Book Lists

Chris, who encouraged me to produce my own top 20 book list earlier this year has starting blogging along with his wife Kim. He posted a list of Jeffrey Eugenides top 10 novels yesterday.

I think lists like this are great, they can never be definitive, but a good book recommendation is always a wonderful gift. (I also hold recommenders of bad books in an implacable rigour of disdain. Boosters of "The Last Don", you know who you are.)

In 1984, Anthony Burgess brought out a list of - and a short booklet reveiwing - his choice of the 99 best novels in English since the war. As I recall, he published it as a rebuke to a top 100 list in the Sunday Times, and he modestly confined himself to 99 hoping that readers might nominate one of his as the hundredth.

Here is the list. I worked through a lot of it with great reward to myself. If I had never read this list I may never have been introduced the work of Robertson Davies, a little known true great.

1939
Party Going (Henry Green)
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (Aldous Huxley)
Finnegans Wake (James Joyce)
At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O'Brien)

1940
The Power and the Glory (Graham Greene)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)
Strangers and Brothers (to 1970) (C P Snow)

1941
The Aerodrome: A Love Story (Rex [Ernest] Warner)

1944
The Horses Mouth (Joyce Cary)
The Razor's Edge (W Somerset Maugham)

1945
Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)

1946
The Gormenghast Novels : Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), Titus Alone (1959) (Mervyn Peake)

1947
The Victim (Saul Bellow)
Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)

1948
The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene)
The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer)
No Highway (Nevil Shute)

1949
The Heat of the Day (Elizabeth Bowen)
Ape and Essence (Aldous Huxley)
1984 (George Orwell)
The Body (William Sansom)

1950
Scenes from Provincial Life (William Cooper)
The Disenchanted (Budd Schulberg)

1951
A Dance to the Music of Time (Anthony Powell)
The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (Henry Williamson)
The Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk)

1952
Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
Wise Blood (Flannery O'Connor)
Sword of Honor (to 1961) (Evelyn Waugh)

1953
The Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler)
The Groves of Academe (Mary McCarthy)

1954
Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis)

1957
Room at the Top (John Braine)
The Alexandria Quartet (Lawrence Durrell)
The London Novels (Colin MacInnes)
The Assistant (Bernard Malamud)

1958
The Bell (Iris Murdoch)
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Alan Sillitoe)
The Once and Future King (TH White)

1959
The Mansion (William Faulkner)
Goldfinger (Ian Fleming)

1960
Facial Justice (LP Hartley)
The Balkan Trilogy (to 1965) (Olivia Manning)

1961
The Mighty and Their Fall (Ivy Compton-Burnett)
Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
The Fox in the Attic (Richard Hughes)
Riders in the Chariot (Patrick White)
The Old Men at the Zoo (Angus Wilson)

1962
Another Country (James Baldwin)
An Error of Judgement (Pamela Hansford Johnson)
Island (Aldous Huxley)
The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing)
Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov)

1963
The Girls of Slender Means (Muriel Spark)

1964
The Spire (William Goldin)
Heartland (Wilson Harris)
A Single Man (Christopher Isherwood)
The Defense (Vladimir Nabokov)
Late Call (Angus Wilson)

1965
The Lockwood Concern (John O'Hara)
Cocksure (Mordecai Richler)
The Mandelbaum Gate (Muriel Spark)

1966
A Man of the People (Chinua Achebe)
The Anti-Death League (Kingsley Amis)
Giles Goat-Boy (John Barth)
The Late Bourgeois World (Nadine Gordimer)
The Last Gentleman (Walker Percy)

1967
The Vendor of Sweets (R K Narayan)

1968
The Image Men (JB Priestley)
Pavane (Keith Roberts)

1969
The French Lieutenant's Woman (John Fowles)
Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth)

1970
Bomber (Len Deighton)

1973
Sweet Dreams (Michael Frayn)
Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)

1975
Humboldt's Gift (Saul Bellow)
The History Man (Malcolm Bradbury)

1976
The Doctor's Wife (Brian Moore)
Falstaff (Robert Nye)

1977
How To Save Your Own Life (Erica Jong)
Farewell Companions (James Plunkett)
Staying On (Paul Scott)

1978
The Coup (John Updike)

1979
The Unlimited Dream Company (JG Ballard)
Dubin's Lives (Bernard Malamud)
A Bend in the River (VS Naipaul)
Sophie's Choice (William Styron)

1980
Life in the West (Brian Aldiss)
Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban)
How Far Can You Go? (David Lodge)
A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole published posthumously)

1981
Lanark (Alasdair Gray)
Darconville's Cat (Alexander Theroux)
The Mosquito Coast (Paul Theroux)
Creation (Gore Vidal)

1982
The Rebel Angels (Robertson Davies)

1983
Ancient Evenings (Norman Mailer)