Me and my boyfriend are putting together a list at the moment of books that we're going to read over the next few years. We want basically, a history of literature. We've already read lots of them between us, but for some reason we decided to re-read important works in chronological order and identify patterns - the rise and death of the adventure novel, post-colonial theory etc.

Anyway, this list only includes (as far as we're aware) books written in English. I think foreign literature will be another project. As will poetry. We're still working on it, but here's our list so far - any glaring omissions?

We wanted important cultural works, prize-winners, those which exemplify the work of important authors and some which introduced iconic and enduring characters.

Anyway, here's the list - want to join in?

• Oronnoko, Aphra Behn (1688)
• Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe (1719)
• Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift (1735)
• Clarissa, Samuel Richardson (1748)
• Tom Jones, Henry Fielding (1749)
• Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne (1769)
• Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen (1803)
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813)
• Waverley, Sir Walter Scott (1814)
• The Antiquary, Sir Walter Scott (1816)
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow/Rip van Winkle, Washington Irving (1820)
• Private Memoirs and Confesssions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg (1824)
• Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper (1826)
• Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens (1839)
• Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe (1839)
• The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens (1841)
• The Pit and the Pendulum, Edgar Allan Poe (1842)
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (1847)
• Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte (1847)
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte (1848)
• Vanity Fair, William Thackeray (1848)
• Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
• David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (1850)
• Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1851)
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe(1852)
• Bleak House, Charles Dickens (1853)
• North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell (1854)
• Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope (1857)
• Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (1859)
• Woman in White, Wilkie Collins (1859)
• Mill on the Floss, George Eliot (1860)
• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (1861)
• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (1868)
• Middlemarch, George Eliot (1872)
• Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy (1874)
• The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope (1875)
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1885)
• King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard (1885)
• The Rise of Silas Lapham, William Dean Howells (1885)
• Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
• A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle (1887)
• Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome (1889)
• Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (1890)
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy (1891)
• Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane (1895)
• Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy (1895)
• Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)
• The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells (1898)
• The Turn of the Screw, Henry James (1898)
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899)

Twentieth Century

• Kim, Rudyard Kipling (1901)
• The Call of the Wild, Jack London (1903)
• Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers (1903)
• The Ambassadors, Henry James (1903)
• Anna of the Five Towns, Arnold Bennett (1905)
• The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton (1907)
• A Room With a View, E.M. Forster (1908)
• The Iron Heel, Jack London (1908)
• The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1912)
• Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)
• The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford (1915)
• Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham (1915)
• The 39 Steps, John Buchan (1915)
• The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West (1918)
• The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (1920)
• Ulysses, James Joyce (1922)
• A Passage to India, E. M. Forster (1924)
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
• Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (1925)
• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (1926)
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder (1927)
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence (1928, banned UK 1960)
• Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh (1928)
• Orlando, Virginia Woolf (1928)
• The Sound and The Fury, William Faulkner (1929)
• Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons (1932)
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932)
• Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (1938)
• Brighton Rock, Graham Greene (1938)
• Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1939)
• For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway (1940)
• The Silver Darlings, Neil M Gunn (1941)
• Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (1945)
• Tales of the South Pacific, James A. Michener (1946)
• Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov (1947)
• The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer (1948)
• Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton (1948)
• 1984, George Orwell (1949)
• The End of the Affair, Graham Greene (1951)
• Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (1951)
• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953)
• Casino Royale, Ian Fleming (1953)
• The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow (1953)
• Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis (1954)
• Lord of the Flies, William Golding (1954)
• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
• On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)
• On the Beach, Nevil Shute (1957)
• Breakfast at Tiffanys, Truman Capote (1958)
• The Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs (1959)
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960)
• Rabbit Run, John Updike (1960)
• A House for Mr Biswas, V.S. Naipaul (1961)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
• Cain’s Book, Alexander Trocchi (1961)
• Catch 22, Joseph Heller (1961)
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962)
• The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John Le Carre (1963)
• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (1963)
• Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey (1964)
• In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (1965)
• The Fixer, Bernard Malamud (1966)
• Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson (1966)
• The Magic Toyshop, Angela Carter (1967)
• Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan (1967)
• Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
• In a Free State, V.S. Naipaul (1971)
• Post Office, Charles Bukowski (1971)
• Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (1973)
• The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell (1973)
• Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975)
• Docherty, William McIlvanney (1975)
• The History Man, Malcolm Bradbury (1975)
• The World According to Garp, John Irving (1978)
• The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch (1978)
• How Far Can You Go?, David Lodge (1980)
• The Beggar Maid (Who Do You Think You Are?), Alice Munro (1980)
• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1980)
• Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess (1980)
• Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie (1981)
• Lanark, Alisdair Gray (1981)
• On The Black Hill, Bruce Chatwin (1982)
• An Ice Cream War, William Boyd (1982)
• The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1982)
• Life and Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee (1983)
• Waterland, Graham Swift (1983)
• Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeannette Winterson (1985)
• The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)
• The Old Devils, Kingsley Amis (1986)
• The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1987)
• Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey (1988)
• Beloved, Toni Morrison (1988)
• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
• Solomon Gursky Was Here, Mordechai Richler (1989)
• The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, Janice Galloway (1989)
• Possession, A.S. Byatt (1990)
• American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis (1991)
• All The Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy (1992)
• The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje (1992)
• Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh (1993)
• A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth (1993)
• Birdsong (1993)
• The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1993)
• Felicia’s Journey, William Trevor (1994)
• Beside the Ocean of Time, George Mackay Brown (1994)
• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx (1994)
• How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman (1994)
• A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry (1995)
• Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Vikram Chandra (1995)
• American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
• Enduring Love, Ian McEwan (1997)
• Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels (1997)
• Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997)
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy (1997)
• Like, Ali Smith (1997)
• Quarantine, Jim Crace (1997)
• The Last King of Scotland, Giles Foden (1998)
• Waiting, Ha Jin (1999)

