As it does from time to time, The Grauniad has compiled a list of what it claims are the best somethings. This time it was novels. The full list with an explanation of how the list was compiled, clickable links to comments and pictures of the book covers can be found here, but I’ve reproduced a simplified version below:
1. Middlemarch – George Eliot
2. Beloved – Toni Morrison
3. Ulysses – James Joyce
4. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
5. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
6. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
7. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
8. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
9. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
10. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
11. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
13. Emma – Jane Austen
14. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
15. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
16. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
18. Persuasion – Jane Austen
19. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
20. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
21. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
22. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
23. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
24. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
25. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
26. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
27. The Trial – Franz Kafka
28. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
29. Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
30. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
31. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
32. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
33. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
34. Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel
35. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
36. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
37. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
38. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
39. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
40. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
41. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
42. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
43. Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
44. Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
45. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
46. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
47. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
48. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
49. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
50. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
51. My Brilliant Friend – Elena Ferrante
52. The Golden Bowl – Henry James
53. The Transit of Venus – Shirley Hazzard
54. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
55. The Waves – Virginia Woolf
56. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
57. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
58. Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
59. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
60. Howards End – E.M. Forster
61. The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
62. Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
63. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
64. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
65. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
66. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
67. The Man Without Qualities – Rubert Musil
68. Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
69. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
70. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
71. Kindred – Octavia E. Butler
72. Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
73. Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
74. Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
75. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
76. Dracula – Bram Stoker
77. The Rainbow – DH Lawrence
78. A House for Mr Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
79. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
80. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
81. Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
82. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
83. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
84. The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
85. The Vegetarian – Han Kang
86. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
87. The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst
88. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
89. The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
90. Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
91. Life and Fate – Vasily Grossman
92. Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
93. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
94. The Known World – Edward P. Jones
95. The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
96. Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo
97. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
98. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
99. The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
100. My Ántonia – Willa Cather
Such lists are a bit silly, except for the fact that they might encourage people (including myself) to read more books, which is a good thing. I wouldn’t compile a ranking myself as I don’t think of books in terms of league tables. “Best” according to what criterion? I don’t see how you can sensibly compare very different types of novel or novels from very different eras. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist counting how many books on the list I have read. If you want to know the answer, it is 42. I’ll let you guess which ones.
I have read the Number 1 novel, Middlemarch and, although I thought it was very good, it surprises me to find it at the top of the list, above Ulysses The highest-ranked book I haven’t read is No. 2, Beloved. There are several others on the list that I’ve never even heard of let alone read. The only book on the list that I did at school was No. 78. A House for Mr Biswas, which I didn’t think was all that great. I’ve been meaning to read Tristram Shandy (No. 19) but I think I’ll get that out of the library rather than buying it.
To save you counting, here are the authors with multiple entries:
5 – Virginia Woolf
4 – Jane Austen
4 – Charles Dickens
3 – Henry James
3 – Toni Morrison
2 – James Baldwin
2 – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 – Gustave Flaubert
2 – Thomas Hardy
2 – Kazuo Ishiguro
2 – Franz Kafka
2 – Thomas Mann
2 – Cormac McCarthy
2 – Vladimir Nabokov
2 – W.G. Sebald
2 – Leo Tolstoy
I haven’t read anything by either Sebald or McCarthy or Flaubert. Among the omissions that surprised me are The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway, The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I’m not saying that any or all of these would be on my list, just that I’m surprised they don’t appear on the Guardian‘s.
If anyone would like to comment – perhaps with other notable omissions or novels that are on the list but you feel shouldn’t be – please feel free to do so through the box below.
In the Dark 