Books I Have Read (And Some I Intend To)
Posted in Alan Warner, Alasdair Gray, Other fiction, Philip Roth, Science Fiction, Gabriel García Márquez, Irène Némirovsky at 14:25 on 26 January 2009
I’ve gone through the Guardian’s list of 1000 novels you must read to find the ones I actually have read. Italicised books await my attention.
I’ve kept them under the Guardian’s groupings.
Titles followed by question marks I believe I read during my schooldays but can’t quite be sure.
What this list says about me I have no idea.
Love (4)
Paul Gallico: The Snow Goose (1941)
Thomas Hardy: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood (1987)
Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago (1957)
Family And Self (9)
Kate Atkinson: Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)
Iain Banks: The Crow Road (1992)
Lynne Reid Banks: The L-Shaped Room (1960)
William Boyd: Any Human Heart (2002)
Jim Crace: Quarantine (1997)
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (1861)
Shusaku Endo: Silence (1966)
JD Salinger: The Catcher In The Rye (1951)
Alan Warner: Morvern Callar (1995)
Crime (12 + 2)
Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868)
Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent (1907)
Joseph Conrad: Under Western Eyes (1911)
Len Deighton: The Ipcress File (1962)
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose (1980)
Graham Greene: The Third Man (1950) ????
Peter Høeg: Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992)
Geoffrey Household: Rogue Male (1939)
John le Carré: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
John le Carré: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963)
Thomas Pynchon: V (1963)
Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Patrick Suskind: Perfume (1985)
Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time (1951)
Comedy (12)
Julian Barnes: A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989)
William Boyd: A Good Man in Africa (1981)
Richmal Crompton: Just William (1922)
Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows (1908)
Graham Greene: Our Man in Havana (1958)
Nick Hornby: High Fidelity (1995)
Bohumil Hrabal: I Served the King of England (1983)
AG Macdonnell: England, Their England (1933)
Magnus Mills: The Restraint of Beasts (1998)
Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast Of Champions (1973)
State Of The Nation (7)
Alasdair Gray: Lanark (1981)
James Kelman: How Late It Was, How Late (1994)
George Orwell: Animal Farm (1945)
Thomas Pynchon: Vineland (1990)
Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children (1981)
Salman Rushdie: Shame (1983)
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
War And Travel (33 + 6)
JG Ballard: Empire of the Sun (1984)
Pat Barker: Regeneration (1991)
William Boyd: An Ice-Cream War (1982)
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1902)
Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim (1900)
Joseph Conrad: Nostromo (1904)
Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Len Deighton: Bomber (1970)
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers (1844)
Sebastian Faulks: Birdsong (1993)
William Golding: To the Ends of the Earth trilogy (1980-89)
Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) ??
Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica (1929)
Thomas Keneally: Confederates (1979)
Thomas Keneally: Schindler’s Ark (1982)
AL Kennedy: Day (2007)
Primo Levi: If Not Now, When? (1982)
Alastair Maclean: The Guns of Navarone (1957) ??
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Gabriel Garcia Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Frederick Marryat: The Children of the New Forest (1847)
Iréne Nèmirovsky: Suite Française (2004)
Baroness Emmuska Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)
George Orwell: Burmese Days (1934)
Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
Walter Scott: Ivanhoe (1819)
Nevil Shute: A Town Like Alice (1950)
Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon (1999)
Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped (1886)
Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island (1883)
William Styron: Sophie’s Choice (1979) ??
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace (1869)
Jules Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days(1873)
Jules Verne: A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) ??
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
HG Wells: The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)
That makes a non-SF total of 77 (though some of them I would classify as SF.) Add in the 60 from the SF/fantasy list and I’ve read 137 of the thousand. I must be spectacularly ill-read.
The good lady notches up 145 with quite a few in common between our two lists.
I could also add the parts of series and the converted short stories from the SF list but that would only take me to just above 140.
Still a long way to go, then. I won’t have time.
For some of them I’ve seen a film or TV adaptation so feel I perhaps don’t need to read them.
A lot of the rest, however, I have no intention of ever picking up.
Tags: Other fiction
Ian Sales
26 January 2009 at 15:46
I manage 146 read of the 1000: love (12), crime (29), comedy (12), family & self (7), state of the nation (7), sf & fantasy (63), war & travel (16). I have also seen 133 of the books as either films or as television series.
Looks we’re all philistines…
jackdeighton
26 January 2009 at 19:08
Ian,
Judging from your blog I’d have thought you’d have way more than me.
Just goes to show.