I couldn't see this already being discussed on the Fforum, but here's a link to the Guardian's list of 1000 novels "everyone must read":
[www.guardian.co.uk]

Yes, they couldn't bring themselves to dare to say "best books" in the thing itself, but note that the words are embedded in the URL. Hmm. They've already done the same with albums and films. Note also that an absurdly large and frankly unrealistic proportion of the 1000 novels "everyone must read" is made up of obscure Victorian novels you'll never have heard of.

It's worth poring over the full articles, incidentally, if you've got the time.


Well, shall we have some fun picking it apart? First and foremost, of course, Jasper's not on the list, which is an outrage. (Quickly, the pitchforks!) But there are other problems with the list. I've mentioned the large helping of Victorian filler - those list spaces could've been better spent, surely? There's some odd placing of titles within sub-sections, but I suppose you could argue most of them. ("Of Mice And Men" in Crime? Kafka's "Castle" under Comedy? Before you say anything, though, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" *does* belong in Science Fiction, oh yes.)

Also some odd decisions in how they've treated authors with more than one qualifying item. Psir Pterry Pratchett's entire Discworld series as one item - couldn't they pick a couple of winners? Isn't it cheating to include the 2000 Molesworth omnibus rather than an individual book or books? Jane Austen's *entire* oeuvre - really?

I'd also question the inclusion of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" on the grounds that it's "so influential", unless of course we're celebrating the 60th birthday of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" with a festival of Newspeak and "influential" now means "derivative". (Jasper could've had Rowling's space, dammit!)

Some odd choices of titles for particular authors - I can't help wondering if here the editors and/or contributors identified an author who deserved to be represented, but couldn't agree on their actual best work and just plumped for their first one instead. The one that leaps out at me here is "The Wasp Factory" by Iain Banks on the Science Fiction & Fantasy list - surely the correct choice is his second novel, "The Bridge", because:
a) it's much, much better, and more to the point
b) it actually has some fantasy content that would justify including it in that sub-section.

Finally, the big obvious problem with this list and others of its type - it's novels only. No Edgar Allan Poe, then. Of course including short fiction would complicate the editors lives enormously, but still, there's a bit of a gap there.

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work is a vampire that sucks me dry
which is a metaphor
but still the reason I stuck a chair leg through my manager



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2009 12:27AM by Adrian Lush.

In the first three were two Martin Amis books, so I couldn't bring myself to read any further.

I'm really pleased you posted the link.
I think that if you can try and put personal taste aside this is a really great list.
I'm off to work my way through the ones I haven't yet read - starting with the Victorians.

In general I like these kinds of lists, but I have to agree that for such a long list there are some gaping holes. Jasper Fforde for one, but I'd add Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine as well, and probably others that I haven't thought of.

I agree that limiting it to novels is too restricting. In addition to poetry and short stories, what about nonfiction? I'd have to add Gödel, Escher Bach, The Ancestor's Tale, and Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, if nothing else.

Regarding Harry Potter, I won't say it has enormous literary merits, but it's certainly better than the latest craze, Twilight. Ugh.

What is Dandelion wine about then? I am intrigued.

The thing about lists like these is that the 'experts' chosen to make the selections are usually products of the established literary training systems so to them anything written after 1900 is of no merit.

I knew a Rhodes scholar who studied philosophy, among other things, and listening to him 1900 was where the expression of human experience ceased to have meaning*.

Its like listening to the top 100 'best songs'.

How many of these would include the original Muppet Show theme music?



*His prejudices were much stronger than the comment by George Moore (I think) that 'All philosophy was written by Plato. All the rest is foot notes."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2009 11:42AM by bunyip.

<deleted for double posting>



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2009 12:00PM by Bonzai Kitten.

The list on my iPod? (It also has the fraggle rock theme, and "I would like to visit the moon" from sesame street... Hey! Shut up! I am not!)

Oh yes you are! And I'd like to be too. Can you get the Fraggle Rock theme on mp3 then? Wow!

I'm ignoring the 1000 books list thanks to the glaring omissions of most of the things on my bookshelves. It's a conspiracy. No Garfield on there either. Huff huff huff.

The Guardian list doesn't seem to have any sort of pre-1900 prejudice, despite the large measure of Victoriana - they wouldn't have been able to put together a whole section on SF/fantasy without 20th century titles, for a start.

And they did include a refreshing number of novels published within the last decade. I don't hold with the notion (TS Eliot's? Someone remind me...) that a novel can't be considered great until ten years after publication - you can generally spot a book with true staying power after the first year or so. That said, I wouldn't have said more than a third of the 2000s novels they included would cut the mustard.

FWIW bunyip, the scuttlebutt I've heard is that the panel of "experts" basically consisted of the Guardian's editorial staff plus a few people they knew. They then got hold of authors and critics within the relevant fields and assigned them books to synopsise. I've had this on a wink and a nod, so ignore or mock it as you see fit.

