Bob's lists: Novels
The second list is books I have read as an adult, books I have loved reading, which I count as my favourite novels of my adult years. I have a lot less time for reading now than I used to. In fact, for a few years after the the period of the first list I only read detective fiction. Then in my mid- or perhaps even late-twenties, I read The Satanic Verses on a beach in Cuba and fell in love with literature again. I guess once you reach a certain fullness, there isn't enough space inside your heart and head for a book to really change you, the way books change you as an adolescent. The books in the second list came closest to changing me in that way, of leaving me a different person. This list is also a bit boysy, and seems to have too many Great American and Great Indian Novels.
No doubt I have forgotten things that should be added to each list. And the numbering is slightly arbitrary, though I have tried to rank them.
The books that shaped me
1. Joseph Heller Catch-22
2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
3. Don DeLillo White Noise
4. Thomas Pynchon Vineland
5. Aldous Huxley Antic Hay
6. George Orwell 1984
7. Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five
8. Jean-Paul Sarte Iron in the Soul
9. Italo Calvino If on a Winter's Night A Traveller
10. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o Petals of Blood
11. Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being
12 Graham Greene Our Man in Havana
13. Anthony Burgess Earthly Powers
14. Victor Serge Conquered City
15. William Faulkner As I Lay Dying
The books I have loved since
1. Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex
2. Philip Roth Human Stain
3. Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses
4. Michael Ondaatje In the Skin of a Lion
5. Rohinton Mistry A Fine Balance
6. Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces
7. Javier Cercas Soldiers of Salamis
8. Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things
9. James Ellroy American Tabloid
10. Don DeLillo Underworld
12. Jonathan Lethem The Fortress of Solitude
13. Valerie Martin Property
I was aiming for ten in each list, and nearly made it with the second.
Want to share your list? Here in the comments thread, or on your own blog if you have one. Do bloggers still tag each other these days? I'll tag Noga, Norm, Max, Martin, George - the other people I'd tag are already in the other discussion thread. I'll also finish off my philosophy list and post that.
Comments
I am enjoying thinking about my own lists!
Ben - yes, Hitchhiker was one of the first books I put on my own list!
Best
Book
Ever
You have email.
http://www.adjb.net/sab/index.php?entry=entry120818-092117
I thought Roy might be Controversial!
I like your lists. David Mitchell would actually be in the very top of my second list - I completely forgot about Cloud Atlas.
I was interested in how much girls' lists and boys' lists would be different.
Anonymous-
Blook Meridian is great, but for me not quite up there.
(Anonymi, please sign a name or nickname!)
WS-
Saw the mail. I'm very tempted. Will read the doc later and reply.
So here is the list, not in any particular order:
1. Anne of Green Gables
2. Jane Eyre
3. Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
4. Little Fadette, George Sand
5. Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
6. Exodus, Leon Uris
7. Shira, SY Agnon
8. Daddy longlegs, Jean Webster
9. Little Women
10. Huckleberry Finn
11. Crime and Punishment
12. The Plague, Albert Camus
13. Story of a Real Man, Boris Polevoy
14. Nevada, Zane Grey
15. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
Anyone who knows my devotion to Jane Austen may well wonder why none of her novels is included in this list. The fact is that I read Austen's Pride & Prejudice and Emma when I was about 14 years old and was not impressed.
I like Daniel Deronda more than Middlemarch.
Like you I tried P and P too early - I read the Brontes when I was very young, but found Austen completely unengaging until I was about 17.
But some people, sadly for them, never undergo that epiphany and continue to misconstrue Austen's novels as romantic wishful thinking. I do so pity them ... :)
Looking back, I changed enormously as a person around the age of fourteen, and my list no.1 was essentially books I read after that. I was a voracious reader both before and after, but generally in the period from 11 to 14/15 I was reading books in the "teens" and "young adult" section of the library (which was in the children's wing) and not from the normal grown-up fiction shelves.
I have lots of vivid memories of reading in that period - feelings, flavours, images, book covers, etc. But I can remember very few actual authors and titles. I read mainly historical fiction (often set down mines or during the American or Russian revolutions) and sci-fi (especially parallel world stuff).
I loved Joan Aitken, Crazy Weather by Charles McNichols, Patrick Kavanagh's children's novels, and The Gates of Paradise (a novel about William Blake) by Peter Carter. That's all I can recall now.
As I said above, I was interested in how much girls' lists and boys' lists would be different - and it seems (from the very small sample) that there is. My sister loved Anne of Green Gables and Daphne Du Maurier, but I never read them for some reason. I've only read one book on CC's list: Exodus.