When I was about 15 my English teacher handed out lists of the books that we should have read if we were to consider ourselves a well-read person. I kept that list for many years, ticking off books once I’d read them, and bearing in mind what needed to be added to my reading history. Sadly, in the various moves I’ve made, that list has been lost. I’d love to go back and see if there is anything I still should read to qualify as well-read. Ever since then, I’ve loved book lists.
In 2003 the BBC did a ‘Big Read’ poll, where the British voted for their 100 favourite novels. It was a rather odd list – children’s author Jacqueline Wilson had 4 books included, and the list was rather influenced by what had recently been a popular movie. Now the BBC has produced another list – ‘100 Novels that Shaped our World’ which was selected by a panel of leading writers, curators and critics (see list below). Only fiction written in English was included, but the list is decidedly weird, with many glaring omissions. Where is Robinson Crusoe, usually considered the first English novel – surely its publication changed the world? And where oh where is Jane Austen’s Emma, a novel which set a standard of perfection all other writers have failed to match? Why the choice of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend when surely young Oliver asking for more brought far more social change than did the later novel? Agatha Christie is the world’s best-selling novelist, and yet not one of her books is on the list. Surely she shaped so much of the crime fiction and TV whodunits that came after her? No Gaskell, Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, R.L. Stevenson, Thackeray, Swift, Fitzgerald, and so many other famous literary names are missing entirely from the list. Can you really leave out Nobel prize winning Faulkner and put in Bridget Jones’ Diary?
I added up what I’d read from this new list and am ashamed to report that I’ve still got two thirds of the books to go. They have been divided into categories (these are also an odd selection). The Director of BBC Arts said he hoped the list would “spark debate”. Well, he succeeded with me. I find the list seriously defective and woefully underrepresenting of the 18th century when the novel got started, and the 19th century when it reached full maturity. Over half of the authors whose books were chosen are currently alive – I wonder how many of the books on this list will still be known in fifty years’ time?
Identity
• Beloved – Toni Morrison
• Days Without End – Sebastian Barry
• Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
• Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
• Small Island – Andrea Levy
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
• Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
• White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Love, Sex & Romance
• Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
• Forever – Judy Blume
• Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
• Riders – Jilly Cooper
• Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
• The Far Pavilions – MM Kaye
• The Forty Rules of Love – Elif Shafak
• The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
• The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton
Adventure
• City of Bohane – Kevin Barry
• Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett
• For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
• His Dark Materials Trilogy – Phillip Pullman
• Ivanhoe – Walter Scott
• Mr Standfast – John Buchan
• The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
• The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
• The Jack Aubrey Novels – Patrick O’Brian
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – JRR Tolkein
Life, Death & Other Worlds
• A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin
• Astonishing the Gods – Ben Okri
• Dune – Frank Herbert
• Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
• Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
• The Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
• The Discworld Series – Terry Pratchett
• The Earthsea Trilogy – Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Sandman Series – Neil Gaiman
• The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Politics, Power & Protest
• A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• Noughts & Crosses – Malorie Blackman
• Strumpet City – James Plunkett
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
• V for Vendetta – Alan Moore
• Unless – Carol Shields
Class & Society
• A House for Mr Biswas – VS Naipaul
• Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
• Disgrace – JM Coetzee
• Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
• Poor Cow – Nell Dunn
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
• The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne – Brian Moore
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
• The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
• Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
Coming of Age
• Emily of New Moon – LM Montgomery
• Golden Child – Claire Adam
• Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
• So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell
• Swami and Friends – RK Narayan
• The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
• The Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
• The Outsiders – SE Hinton
• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ – Sue Townsend
• The Twilight Saga – Stephanie Meyer
Family & Friendship
• A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
• Ballet Shoes – Noel Streatfeild
• Cloudstreet – Tim Winton
• Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
• I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
• Middlemarch – George Eliot
• Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin
• The Shipping News – E Annie Proulx
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte
• The Witches – Roald Dahl
Conflict & Crime
• American Tabloid – James Ellroy
• American War – Omar El Akkad
• Ice Candy Man – Bapsi Sidhwa
• Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
• Regeneration – Pat Barker
• The Children of Men – PD James
• The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
• The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
• The Quiet American – Graham Greene
Rule Breakers
• A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• Bartleby, the Scrivener – Herman Melville
• Habibi – Craig Thompson
• How to be Both – Ali Smith
• Orlando – Virginia Woolf
• Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
• Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
• Psmith, Journalist – PG Wodehouse
• The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – Audre Lorde
How many of these books have you read? Is it more than my total of about one-third? Let me know in the comments. comment.
The BBC panel consisted of Radio 4 Front Row presenter and Times Literary Supplement editor Stig Abell, broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, authors Juno Dawson, Kit de Waal and Alexander McCall Smith, and Bradford Festival Literary Director Syima Aslam.