They did a "1000 best albums" too! Much, much worse. And no Muppets. There aren't any on my MP3 player either, but I do have the old Grange Hill theme ("Chicken Man" by Alan Hawkshaw).

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work is a vampire that sucks me dry
which is a metaphor
but still the reason I stuck a chair leg through my manager

It's probably fair enough to restrict the list to novels only - if nothing else it leaves things open for other lists of best poetry, short stories, plays and so forth.

Problems arise when the stated criteria are selectively ignored: Herge (Crab With Golden Claws, Tintin in Tibet), Briggs (When the Wind Blows) and Goscinny (Asterix the Gaul) are included and these are Graphic Novels but the likes of Alan Moore (From Hell, Watchmen, A Small Killing, etc) or Bryan Talbot (A Tale of One Bad Rat, Alice in Sunderland) or Will Eisner, Joe Sacco, Shaun Tan, Eddie Campbell, Neil Gaiman... this list could get very long indeed... are missing.

The word 'novel' in 'Graphic Novel' is, of course, the sticking point. Alan Moore has argued that the term is nothing more than a marketing ploy anyway and he thinks of them more as "expensive comics". Eddie Campbell and Bryan Talbot discussed the same moot point a couple of years ago at a writers' festival and (from memory) they came to a similar conclusion.

Another point concerns length. Aphra Behn's 'Oroonoko', for instance, is on the list and runs to about 50 pages. When first published, there was no such term as 'short story' but that doesn't mean that we should still consider it to be the 'novel' that it was then deemed to be. If it is to be so considered, then anything recently called 'short story' of a similar length should come into the running. As an obvious starting point, some of Stephen King's and Ernest Hemingway's short stories are far longer than 50 pages but because they are called 'short stories' (or the hideous term 'novella'), they aren't considered.

If Joyce's 'Ulysses' with its convoluted use of language is a 'novel', and graphic novels are 'novels', then another question arises regarding Verse Novels. I'm not sure how universally well known Steven Herrick is, but his Australian trilogy of 'Bend in the River', 'Wolf' and 'Cold Skin' tell coherent, novel-like stories with linked 'chapters' (ie, poems) of verse. The Canterbury Tales is, perhaps, a more widely known example of this point: while the tales are obviously individual entities, the developing relationships between the pilgrims provides a wider -novel?- structure. Don Quixote (on the list) is no more coherent than Chaucer, in this regard, with its linked episodic structure.

Herrick's books are aimed at adolescents and I'd also observe that children's and adolescent novels are conspicuously thin on the ground in the list to begin with. This deserved to be a separate section in its own right.

Nevertheless, there will probably always be grey areas when lists of 'bests' are compiled and - apart from the glaring omission of Jasper - this is far from being a poor one.

ES: There is if you record it off the telly, and then email it to yourself.

And I believe that it's out on the net somewhere too, but I'm on dial up, so I can't be sure.

Always contentious are your 'best' lists.

For example: what is the best antibiotic? There are a large number of people who would say penicillin and its derivatives, but for a large number of people the cure would kill them as they are allergic to penicillin and its offshoots.

Similarly I am severely allergic to a lot of literature that is considered 'essential' reading and enjoy a lot that is considered trash.

How about a list of the top 1000 books, including series and related novels, such as all James Bond books as one item, by number of sales.

That should cull out the personal biases and make the list more representative of what the 'people' think are the best books. Excepting 'A Brief History of Time' which I am told has huge sales but very few people get past the second chapter.

In that case books like Twilight would rank considerably higher than many well written novels. I have read a couple of the books and find the characters quite annoying to say the least. The sickening way they carry on... I felt like siding with the enemy vampires.

<spleen has been vented>
<no offense meant to those who like the books>

Also books that had been around longer would be weighted higher than books that had been published recently.

Urg.

No Brideshead Revisited or Sword of Honour Trilogy, but the inclusion of all of Evelyn Waugh's minor - lesser, maybe, oops? - novels.

Who is responsible for this? Hm? Own up. Now.

Welcome back, QE. Long time no hear.

Move along - nothing to see here -



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/01/2009 11:34AM by SkidMarks.

Small disagreement here: books published in years, many of, including decades, ago have had more time to make sales, but the large publishing runs along with the advertising of new titles means that new books are given a greater market penetration.

Brief History of Time is a good case in point. How many of the general public would normally buy a book about physics?

I bought my first copy of LOTR in 1970 when there was no publicity about it. Since it became the basis of three movies its publicity support is enormous, and I suppose that gives it a higher ranking than it might otherwise have had, but how many books get this blockbuster treatment?

As a corollary, unfilmable but classic books get no attention whatsoever. I wonder if the Discworld adaptations on Sky actually helped sales or not?