some are "one-hit wonders"; some the culmination of a long career of excellent work.
I have tried not to include books just because they are critically acclaimed or "worthy" or because I feel I "should" have enjoyed them.
Anyway, for what it's worth, here they are (in chronological order):

Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1767)
Choderlos de Laclos - Les Laisons Dangereuses (1781)
Jane Austen - Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Stendhal - Scarlet and Black (1830)
Nicolai Gogol - Dead Souls (1842)
Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre (1847)
Charles Dickens - Bleak House (1853)
Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South (1855)
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1857)
Fyodor Dostoyevski - Crime and Punishment (1866)
George Eliot - Middlemarch (1872)
Leo Nicoleyavich Tolstoy - Anna Karenin (1876)
Thomas Hardy - Return of the Native (1878)
Henry James - Washington Square (1880)
Emile Zola - Germinal (1885)
HG Wells - The War of the Worlds (1898)
Joseph Conrad - Nostromo (1904)
EM Forster - Howard’s End (1910)
DH Lawrence - Sons and Lovers (1913)
James Joyce - Ulysses (1922)
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (1924)
Franz Kafka - The Trial (1925)
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse (1927)
Andre Gide - Fruits of the Earth (1927)
Jean Cocteau - Les Enfants Terribles (1929)
Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Mikhail Solokhov - And Quiet Flows the Don (1929)
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying (1930)
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (1932)
Andre Malraux - Man’s Estate (1933)
Graham Greene - The Power and the Glory (1938)
Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea (1938)
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Arthur Koestler - Darkness at Noon (1940)
Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano (1947)
Alan Paton - Cry the Beloved Country (1948)
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty Four (1949)
Mervin Peake - Gormenghast (1950)
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 (1950)
JD Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Isaac Asimov - Foundation (1951)
Samuel Beckett - The Unnamable (1952)
JRR Tolkein - Lord of the Rings (1954)
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita (1955)
Albert Camus - The Fall (1956)
Gunter Grass - The Tin Drum (1959)
Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths (1960)
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar (1963)
Saul Bellow - Herzog (1964)
Margaret Laurence - The Stone Angel (1964)
Frank Herbert - Dune (1965)
Angela Carter - The Magic Toyshop (1967)
Philip K Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Arthur C Clarke - 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970)
JG Ballard - Vermilion Sands (1971)
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Heinrich Boll - The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum (1974)
Italo Calvino - If on a Winter Night a Traveller (1979)
Michel Tremblay - The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant (1978)
Athol Fugard - Tsotsi (1979)
Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose (1980)
Mordecai Richler - Joshua Then and Now (1980)
Robertson Davies - The Rebel Angels (1981)
JM Coetzee - The Life and Times of Michael K (1983)
Graham Swift - Waterland (1983)
Fay Weldon - The Life and Loves of She-Devil (1983)
Keri Hulme - The Bone People (1983)
Julian Barnes - Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
William Golding - The Spire (1984)
Doris Lessing - The Good Terrorist (1985)
Peter Carey - Illywhacker (1985)
Kazuo Ishiguru - An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
Bruce Chatwin - Songlines (1987)
Jeanette Winterson - The Passion (1987)
Michel Tournier - Gilles et Jeanne (1987)
Michael Ondaatje - In the Skin of a Lion (1987)
Toni Morrison - Beloved (1987)
Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses (1988)
William Gibson - Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)
Martin Amis - London Fields (1989)
AS Byatt - Possession (1990)
Louis de Bernieres - The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (1990)
Hanif Kureishi - The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
Nino Ricci - Lives of the Saints (1990)
Roddy Doyle - The Snapper (1990)
Pat Barker - Regeneration (1991)
Rohinton Mistry - Such a Long Journey (1991)
Barry Unsworth - Sacred Hunger (1992)
Jim Crace - Arcadia (1992)
Peter Hoeg - Borderliners (1993)
David Malouf - Remembering Babylon (1993)
Annie Proulx - The Shipping News (1993)
Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy (1993)
Kate Atkinson - Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)
Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace (1996)
Tim Binding - A Perfect Execution (1996)
Lawrence Norfolk - The Pope’s Rhinoceros (1996)
Mick Jackson - The Underground Man (1997)
Ian McEwan - Enduring Love (1997)
Andrew Miller - Ingenious Pain (1997)
Will Self - Great Apes (1997)
Murray Bail - Eucalyptus (1998)
Michael Cunningham - The Hours (1998)
Timothy Findlay - Pilgrim (1999)
Michèle Roberts - Fair Exchange (1999)
Mark Z Danielewski - House of Leaves (2000)
Helen Humphreys - Afterimage (2000)
Thomas Wharton - Salamander (2001)
Dennis Bock - The Ash Garden (2001)
Yann Martel - Life of Pi (2001)
Jamie O’Neill - At Swim Two Boys (2001)
William Trevor - The Story of Lucy Gault (2002)
Marc Estrin - Insect Dreams (2002)
Carol Shields - Unless (2002)
Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003)
Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner (2003)
Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)
DBC Pierre - Vernon God Little (2003)
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas (2004)

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