A Son of the Rock

In response to its 100 best novels list I posted about here, on Saturday last the Guardian published its readers’ list of their 100 best novels.

I must admit I did not send in my contribution so have no grounds for complaint but again I note the absence of Sunset Song.

I did better with these, 44 (47 if the Neapolitan Quartet counts as 4; or 43⅓ if the Tolkien is taken as a whole.)

Since I copied and pasted from the Guardian website the links are theirs.

93=  Animal Farm by George Orwell

Love in the Time of Cholera  by Gabriel García Márquez

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

80= Dune by Frank Herbert

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

75= Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Brideshead Revisited  by Evelyn Waugh

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy  by John le Carré

73= The Unbearable Lightness of Being  by Milan Kundera

70= Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin

To the Lighthouse  by Virginia Woolf

63= Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante  (Isn’t this actually four books?)

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

62 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

60 Possession by AS Byatt

57 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

52= Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Emma  by Jane Austen

49 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

46  Watership Down  by Richard Adams

41 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

39= Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Stoner by John Williams

37 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

31 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

29 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens  (Also at 29 was Huckleberry Finn which I may have read when very young but can’t actually remember doing so.)

26 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

21 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

20 Beloved by Toni Morrison

19 Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

16 Persuasion by Jane Austen

14= Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

8= Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (I’ve now started this.)

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

7 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

6 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

5 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

3 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

1 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (I’ve only read The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in the trilogy.)