The List Is Growing!

The List was at 51 books last time I posted it - thanks to many more suggestions from visitors to the site - it is now numbering 74 amazing books.  Is your favourite book on the list?  

1.    Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

2.    Jamaica Inn – Daphne Du Maurier

3.    Iliad – Homer

4.    War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

5.    Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

6.    1984 – George Orwell

7.    Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

8.    Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

9.    Lord Of The Flies  - William Golding

10. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

11. Tess of The D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

12. Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

13. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

14. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

15. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

16. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

17. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  - Philip K. Dick

18. Murders In The Rue Morgue – Edgar Allen Poe

19. Middlemarch – George Elliot

20. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

21. Bleak House – Charles Dickens

22. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

23. The Time Machine – HG Wells

24. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

25. Foundation – Isaac Asimov

26. Ulysses – James Joyce

27. Paradise Lost – Milton

28. The Pearl – John Steinbeck

29. Twenty thousand Leagues Under The Sea – Jules Verne

30. I Claudius – Robert Graves

31. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

32. East Of Eden - John Steinbeck

33. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

34. Odyssey – Homer

35. Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie

36. Diceman - George Cockcroft

37. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Berniéres

39. Persuasion – Jane Austen

40. Animal Farm – George Orwell

41. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco

42. Lord Of The Rings – JRR Tolkien

43. Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

44. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré

45. Neuromancer – William Gibson

46. A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré

47. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

48. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

49. 100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

50. Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee

51. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

52. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

53. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

54. Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man – James Joyce   

55. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

56. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

57. The Sound and The Fury – William Faulkner

58. Sons and Lovers – DH Lawrence

59. The Wings Of The Dove – Henry James

60. A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh

61. As I Lay Dying- William Faulkner

62. The French Lieutentant’s Woman – John Fowles

63. Howards End – EM Forster

64. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

65. On The Road – Jack Kerouac

66. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

67. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

68. The Call of the Wild – Jack London

69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

71. Naked Lunch – William S Burroughs

72. The Magus – John Fowles

73. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

74. A Town Like Alice – Neville Shute

Wuthering Site

I found this website when looking around the internet,  it is very informative and well built, take a look at it to add value to your Wuthering Heights reading experience.






This cool website which is making for a great companion to the Wuthering Heights audiobook I am currently deeply immersed in.


http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/


The site was created by a fellow Devon dweller like me, Paul Thompson, and it is comprehensive.  I have spent a while there recently exploring the character studies, the story timeline, character genealogy, it is really well done.

War and Peace review by Adam Thirlwell

War and Peace


by Leo Tolstoy

(Anthony Briggs
 Translation)

Reviewed by Adam Thirlwell in Guardian Books

"As for Tolstoy," James Joyce wrote to his brother, when Joyce was 23, "I disagree with you altogether. Tolstoy is a magnificent writer. He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!"

What did Joyce mean by not being theatrical? "Then suddenly the most fearful scream - it couldn't be hers, she couldn't have screamed like that - came from inside the room. Prince Andrey ran to the door. The screaming stopped and he heard a different sound, the wail of a baby. 'Why have they taken a baby in there?' Prince Andrey wondered for a split-second." That is the untheatrical, impure, confused, comic way of describing a man as he waits for his wife to give birth. Tolstoy's War and Peace, whose unparaphrasable plot covers Russia during the Napoleonic wars, is a 1,400-page exercise in - a treadmill of - irony; and it is gleefully experimental.

With War and Peace, Tolstoy introduced two novelistic innovations, both based on his new principle of length, which was part of his constant principle of irony. The first is luxurious detail. There is suddenly space to record deft things such as: "A doctor in a bloodstained apron came out of the tent, holding a cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his bloodstained hands to keep the blood off it." There are bad jokes, an emperor in trendy narrow shoes, mispronounced place names, dresses that have to be mended just before someone goes out. The second innovation is the way he breaks into the narrative, introducing historical essays. Flaubert and Henry James disliked them, considering them irrelevant and un-novelistic. But they can be exhilarating too: like the details, these essays are ironic. They are exercises in deflation.

Such fun with form, however, has not always been obvious from his English translations. In 1889, for example, a man called Huntington Smith (working from a French version) abridged the novel into two sections - one for stories, one for essays - retitled it "The Physiology of War", and explained that Tolstoy was significant because he "had a message to deliver, a message worth hearing, and the world has shown itself ready to hear". This depressing sentence can stand as an allegory of the things that can go wrong in translation.

But things have more often gone right. There are excellent translations by Constance Garnett, Rosemary Edmonds and, my favourite, by Louise and Aylmer Maude, whose version was approved by Tolstoy. And now there is a new translation, by Anthony Briggs, which is accurate and clear; and, in general, faithful. But there are problems with fidelity. Everyone, after all, has different definitions.

Tolstoy, says Briggs, in his note on the translation, is "an easy read for a Russian (and comparatively easy to translate). Stylistic angularities, shocks and surprises are infrequent, and the dialogue in particular is individualised but always natural. It seems most important to ensure in any translation the same kind of smooth reading, and varied but realistic-sounding dialogue."