Comments are moderated, and will not appear until approved.
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J. S. Tyler
I’ve read 27–about 1/4. Many of these books are on my TBR list, though!
Susannah Fullerton
I’ve read about 30 of them, but I do think it is a rather strange list.
Anne Richmond
I agree Susannah, this may be list of what is popular in the Uk at the moment, but it is not a list of novels that shaped our world in 2020. It seems to show a serious lack of understanding the past and the evolution of thinking.
Susannah Fullerton
Yes, it all seemed so ill-considered and strange!
Whispering Gums
I’ve read about 1/3 too. If you add those I’ve seen and not read, maybe about 40!!
It is an odd list for readers, but it’s probably not so much of an odd list in terms of the “shaped the world” criterion? Still, it’s very narrow, partly I suppose because of the “written in English” limitation. No Aussies there, I think, which says something about us! In terms of changing the world, where’s Portnoy’s complaint or Lady Chatterley’s lover? Books which challenged the censors!!
And where, for heaven’s sake is The handmaid’s tale? Surely that had a bigger impact that Oryx and Crake.
Still, we can always disagree with lists like this. The good thing about them is that they encourage conversation.
Susannah Fullerton
Yes, at least it makes us think about what we’d put on our own lists. I agree about Lady Chatterley – surely it had a huge effect?? Some seriously odd choices, but I guess if we came up with our own lists, we’d also be fielding queries.
Gwyn Burns
Dear Susannah,
I have read about one fifth of these books, but am a bit horrified by the list. Where are the real classics and fancy ‘The Wide Sargasso Sea’ being amongst them. There are no French authors there. I think this is a ‘popular’ list relating often to films not a reader’s list.
Thanks very much for the info.
Kind Regards
GwynBurns
Miland
I regret that I’ve only read about half a sozen of these – the version of V for Vendetta I read was the graphic novel, though that may well have been the original.
On the other hand, I’ve read a few that are not on the list, so I won’t feel too bad.
But this list seems like designing a school syllabus based on people’s private hobbies. Surely a much better list would be one compiled by experts on literature, the sort who teach in universities, or get on to the Queen’s Honours list.
Speaking of which, would you (Susannah) like to compile a bucket list of titles for us? Then at least my deploring my own illiteracy will be based on solid ground, a bit like the patient who said ‘O thank you Dr, I feel so much better now I know what it is.’
HNY 2020! 🙂
Susannah Fullerton
Yes, it is a very strange list. I will give some thought to making a list of my own, but it is very hard to decide on which books have shaped the world. I know which ones have shaped MY world, but that’s very personal and hardly representative.
Happy New Year.
Nairn
I would have thought that Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon was much more influential than Regeneration by Pat Barker wonderful tho the latter is.
The Title Conflict and Crime strikes me as a cop out,.
I’m afraid this is just another marketing exercise .
Susannah Fullerton
I think that Marketing exercise is a good way of describing it! A seriously weird list.
Anne Williams
Dear Susannah
You are way ahead of me, I counted only 14. Many others I had only seen the film made, which I find is never quite the same as the book, if you read it after seeing the movie.
I agree there are a number of classics missing. Power of One, The Good Earth, Anna Karenina.
Also I’m ashamed to say I had never heard of some of the listed books or authors.
It looks more like a popular listing amongst British folk with no literary experts asked.
Apologies for my late comments, I must have missed your previous missive.
Anne
Susannah Fullerton
Isn’t it a weird list – as you say, no literary experts asked!
Happy reading for 2020.
Susannah Fullerton
The list is so full of gaps, it’s hard to know where to start with complaints! I agree with the 3 authors you mention, but the list has far too much fantasy and I really question how much most fantasy novels have changed the world.
Heather
I found that I had read approximately 20 on the list but cannot understand why half of those ever made the BBC’s 100 Novels that Changed the World!
There are so many fantasy novels amongst the list. The only two of merit, in my considered opinion, is J.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Oh, and J.K. Rowling did get many children into reading. The others are like a ‘mob of sheep’. Or perhaps I’ve missed the point. There were many authors I have never heard but so many great authors missing.
I agree with the comments above, I feel I haven’t missed very much by not having read most of that very ordinary list.
Peter Danzer
No, I read far less and I believe I have not missed much. Considering that most of my reading is of world literature — but not necessarily of English origin — I find such one-sided lists quite unrepresentative.
Susannah Fullerton
Like you, I felt I haven’t missed much by not having read most of that strange list.
Margi
Jilly Cooper and no Elizabeth Gaskell?! Give me strength. Oddly I have read all in the category of Family and Friendship and can forgive (almost) all for this selection.
Susannah Fullerton
I made a similar exclamation in many places with that list! While I admit to a guilty enjoyment of Jilly Cooper’s bonking novels, her books have surely not changed the world in any way???