That Guardian list, and my best books

I wrote for my Substack (regular free newsletter, see top right of this page to sign up) about choosing the best books: and felt I should share it here too. I made my own list (not the full 100 you'll be glad to hear), and the picture above is a giveaway for what's at the top of it. This is my piece:

The Guardian newspaper published a list last week

The 100 best novels of all time | Fiction | The Guardian

as chosen by polling authors, academics and others. If you read the Guardian or are on social media you couldn’t have missed this, as – and presumably this is the whole point – it has to be argued over at enormous length, with people getting very irate. How could you miss out MY favourites? Since it was done on votes the answer to that one is clear: No-one else likes them that much.

I would file it away as ‘enjoyable distraction that means nothing’. I live my cultural life by the George Orwell remark: ‘you cannot prove to me that a work of art is good’. Or bad for that matter.

But obviously, I also counted up how many of the books I had read. I don’t think I’m going to share that number: it is very high, and that makes people get very cross for some reason. I will say that it was (surprisingly) more than Andy Miller, revered master of the Backlisted podcast,

Backlisted

 had read from the list.

The other figure I don’t ever like to reveal is how many books I read in a month or a year, because again people find it annoying. Yes, it is a lot. In the days when I gave an answer people would say ‘but you don’t read them properly do you?’ and ‘well you can’t count short books’ and so on, which I found quite rude (who made the rules?), so now I don’t say. My only important tip is that all my life I have made time for reading by doing minimal housework, and not worrying about it.

I have done posts on more than 2500 different books here on the blog.

Aaanyway, I did make a list of my favourite novels, which might be different another week or month or year. But right now, these ones. Wolf Hall is top choice (and that probably isn't going to change anytime soon), but after that they are not in order, just random.

Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall  (see particularly Hilary Mantel and the Ghost of Thomas Cromwell)

Alastair Mcleod No Great Mischief

Ford Madox Ford Parade’s End

Sybille Bedford A Legacy

Dodie Smith I Capture the Castle

Marilynn Robinson Housekeeping

Mrs Gaskell Wives and Daughters

Nancy Mitford Pursuit of Love/Love in a cold climate

Robert Irwin Wonders Will Never Cease

George Eliot Middlemarch

LP Hartley The Go-Between

Agatha Christie Five Little Pigs

Dorothy L Sayers The Nine Tailors

Katherine Heiny Standard Deviation

James Joyce Ulysses

F Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

WG Sebald Rings of Saturn/The Emigrants

Henry James Wings of the Dove

Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited

Giorgio Bassani Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm

Edith Wharton The House of Mirth

Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano

Marcel Proust A la Recherche de Temps Perdu

Vikram Seth A Suitable Boy

JL Carr A Month in the Country

Charles Dickens Great Expectations

Mrs Oliphant Miss Marjoribanks

Sebastian Japrisot A very long engagement

Jane Austen Emma

There are entries on most of them (not Vikram Seth, and not, weirdly, that particular Dickens), you can easily find them with the search box (top right)

You know how it works: plenty of room for others' choices below...