I’ve read 24 of them. I guess I’m semi-literate.
I claim to have read 30 of the books in their entirety. I’d LIKE to claim credit for Ulysses, but the truth is, I spent one full trimester in my senior year of high school reading it with a class devoted to that book. we made it about halfway through the book by the end of the trimester.
It was very rewarding, but incredibly slow going… and I could never motivate myself to continue with it for very long after the course was over. That’s a failing on my part.
On the other hand, I have tried about 5 times in my life to get past one page of ***Finnegans ***Wake, and have failed every time. I won’t be giving it any more chances to grow on me.
Oddly enough, I’ve only read 21 of the 30 in the past year and a half. Lord of the Flies and The Great Gatsby were required reading in high school. Other than that, I’d read Slaughterhouse Five, The Maltese Falcon, ***Catch 22, Catcher in the Rye, Animal Farm, Call of the Wild, and Grapes of Wrath ***on my own, at one time or another.
Again, I don’t take this list as binding or authoritative, but I started choosing selections from this list baout 18 months ago because I’d gotten completely out of the habit of reading for pleasure since my son was born, and because I was surprised at how few “classics” I’d read since leaving school.
Total of five, broken down into categories:
Uber-Sucked
-A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
Plain Vanilla Sucked
-THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
Acceptable
-ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
-BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
Pretty Decent
-CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
I read quite a bit but a lot of mainstream novels.
Oops. I meant not a lot of mainstream novels.
- Lordy, who are the other four people who’ve read Zuleika Dobson? I thought I’d be the only one.
Surprised to see so few responses for Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Bowen, though. Yes, the list did seem to be quite erratic; I guess the point is that “greatness” transcends differences in style, popularity, lasting relevance and so on, but the whole list still felt pretty curve-bally.
I know you meant Robertson Davies, for those of us crying in the Literary Wilderness. His body of work would stand up favorably against all 20th-Century comers, together with Fowles and Burgess.
Must be the publisher’s skew that left out Harper Lee - most of the authors on the list would have held the ladder for the Lindberg baby kidnapper to have written that one book. [That was a tasteless comment. I’d edit it out, but I already hit “Submit Reply”:D]
Tasteless as it may be, I might steal it, by your leave. Or replace it with something even more tasteless.
“I would steal Lindy Chamberlain’s baby myself to have written that” has a ring to it.
I’m trying to figure out what definition of “novel” would include Winesburg, Ohio. It’s a thematically linked group of short stories. It ties together with some shared characters, but you can say the same of many other short story collections. That doesn’t make it a novel to my mind.
Yup. Where the hell is A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth? I’d put it up against most of these.
I read Zuleika Dobson, but largely because it was on this list and my local library happened to have it on hand.
Bits and pieces were hilarious, but the novel as a whole was nothing special, in my opinion.
Doh! Can’t believe I did that.
Agreed except for Burgess, but only because I read just two of his books, and one was the odd 1985.
Yeah, I’m surprised by the absence of A.S. Byatt. Possession is my desert-island book. Although I think she’s better at short stories and novellas; I enjoyed “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, “Cold”, and “A Lamia in the Cevannes” far more than Babel Tower or The Game.
And I’m sorry, fellow fantasy fans; J.R.R. Tolkien was a visionary and meticulous world-creator, and undeniably the father of modern fantasy. But his prose is, to put it charitably, stiff. He reads like halfway through LotR he forgot he was writing an English novel, and started writing an Icelandic saga.
Kind of surprised so few have read Winesburg, Ohio. It’s a great book (really a collection of short stories). Very reader-friendly, unlike, say, Ulysses or Heart of Darkness.
If you don’t want to read the whole book, you owe it to yourself to at least read a couple of the stories, say Hands and Paper Pills.
Go on. REEEEAAAAD 'EM…
[quote=Ponch8;1521783 Next in my queue is Slaughterhouse Five.[/quote]
Hooray! I LOVE KVJ. If you haven’t already, and if you find you want to read more KVJ, do check out Cat’s Cradle, Galapagos, The Sirens of Titan (my pesonal favorite!!!)
Hope you enjoy S6.
That’s the only book I’ve ever read back-to-back, so I can see it being desert-islandy…she definitely knitted a lot of clever things together.
Sirens Of Titan was my long time favorite, eventually usurped by Galapagos.
Thank you for pointing this out. People often forget this and think such lists are definitive. They’re not.
I second Winesburg, Ohio. There’s a film loosely based on it, Chicago Heights (2010), unseen by me.
To all the people decrying James Joyce as bullshit, you have to remember that at the time what he was doing was revolutionary.
It may seem like malarky now (even though it isn’t, trywriting400pagesdeeplydensestreamofconsciousnessladenwithrichhistoricallingusiticandliteraryreferencesyou) but at the time it was absolutely moldbreaking.
I think that was the point 
I agree it’s a very good work. I just don’t think it’s a novel. Certainly I’ll join you and Spke in recommending it to others.