A meme has been floating around on facebook and in blogs that refers to a list of 100 books compiled by the BBC. Presumably they are must-reads. Accompanying the list is a claim that the average person is likely to have read only six titles from the list. I don’t know the source of the list, although you can find it on blogs like this. There is a list (The Big Read) published on the BBC’s web site in April 2003, kind of a book popularity contest, but it doesn’t match the list that’s currently making the rounds.
I have problems with lists like these. By what process does our literary canon get established? What influence do critics have? The market? The film industry? Do lists published by influential media outlets become self-fulfilling? Do they have a tendency to stunt our capacity to judge for ourselves? Have the people making these lists actually read the books? One survey raises doubts.
The (possibly fake) BBC list includes Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. Really? A must-read? A fun read, yes, but it’s fluff. Ditto the Harry Potter series. Do I really want to abuse myself with The Chronicles of Narnia by that sappy conservative Christian apologist? And what about the complete works of William Shakespeare? Get real. Although this may sound like heresy, while I love many of the great Willy S’s offerings, there are a good many of them that are either tedious or unreadable and can be safely ignored. A quick scan of the list reveals that it is heavily weighted in favour of Brit. Lit. (no surprise there)—with particular deference to the Victorian novel and winners of the Man Booker prize.
There are many on the list that I do believe are must-reads: Midnight’s Children, Hamlet, Crime and Punishment, The Great Gatsby, Heart of Darkness, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Lolita, The Bible, Ulysses. But the list has some frightening deficiencies and egregious omissions. For example, apart from Shakespeare, there is no consideration of either poetry or drama. (The official Big Read explicitly restricts itself to novels, but that doesn’t appear to be the case with the current list which throws in Shakespeare and the Bible.)
So I have chosen to prepare my own list of 100 must-reads as a supplement to the BBC list. It includes a smattering of important works of poetry and drama. It is necessarily idiosyncratic, reflecting my own education (which includes an English degree) and my locale (Canada). I have also tried to include a few titles written in the 21st century and titles which might strike you as offbeat or obscure. I suggest them as a way to resist the ossifying effect of canonical lists like this. Living authors are indicated with underlines. Enjoy!
Poetry
1. The Iliad, Homer
2. The Odyssey, Homer
3. The Aeneid, Virgil
4. Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
5. Paradise Lost, John Milton
6. The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser (OK, I’m joking)
7. Songs of Innocence and Experience, William Blake
8. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
9. The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
10. Ariel, Sylvia Plath
11. Coney Island of the Mind, Lawrence Ferlenghetti
12. Short Journey Upriver Toward Osheida, Roo Borson
Drama
13. The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe
14. Playboy of the Western World, William Congreve
15. Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw
16. Waiting For Godot, Samuel Beckett
17. Murder in the Cathedral, T. S. Eliot
18. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee
19. All My Sons, Arthur Miller
20. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard
21. Baal, Bertolt Brecht
Novels
22. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
23. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne\
24. Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
25. The Ambassador, Henry James
26. Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
27. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
28. Light in August, William Faulkner
29. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
30. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemmingway
31. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemmingway
32. The Trial, Franz Kafka
33. The Castle, Franz Kafka
34. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
35. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
36. The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor
37. The Sandcastle, Iris Murdoch
38. The Radiant Way, Margaret Drabble
39. The Good Works of Ayela Linde, Charlotte Forbes
40. Lost Between Houses, David Gilmour
41. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Mordecai Richler
42. Suicide Blonde, Darcey Steinke
43. We Were The Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates
44. In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje
45. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
46. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
47. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
48. The Outsider, Albert Camus
49. The Fall, Albert Camus
50. Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
51. Demian, Herman Hesse
52. Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
53. Under The Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
54. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima
55. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
56. The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinsky
57. Cockpit, Jerzy Kosinsky
58. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
59. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
60. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
61. Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
62. Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence
63. A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
64. Gender Wars, Brian Fawcett
65. Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen
66. Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels
67. Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald
68. Childhood, André Alexis
69. A Casual Brutality, Neil Bissoondath
70. The Jade Peony, Wayson Choy
71. Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
72. Famous Last Words, Timothy Findley
73. Not Wanted On The Voyage, Timothy Findley
74. The Wars, Timothy Findley
75. Barney’s Version, Mordecai Richler
76. Black Rain, Masuji Ibuse
77. The White Hotel, D.M. Thomas
78. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
79. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
80. Strange Heaven, Lynn Coady
81. Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima
82. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Yukio Mishima
83. The Human Factor, Graham Greene
84. The White Bone, Barbara Gowdy
85. The Electrical Field, Kerri Sakamoto
86. Miss Lonelyhearts/Day of the Locusts, Nathanael West
87. Angels and Insects, A. S. Byatt
88. Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
89. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
90. Liana, Martha Gellhorn
91. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
92. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
93. Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow
94. Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
95. Perpetual Motion, Graeme Gibson
96. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
97. Coming Up For Air, George Orwell
98. The Pied Piper, Nevil Shute
99. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
100. The Chrysalids, John Wyndam