Yet another book list has emerged, and while reading it I thought, instead of bitching and moaning about what’s excluded, or talking about how many we’ve read, how about calling out a few delightful surprises? There were two on this list that were obscure enough that I didn’t really expect to see them:
The Go-Between, by LP Hartley. “When a repressed middle-aged man discovers a journal from his childhood, he has little idea that within those pages lies a heart-wrenching story of love and its destruction – as well as the key to his arrested development. In his most famous work, author and critic Hartley brilliantly renders a child’s-eye view of adult affairs.” I only read this maybe five years ago, I’m not even sure how I came across it, but it’s pretty remarkable…Hartley definitely had that knack of writing a narrator who, because he’s a kid, is unwittingly unreliable.
Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard. This one is about two Australian orphan girls who end up in England, and well, the paths their lives take. Hazzard is terrific at planting seeds early in the narrative and having them grow with the characters. I’d recommend this slightly ahead of The Go-Between.
Never Let me Go is also science fiction, and it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t one I’d pick for a list like this.
But it’s also the sort of science fiction where non-science-fiction fans will go “What? But of course that’s not science fiction; I wouldn’t include it if it were!”.
I’ve read parts of 11, and half of those I had to read for school, and all of those could barely finish due to boredom, or didn’t even finish.
The ones that I read on my own I universally liked and finished, with two exceptions to both. I do remember parts of The Invisible Man which I had to read in school, but I skipped ahead at the end. And I tried to read Midnight’s Children which my brother recommended but could not finish it. But as for school books, I remember a lot more about Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby from what I heard about them second hand than what I remember from actually reading them.
My brother also recommended In Search of Lost Time, which I also couldn’t finish, but I don’t really count that since it is so long and I made it through the first volume. I don’t remember any of it though, which probably has something to do with why I didn’t finish.
On the other hand, I’ve read all of War and Peace three times, so it’s not like I can never complete a long book.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Wolff clocks in at number 4? Good news for me: I rather enjoyed it in college. Brothers Karamazov: Well deserved. Frankenstein :snort. Ragtime was fun. Not sure why Bram Stoker’s Dracula made the list.
I like the list: lots of promising entries for this board member who doesn’t read many novels.
If you look a the HTML, it’s all inline so it could be chosen seemingly at random on the server side, perhaps by some mysterious function.
But from the HTML alone: no obvious meaningful pattern; probably just Guardian pastel confetti.
James Joyce famously said he planted “literary landmines” in Ulysses so his spectre may have returned for just gettng 3rd place. So even the Guardian doesn’t know how the colors got that way.
ETA: They do change on refresh. I haven’t checked to see if every pastel blue or any set of books change together. I think it’s James Joyce doing it.
It’s a good list IMHO, which is not especially informed. It represents the consensus of mainstream literati. So what does that say?
Speculative fiction in underrated, notwithstanding its single entry. Probably underrated categories are science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, thrillers, comedy, mystery, and horror. Possibly underrated fiction is philosophical, Westerns, spy, and romance. I don’t begrudge the selections; I merely observe and opine.
Massively underrated are certain works from foreign lands that I have never heard of and neither has their panel.
Even speculative fiction that can’t be counted as sci-fi or fantasy, I still count 4 at least entries, unless you don’t count dystopian fiction as speculative. If you do count alternative history as speculative then I’d say you’d have to count dystopias as well since they’re alternative history in reverse.