I have three reasons for feeling that Tolstoy has been betrayed here. First, this idea that he is an easy read in Russian. Vladimir Nabokov would remind his students that "simplicity is bunkum. No major writer is simple", and go on to show how Tolstoy's style is made up of "creative repetitions" - "he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words". For instance, Russian allows a gap between an adjective and its noun, and Tolstoy loved to elongate that fact. So in the final chapter, when Natasha is in the middle of a happy ending, Tolstoy describes her (literally) like this: "And a joyful, and at the same time pathetic, asking forgiveness for her joy, expression, settled on Natasha's face." This is not smooth Russian, but deliberate complication. In Briggs's translation, it reads: "And Natasha's face had shone with happiness, though it also had a pathetic look as if to apologise for any happiness." It is not that English offers him many ways of imitating Tolstoy's weird syntax, but that is no reason then to make out that nothing has been lost. It is no reason not to try. "Have you noticed Tolstoy's language?" asked Chekhov. "Enormous periods, sentences piled one on top of another. Don't think that it happens by chance or that it's a shortcoming. It's art, and it only comes after hard work."

Secondly, this idea that a translation should be happily smooth. I agree with Milan Kundera: "Partisans of 'flowing' translation often object to my translators: 'That's not the way to say it in German (in English, in Spanish, etc.)!' I reply: 'It's not the way to say it in Czech either!'"

And thirdly, there is the dialogue. The three great previous translators of War and Peace were all educated women. Briggs is impatient with them, on the grounds that their language could not be equal to the brute earthiness of the soldiers' dialogue on battlefields. But it is not obvious that Briggs is so earthy either. "'You all right, Petrov?' inquired one. 'We gave it to 'em hot, men. That'll keep 'em quiet,' another said. 'Couldn't see nothing. They were hitting their own men! Couldn't see nothing for the dark, mates. Anything to drink?'" How much better is this than dialogue which Briggs dislikes: "I say, fellow-countrymen, will they set us down here or take us on to Moscow?"

No, this novel is spikier than it now looks. While Moscow collapses, Pierre Besukhov is trying to predict the future, using a weird key which combines numbers with the French alphabet. Napoleon adds up to 666. Besukhov then tries to find Napoleon's numerical equal. Having failed with the Emperor Alexander, and the Russian nation, Pierre thinks, naturally, of himself: he doesn't work either. Finally, after adding in his nationality in French - russe - and then misspelling it, Pierre gets it right: "Dropping the e again (quite unjustifiably) Pierre got the answer he was after in the phrase l'russe Besuhof - exactly 666!"

L'russe. If you needed an emblem of the novel, an un-French word - thrussian - made up by a French-speaking member of the Russian aristocracy would be it. And yet, in this translation, the loopiness of Pierre's bad French is mildly lost, because Tolstoy's sporadic French ambience has been cut out. It provides, therefore, a stray, enforced moment of polyphony.

It is a small stylistic moment, but everything in this novel is small. Because War and Peace is a great novel not because Tolstoy's characters worry about God and death and nations, but because they make up weird words. Its subject is not grandiose: it is chance. And the only way to show this is minutely. Tolstoy is the greatest miniaturist in the history of the novel. He is economical. This outlandish, wonderful novel - which survives all of its impossible, necessary translations, including this thorough but imperfect one - is a masterpiece of reduction, and has style.

An Odyssey in Literature

I have always had a desire to read as many of the books that are considered to be Literary classics as possible.  Some of these are ancient classics, and some are modern classics, many are classics of English Literature, others are classics from other languages and cultures.

It is my birthday today and next year is a milestone birthday (ouch).  Life is rushing past so fast so I have decided to make a formal plan to start ticking these greats off my list, as frankly, I am not getting any younger!  (My Gran says she is glad to hear I am 'bettering myself')

I already have a decent number of these books under my belt, having read them already, so rather than revisiting them all again in written form, I plan to approach this book list in a different way.  I will read many of these books, particularly the ones I have not read before, but in revisiting the ones I have already read, I plan instead to listen to them, as read by some fantastic narrators.


I have been a bookworm from early childhood, and always have a pile of books by bed, I will always love the feel of a book, the smell of the ink and the paper, that will never change.  But, in recent years I have also become a fan of audiobooks.  A well read audiobook can really bring a story to life, and add another dimension to the stories remembered from the written words I have previously enjoyed.  Also, when all the accents are done perfectly, it really adds a lot of drama and authenticity to the story hearing it that way.    Audiobooks are an opportunity to be listening to fantastic stories, instead of tacky radio stations, while I work at my desk, in the studio, travelling, or pottering around the house.  I look forward to chores and driving now, as I can immerse myself in epic stories of love, heroism and adventure while I go about my daily grind.  

This list will be evolving and expanding.  As a start point, I asked the people in my life and my followers in the twitterverse too, to give me suggestions of their personal much loved classics for my list.  My next post will have the first 50 essential books we came up with between us for my list.