The Telegraph have included a supplement this weekend to coincide with the Hay-on-Wye Book festival, of a list of the 500 must-read books. They are not suggesting you would be lacking in some way if you don’t read them, it is just a suggestion of what might constitute a basis for a library. They split the suggested titles into categories, including war and history, romance, poetry, British greats, food and drink, money, thrillers, crime, sci-fi and fantasy, children’s, plays, European/Russian/Latin American/African/ Asian/American classics, sports/pastimes, comedy and autobiographies! Good heavens! How inclusive!
I read through the list and was surprised how many I had actually read; there were also some I had tried but not completed for various reasons, some I definitely want to read, and some I’ve never heard of! There were some inclusions by authors which surprised me, not necessarily because of the writer but because I didn’t necessarily agree with the title being the best of the oeuvre.
Have a look and see what you think:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/promotions/10075387/must-read-books.html
http://books.telegraph.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/showSubCategories.do?categoryCode=3064
These are some thoughts on what might be on my list… don’t take it as definitive, I’ve probably missed a few, and maybe will discard some on further reflection!
- The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
- Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- The Trial by Franz Kafka
- Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
- If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
- The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
- Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
- The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
- The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
- A Passage to India by EM Forster
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
- The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Northern Lights, Philip Pullman
- 2666, Roberto Bolaño
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
- Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
- Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
- The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
- Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
- The Magus, John Fowles
- Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
- The Godfather, Mario Puzo
- Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
- War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
- The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
- The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
- Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
- Round the bend, Nevil Shute
- Watership Down, Richard Adams
- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- Bleak House, Charles Dickens
- Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
- The Dhammapada
Lois Elsden 
What, no Jane Austen!
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Sorry… I should have included her I know, it’s just a prejudice of mine! I’ll amend the list when I remember all the other people I’ve forgotten!
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As for “Midnight’s Children” – unreadable like the rest of his stuff.
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I enjoyed it until about three quarters of the way through, then it was a real struggle!
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And furthermore, what about D H Lawrence, Kashuo Ishigura, Anthony Burgess, Cervantes,Marquez and modern ones such as Margaret Drabble, Margaret Forster et al
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Oh heck… I will have to really get to work on my amended list… although I did only include books I have actually read… is that a good enough excuse?
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Sorry about that, I misread it I thought the list was the Telegraph’s.
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Oh dear… I’m a bit muddly aren’t I?!
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Well I’m just as dizzy as I didn’t read it properly!
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