In Which My Reading List Grows Longer...

[doctorray]

So, The Guardian has published a list of "1,000 Novels Everybody Must Read".  Yep.  One thousand.  As in one a week for 19 years, and never mind the non-fiction or the new-fiction or the anything else.  Except reading The Guardian I suppose...

But if you're as stunningly well-read as the acerbically worldly-wise staffers of the Guardian, you've

Comments

[gotham_bound]

*No* Madeline L'Engle?! Pfft! this list is irrelevant! (I'll keep telling myself that to keep from feeling like an unlettered idiot.)

[zorker]

I feel uncomfortable that they listed two books by Iain Banks here, and one of them is Consider Phlebas. That was definitely one of his weaker novels. Why not Use of Weapons, which is absolutely incredible?

[freudinshade]

I've read about 20 of these (loosely counting, since some of them are series) and I have to say, there's some pretty big differences in strengths of the ones I read. Some are classics and some are questionable and will probably be forgotten.

Did they say anything about their criteria? To address Zorker's complaint, I think they chose Consider Phlebas because it's the first Culture novel. I agree it's far from the strongest. On the other hand, they put the whole Discworld series as one entry.

And Lord of the Flies is not Sci-Fi or Fantasy. Leaving room for some L'engle (of Van Eekhout, but hey, they can't put it on until it actually ships :)

[essentialsaltes]

I think I totted up 70, with some quibbles (like the Discworld Series?? - that's 70 novels right there, isn't it

[karteblanche]

I actually liked Strange & Norrell a fair bit. I think it was unnecessarily convoluted in places, but had some really very interesting ideas.

As for the rest of the list, I agree with just about everyone else that there are some things on here that make me go "huh?" And why do some series have only one mention (like Harry Potter) while others list the whole series?

I do appreciate when lists like this include A Canticle for Leibowitz, though, since it's one of my favorites.

[essentialsaltes]

Yeah, I shoulda also listed the ones I have read that definitely definitely deserve to be there...

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
The Time Machine by HG Wells
The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
The Sword in the Stone by TH White
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

[swmartin]

I found it interesting to compare their lists with my own, put together about a decade ago on the Enigma web site. Most of the sf books I recommended made it onto the list, or at least credible variants from the same authors. Ender's Game was the only pick I made which I'm surprised they didn't. Not on my list because I didn't go back to that far, but noticeably absent from theirs, is any mention of Jules Verne.

Their choice of fantasy, however, seems way off. As essentialsaltes pointed out, you really can't discuss modern fantasy without acknowledging Lieber and Donaldson, to which list I'd add Zelazny. And if you're going to include Harry Potter and Narnia, where are the other great children's fantasy works? Had they never heard of Peter Pan or the Wizard of Oz?