Tags
The other week, the BBC published a list of The 100 Novels that Shaped Our World. It’s as tendentious as such lists inevitably are, though there is also, inevitably, some interest in it.
In response, Nina Allan produced her own list of The 100 Novels that Shaped Her World. This is more personal, and therefore more revealing in its way. And I find myself much more in sympathy with Nina’s list than with the BBC’s. She also suggested that “we all get naked” and produce our own lists. So I have done precisely that. Well, with qualifications.
Nina didn’t keep strictly to the remit of novels, since she included T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (understandably, of course). I have broken with the remit even more dramatically, since my list includes a fair bit of poetry and non-fiction. To be honest, novels alone would not give an accurate or a coherent picture of what has, since childhood, shaped me as both a reader and a writer. Right from the start of trying to compile this list (and drawing up a list of 100 books is far harder than I thought it would be) I found myself unable to avoid including books that were not novels, because they demanded their place on the list.
I have also broken with her remit of only including one title by each author. I tried to do that, and in some places I was able to sneak extra titles through (Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, for instance) in ways that don’t really seem to transgress the rule. But there are two authors I have included twice: I discovered T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems and The Four Quartets at exactly the same time (I picked them up from the same shelf in the same shop on the same school outing) and it would be invidious to pick one over the other. And H.G. Wells also appears twice because the two books are exemplars of two different branches of his career, and both, in very different ways, have been very important to me. Again, I could not pick one over the other.
Other than that, I will follow Nina’s pattern and list the books without comment. Partly because a list of 100 titles is long enough anyway, and any commentary would stretch this post to breaking point. And also, you don’t really need to know which novel I ripped off for the first piece of fiction I ever wrote (when I was 10), or which book shaped my desire to be a critic, or which novel I hated on first acquaintance but came to admire on revisiting. You might guess, of course, though you might well be wrong.
I thought long and hard about how to present this list. Should it be in the order the books occurred to me? Or chronological order of publication? Or in some order that reflects when I first read them? In the end, alphabetical order of author seems the most straightforward. So here goes:
100 Books that have shaped me as a reader and as a writer:
English Music – Peter Ackroyd
Report on Probability A – Brian Aldiss
The Rift – Nina Allan
Look to the Lady – Margery Allingham
Life After Life – Kate Atkinson
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
The Bridge – Iain Banks
Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
The Untouchable – John Banville
The Famous Five – Enid Blyton
A Postillion Struck by Lightning – Dirk Bogarde
The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolano
Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges
The New Confessions – William Boyd
The Ascent of Man – Jacob Bronowski
Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
Earthly Powers – Anthony Burgess
True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey
Best Science Fiction of the Year 3 – Edited by Terry Carr
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
The Poems of C.P. Cavafy
The Blazing World – Margaret Cavendish
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
Strokes – John Clute
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe – D.G. Compton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Just William – Richmal Crompton
Aegypt Quartet – John Crowley
House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
Dhalgren – Samuel R. Delany
Underworld – Don DeLillo
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Loon Lake – E.L. Doctorow
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle
My Family and Other Animals – Gerald Durrell
The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell
Selected Poems – T.S. Eliot
The Four Quartets – T.S. Eliot
Tours of the Black Clock – Steve Erickson
A Time of Gifts – Patrick Leigh Fermor
Time and Again – Jack Finney
The Civil War trilogy – Shelby Foote
Sarah Canary – Karen Joy Fowler
The Magus – John Fowles
The Stone Book Quartet – Alan Garner
The Spire – William Golding
Lanark – Alasdair Gray
The Course of the Heart – M. John Harrison
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
The Mersey Sound – Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten
Riddley Walker – Russell Hoban
Mythago Wood – Robert Holdstock
The Blazing World – Siri Hustvedt
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
Phoenix Café – Gwyneth Jones
Report to Greco – Nikos Kazantzakis
900 Grandmothers – R.A. Lafferty
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
Decision at Delphi – Helen MacInnes
Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Children of the New Forest – Frederick Marryat
C – Tom McCarthy
Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
Loving Little Egypt – Thomas McMahon
The Metaphysical Club – Louis Menand
Martin Dressler – Steven Millhauser
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Utopia – Thomas More
Hav – Jan Morris
The City, Not Long After – Pat Murphy
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
My Name is Red – Orhan Pamuk
An Instance of the Fingerpost – Iain Pears
James Tiptree Jr – Julie Phillips
Woman on the Edge of Time – Marge Piercy
The Affirmation – Christopher Priest
An Inspector Calls – J.B. Priestley
The King Must Die – Mary Renault
The Chalk Giants – Keith Roberts
Queen of the States – Josephine Saxton
Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
Skin and Bones – Thorne Smith
Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Tom Stoppard
Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
Waterland – Graham Swift
Warm Worlds and Otherwise – James Tiptree Jr.
The Ruby in her Navel – Barry Unsworth
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut Jr
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
The History of Mr Polly – H.G. Wells
Sinai Tapestry – Edward Whittemore
Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Uncle Fred in the Springtime – P.G. Wodehouse
The Book of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe
How can sitting in bed drinking champagne be so exhausting? But last night was exhausting.
For the record, the full list of winners was:
You can see 