The 1899 list yesterday made me want to look again at a more modern list of greatest novels of all time. So below is the list from The Guardian, published in 2003.
I
use a strikethrough for the books I have read.
1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim's
Progress John Bunyan
3. Robinson
Crusoe Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver's
Travels Jonathan Swift
5. Tom
Jones Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram
Shandy Laurence Sterne
8. Dangerous
Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma Jane
Austen
10. Frankenstein Mary
Shelley
11. Nightmare
Abbey Thomas Love Peacock
12. The
Black Sheep Honoré De Balzac
13. The
Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal
14. The
Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil Benjamin
Disraeli
16. David
Copperfield Charles Dickens
17. Wuthering
Heights Emily Brontë
18. Jane
Eyre Charlotte Brontë
19. Vanity
Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The
Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby-Dick Herman
Melville
22. Madame
Bovary Gustave Flaubert
23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
24. Alice's
Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
25. Little
Women Louisa M. Alcott
26. The
Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope
27. Anna
Karenina Leo Tolstoy
28. Daniel
Deronda George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
31. Huckleberry
Finn Mark Twain
32. The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Three
Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
34. The
Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith
36. Jude
the Obscure Thomas Hardy
37. The
Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers
38. The
Call of the Wild Jack London
39. Nostromo Joseph
Conrad
40. The
Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
41. In
Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
42. The
Rainbow D. H. Lawrence
43. The
Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
44. The
Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan
45. Ulysses James
Joyce
46. Mrs
Dalloway Virginia Woolf
47. A
Passage to India EM Forster
48. The
Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The
Trial Franz Kafka
50. Men
Without Women Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey
to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
52. As
I Lay Dying William Faulkner
53. Brave
New World Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop Evelyn
Waugh
55. USA John
Dos Passos
56. The
Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
57. The
Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford
58. The
Plague Albert Camus
59. Nineteen
Eighty-Four George Orwell
60. Malone
Dies Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
62. Wise
Blood Flannery O'Connor
63. Charlotte's
Web EB White
64. The
Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky
Jim Kingsley Amis
66. Lord
of the Flies William Golding
67. The
Quiet American Graham Greene
68 On
the Road Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita Vladimir
Nabokov
70. The
Tin Drum Günter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
72. The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
73. To
Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 Joseph
Heller
75. Herzog Saul
Bellow
76. One
Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez
77. Mrs
Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carré
79. Song
of Solomon Toni Morrison
80. The
Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge
81. The
Executioner's Song Norman Mailer
82. If
on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino
83. A
Bend in the River VS Naipaul
84. Waiting
for the Barbarians JM Coetzee
85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark Alasdair
Gray
87. The
New York Trilogy Paul Auster
88. The
BFG Roald Dahl
89. The
Periodic Table Primo Levi
90. Money Martin
Amis
91. An
Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar
And Lucinda Peter Carey
93. The
Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera
94. Haroun
and the Sea of Stories Salman Rushdie
95. LA
Confidential James Ellroy
96. Wise
Children Angela Carter
97. Atonement Ian
McEwan
98. Northern
Lights Philip Pullman
99. American
Pastoral Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald
The main thing I’ve learnt is that I’ve read very little. But there are some odd choices. Omission of War and Peace? Daniel Deronda instead of Middlemarch? David Copperfield instead of Bleak House? The Woman in White instead of The Moonstone? Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, rightly, but not Through the Looking-Glass? As I Lay Dying instead of The Sound and the Fury?
If I were to make a list of 100 greatest novels of all time, I would also name Hadji Murad by Lev Tolstoy, Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, maybe Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman…
I would also include a few non-Western titles such as The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, Hong lou meng/ Dream of the Red Chamber/ The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, etc.
What do you think, folks?
As ever, non-western writers are only included if the authors had the good sense to write in a proper European language instead of one of those silly little languages of theirs that Guardianista literati don't really care about.
ReplyDeleteHater!
DeleteHe did set himself a rule of one book per author, which is especially ridiculous in the case of Tolstoy, and is violated anyway in the case of Dos Passos.
ReplyDeleteAll lists are ridiculous--though fun enough--but this one was odd anyway for our time. You'd think we'd be beginning to get over the Western bias of these lists. And any list that has Anna Karenina and then also Lucky Jim or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is just weird...
I didn't realise he set himself that rule. But that is ridiculous!
DeleteI never make a list with that rule as I do not want to pick between Anna Karenina and War and Peace.
Every entry should include a paragraph on how the book is better than The Tale of Genji.
