this one by the telegraph (UK)
I've read 35. hmm.
who gets to make these things? whose opinions are this definitive?
that said, i still can't resist tallying up.
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- moonrat
- I'm a recovering editorial assistant. I'm like most of my kind: impoverished coffee-and-gin survivalists, underpaid but ambitious, bitter but hopeful. Painfully self-conscious, woefully self-congratulatory, willfully self-indulgent. Yes, I'm white, but I'm trying to get over it. Accurate spelling (to the dismay of my boss) is not among my interests. So read forgivingly.
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24 comments:
I've read 32. A few more I couldn't make it to the end.
Glad to see South African author J M Coetzee there, although I enjoyed "Waiting for the Barbarians" more than Disgrace.
completely unrelated but you're not online right now so...
website u must visit. so hilarious
http://www.postcardsfromyomomma.com/
41. I was pleased to see J.M. Coetzee on there too. I think he's a great writer and Naguib Mahfouz as well. It seemed a little more eclectic and a little less 'great classic male british writers' than usual.
Hmm, I only have 24, but there are quite a few more that I started......
Who gets to write these things? Anyone with an opinion.
In fact, I'd like to see YOUR list. I'll even make it easy on you: just do 25 and not 100 (unless you really want to do 100).
What are Moonrat's 25 Books You Must Read Before Joining The Choir Invisible?
It became a silly list right off the bat when they added "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." I stopped reading after that
I didn't keep count, but I was surprised I'd read as many as I had. I recently had to do a Top Ten Books thing as part of an interview. I have to say, it was tough - and none of my top ten were on that list, though I did have a differen John Le Carre on mine.
I only had 18 and then 3 or 4 that I'd started, but not finished. I agree that these lists are often puzzling, but I do like cross-checking them with each other to see what consistently seems to make it onto all or most.
31.
And it's Nineteen Eighty-Four, not "1984". Stupid Torygraph.
And yeah, HHGTTG is far too popular to be on the list.
Um... 19. And Hitchhiker's was one of them. I hereby resign myself to a life of permanent plebeian taste. (grin)
34 and several halves. Maybe a couple more. It's hard to remember what I read three decades ago when I did so much of my "serious" reading.
So when are you going to make your own list? You've got as much right as anybody else.
I've only read 21 on this list.
20 for me - if the lust had been "authors" it would have been more (dif. Toni Morrison, dif. Le Carre, etc)
Whew, I've read 45, but that's because this list leans heavily towards French authors. I was glad to see MIDDLEMARCH, one of my all-time favorite books, is in the number one spot!
I think the Telegraph’s list is FAR better than the last, American, one I saw posted somewhere. It’s hard to find a bad selection on this list and I have read a large number of them (no, I will not be more specific as I do not like to brag). Maybe folks in the UK just have better taste.
I did not-bad, about the same as you, Moonie, or a little more (but I *am* older, ha!).
But y'know, these things are all flawed the same way: the best they can ever do is no better than "The N novels everyone should read -- out of all the novels I/we have read and still remember."
If you could cut up all the lists into one book per snippet and shake them up in a paper bag in such a way that all the matching titles' snippets adhered to one another, I guess you could say the 100 biggest wads of paper are probably excellent candidates for the 100 must-reads.
If you took 100 such lists and read one unfamiliar book from each one, I bet you'd have done yourself and your reading a great favor. (Er, as such things go. Please don't take this as a hint to do even MORE reading than you already do.)
hmm. well, since appealing to my ego has always been an excellent strategy for getting things done...
maybe i WILL put together a list! humph! you've asked for it!
of course, mine will be annotated and long-winded.
of course, mine will be annotated and long-winded.
You forgot "...and spread out across 100 posts." Which doesn't count, you know. By the time you got to the 99th entry in the series you'd have alienated everyone here.
29, eek! Need to get reading! Strangely, Valley of the Dolls was not on the list--quel disappointment!
I've only read 7...
I shall blame this on the fact that I am a children's librarian, and I only have time to read about 1 grown-up book a month.
I think I'm above 50 (although a great many of these were when I was back in school, so I can't remember them too clearly). And I have a few more, like Underworld and Disgrace on the 'to be read' pile.
It's still quite a Brit-centric list, I think. Very few American titles. And a lot of things like Brighton Rock and Cold Comfort Farm that I can't readily imagine any non-Brits reading.
And I can't resist adding another dozen books to my Amazon/public library wish lists. God, such a "to read" stack!
I only got a lousy 24. Middlemarch? Really? That's on the list?
It was looking ugly for awhile, but I pulled through in the end: 13. But I have two on my shelf waiting to be read!
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