Kat posted a list of ‘should-reads’ from the BBC and noted what she’d read, what she hasn’t but wants to, and what she hasn’t and doesn’t want to. I think this activity should become a meme – it has reminded me of books I love and books I still want to read. And reread.

Following Kat’s legend, bold means I’ve read it and unbold (shy?) means I haven’t.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible (spoilers abound, I’ve heard the ending)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (how have I not read this yet? List!)
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (I know, I know…)
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare – (nope, not all of it. Not yet.)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens (Got to improve my Dickens ratings – this is unforgivable!)
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (One of these days; doorstop)
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth (started this but had to return it. I’ve loved some of his other books.)
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville (this is embarrassing!)
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Inferno – Dante
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker (didn’t like this. Have issues with Alice Walker)
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (MUST READ!)
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry (urg, have started at least three times…)
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (AWFUL American tripe)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Wow, have I really not?)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams (Oh how I love this book!)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (Good but not a patch on the musical…)

I’ve got just over half (about 56) under my belt. And nothing in there that I don’t want to read, which is a nice feeling (the ones I don’t want to read, unfortunately, I’ve already read).

Based on this, in 2010 I am going to try and read (more):

• Dickens
• Russians
• Ulysses, finally
• Remains of the Day
• Sherlock Holmes
• Steinbeck

Kat points out the problematic notion that you have to read a specific collection of books to be well-read (or whatever). I agree with her, but I also subscribe to the idea of the canon – as long as it’s a flexible, self-determined one. I like the idea of a literary heritage, that we inherit great tales, that there’s some kind of inter-generational continuity where stories are concerned. In fact, the nice thing about this list is its combination of contemporary and historical books.

I think that we can share a lot through stories, that we can tap into the zeitgeist, the ideas that are circulating the planet, the thoughts people are thinking and were thinking. Maybe reading some of these “greats” is the equivalent of checking the newsfeed on Facebook – checking in with the larger vibe. Except you get to check everyone’s best updates, none of the ‘this milkshake tastes like ass’ bits. (Although, as loyal readers know, the books representing those quotidian updates are also enjoyed by me on a regular basis.)

My approval of the canon may seem to be at odds with views I’ve previously expressed, but to me there’s no paradox. I love ephemeral stories and I love stories that last forever. They aren’t the same thing, but also… they are the same thing.

I’m in favour of stories.

What about you?

What do you think about these sorts of lists? Do they serve a purpose, or do they just make some people feel smug and some feel inferior? Why do we read, anyway? What’s a bestseller doing?

Sarah, Suse, Blair, you’re tagged. Blogless friends, anonymous readers, what do you folks read and what you make of it all?
photo credit: guldfisken

This is going to be a bit of a rant.

I’ve recently experienced a series of interactions with friends and acquaintances in response to my raving about some book I was reading. The conversation usually goes one of two ways:

Conversation #1

Me: I love this book! It makes me want to become a brittle-yet-vulnerable forensic psychologist (for example) who solves murders in the nick of time.

My friend: Mmm. I don’t know, I thought the book was a bit obvious, didn’t you? And it was so unlikely, you know, all those convenient coincidences. And the love-interest subplot? Predictable.

Me: Ohhh. I thought that was nice. You know, how she saved his life, and then he saved her life, and then they both saved the killer’s life together so that justice could be served in a court of law?

My friend: It’s probably just me. I just think it didn’t compare to [trendy writer]’s book, which was so gritty and urban. So real. And yet at the same time, a metaphor for today’s world, don’t you think?

Conversation #2

Me: I’m reading [average novel example] and can’t put it down.

My friend: You read that sh*t?

Me: …

Here’s my thing: I don’t think reading novels should be hard work, not if the work isn’t dwarfed by the enjoyment you get from it. I don’t think books should be notches on an intellectual bedpost. I don’t think they should be used as the currency of culture – or cool – either.

I heard about an architect – maybe Jørn Utzon – who said that his aim in creating new spaces was to allow people to think new thoughts. That’s what a good novel does for me. It puts new pictures into my head and introduces me to new people and make me feel stuff.

There are plenty of crap novels out there. Really bad ones, the literary lovechildren of Dan Brown and Matthew Reilly (I should know, I’ve read most of them). But for me, the litmus test there is whether or not I’m convinced by the story. That’s it. If it’s reeeeally badly written, or if the characters are preposterous, or the plot is overly contrived, then it’s not fun. On the other hand, surely the unwritten contract between the author and us as readers involves us suspending our disbelief to some degree.

The way I see it, you should only be allowed to rubbish a novel if you started it with the intention of enjoying it. Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think people become addicted to criticising things. Maybe it’s the way we’re educated: you get into a rhythm or a pattern of looking for the defects, the ‘Aha!’, something to write in the essay. I’ve always been the opposite. In any given situation I tend to dole out more than enough benefit of the doubt to go around.

That said, I understand the importance of criticism and think that where it’s thoughtful, it’s priceless. I’m not advocating being nice about everything.

What is increasingly pissing me off, though, is what I see as being people bigging themselves up via putting down other people’s work. It becomes a bit like racism or other forms of prejudice that work psychologically to affirm one’s own rightness (or right-onness!). And it seems to me that a quasi-intellectual objection to a ‘low-brow’ novel is often meant to belittle those who enjoy it (ok, me) as much as its author.

So I’ve reached my tipping point. From here on in I’m going to be more forthright than ever about fun books without intellectual pretensions.  If I inhale a Nick Hornby or a Val McDermid or a Nicholas Evans, I’m going to go there, girlfriend. Oh yes I di-id.

Rant over. Thoughts?

(Photo credits: Striatic, Secret Pilgrim, 416style, macfanmd)