ReplyDeleteThis is just McCrum, right? So no methodology or voting or anything like that? Even on his own terms, he does not even try to make the case that Sybil is one of the 100 greatest novels of "all time", or of any time, just that it is good, better than you might think.
Although my favorite novel on the list is Men without Women, since it is in no way a novel. Odd odd odd.
Thirty-some books off the list is a lot more reading than "very little"!
Haha, considering that you're not particularly impressed with Hong lou meng, I do wonder what you'd think about The Tale of Genji. You should like it more, I think.
DeleteWhen I googled Men without Women, it's the Murakami book that popped up. Then I went back to the list and realised they meant the Hemingway.
Have you read all these books on the list?
I have read so much about Genji. Not as much as I have read about, oh, Proust, but a lot.
DeleteSo I have read 47 of the first 50, 20 of the next 25, and 6 of the last 25, which is the way these lists usually go for me now. I have not read Sybil myself.
I read 10 of them by the time I was 10 or let's be safe and say 12 years old.
I am completely with Reese. Putting The Riddle of the Sands, for example, a good book that accidentally invented the spy novel, make me doubt McCrum's sense. It belongs on a list of greatest spy novels, and greatest sailing novels.
That's a lot!
DeleteBut yes, it is in some ways a strange list. But now that I have seen the 1899 list...
Let's see which writer I have read the most about. Must be Shakespeare.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteThis looks like spam..
DeleteI suppose people put A Passage to India on these sorts of lists because it’s a book about Issues, an Important book. I didn’t care for it. Howards End and A Room with a View are among my favourites, with some beautifully drawn characters. A Passage’s characters seemed to be cardboard cutouts.
ReplyDeleteA Room with a View didn't leave a strong impression on me. But I want to read Maurice at some point, as I enjoyed the film.
DeleteTook me a while to realise these were in chronological order.
ReplyDeleteNot a terrible list. Would be a good list if it were just somebody's favourites. But as a purportedly objective list, it suffers not only from Euro-centrism (& within that, Anglo-centrism) as others have observed, but also from massive neophilia or recency bias, as these lists so often do. The idea there are only 9 novels from before the 19th Century that stack up is preposterous. We are already in the 20th Century by No. 39. Why is I dunno The Executioner's Song better than Rasselas or Oblomov or Notre-Dame de Paris? I mean, it just bloody isn't. Wouldn't any serious list include at least one or two of the ancient novels - if only The Golden Ass & Satyricon - the 4 great Chinese novels, something by Goethe, maybe a Zola? It doesn't help that the compiler restricts himself to 1 book per author, and even within that, he makes bizarre choices at times. The Black Sheep for Balzac? Daniel frigging Deronda for George Eliot? What the feck? Scoop for Evelyn Waugh? You what?
On the other hand, I'm open to the idea of including more "genre" & children's fiction in such lists. Even if it's a bit of a problem when you end up including The 39 Steps at the same time as excluding War & Peace.
Chill, Hadrian.
DeleteChildren's fiction like The Little Prince or Narnia or Harry Potter?
I was going to make a list of 100 books that meant the most to me, but then people would see and comment on all the holes in my reading, so I stopped myself.
There are so many here I haven’t read; I’ve only read 29.
ReplyDeleteNo fair sticking three Dos Passos novels under one heading. By the way, these novels are good, but I wouldn’t say they really belong on this list. Mostly, they’re an interesting portrait of an era, but none of the characters stayed with me.
Proust, on the other hand, has to be grouped together, because those seven books really do form one novel.
I love John Le Carre, but come on he doesn’t belong on a list with Tolstoy and Dickens. Also, I’d pick Smiley’s People as his greatest — though don’t try to read it first; it’ll spoil Tinker Taylor (in case you ever decide to pick up 1970s spy novels, which you won’t).
Speaking of Dickens, I think you’d love David Copperfield; I forgot you haven’t gotten there yet.
The Way We Live Now would not be my choice for greatest Trollope; that would be Framley Parsonage, A Small House at Allington, Phineas Finn, or Orley Farm. Possibly another, he wrote too much.
As others have commented, Men Without Women is a book of short stories, not a novel. I’d pick For Whom The Bell Tolls for greatest Hemingway, and I’d agree it belongs on this list.
Some of these are obviously on the list at least in part because they were recent films in 2003. Lord of the Rings, LA Confidential, etc.
I'm pretty sure I have read some version of David Copperfield as a kid. I just don't know if it's the whole book or some abridged version.
DeleteSome of the choices are certainly odd.