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gone with the wind?

might add paul auster, new your trilogy and money, martin amis. only as maybes, it's pretty comprehensive, every time i think i've found a glaring omission it's there

We had Gone With the Wind at one point... I can't remember why we took it off, to be honest. I think my boyfriend just freaked out a bit about the length of the list and started looking for reasons to remove things. I think GWTW was deemed "not important enough" by him, which doesn't really stand up when you read some of his other choices. I might lobby for its re-introduction.

I can't believe we've missed Martin Amis... and I've always meant to read the New York Trilogy. Thank you, kesh - I knew you'd be able to come up with the good stuff...

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on gwtw, i've not read it and i'm not sure i'd like it, but pulitzer prize and scarlett o'hara satisfy two of your criteria

gore vidal?

post colonial you'd have to have some doris lessing. the golden notebook is my favourite, but not her most focused on colonial africa, that might be martha quest or the grass is singing

"If I did it" by OJ?

i've read about half of those

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you'll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy (1997)

i would deem that as foreign literature, maybe?

I've not read it either, I've deliberately avoided it for years. I only saw the movie because they made us watch it in junior high school.


I don't know if these are 'glaring omissions' but 2 books that immediately came into my head that I don't see on your list are 'the jungle' and 'walden'.

Depends... it doesn't really matter where the author's from: if it was written in English, we'll read it - we're just not reading translations at the moment... So I don't know. I guess Matthew's looked at this and included it...

Thanks, I'll have a look at those.

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well i wouldn't mind being forced to watch vivien leigh. think it's novels only, so no walden.

i can't say i've read many of these, but they came to mind as well known or respected and not on your list. i turned it into a game to think of as many as i could

anthony powell, j g ballard, p g wodehouse, john barthe, alan silitoe, isherwood, j b priestley, paul theroux, mervyn peake, john fowles, c p snow, philip k dick, j. p donleavy, william trevor,

I thought of the novel thing afterwards but decided to leave it anyways. There are a lot of books on the lists that I haven't read so I wasn't sure.

if you're saying you wouldn't mind watching vivien leigh because she's cute then I agree. but I found her character (at least as it's portrayed in the film) to be sufficiently annoying (even when I was 11-12 years old, mind you) that it negates any possible benefits of watching vivien leigh. you know clark gable isn't exactly an eyesore either but I'd rather rub salt and lemon juice in my eyes than watch that film again.

i love leslie howard. how could a fey english sissy get away with playing a klansman?

holy shit

i'm stealing that list

also if you want more post-colonial stuff you should add wide sargasso sea by jean rhys and shame by salman rushdie.

actually i was surprised to see that there aren't any rushdie books on your list, unless i missed them. which is very likely.

but i'm SO glad you've got brideshead revisited on there.

but also i noticed that you don't have the author of birdsong? it's by sebastian faulks.

raymond chandler should be on the list as he represents that depression era, pulp hard-boiled whatever genre. or i think now that he's been a big fucking deal for a while, he's just considered an american writer. and it seems no author can write about LA without earning a few cheap, book jacket comparisons to him.

or anywhere really. how many times to you see "______ does for _______ what chandler did for los angeles and faulkner did for the south."
it's on every second book to fail and collect dust in the discount bins.

i apologize if he is on there and i missed him.

i still have your copy of money kesh

Haha, you're such a star! Thanks, kesh. All our books are sitting in a Word document at the bottom and we have a lot of "possibles" - mainly just author names - at the bottom: ones we haven't chosen or discussed work by. I'll put those all on there...

You should! Join in, it'll be great!

I'll have a look at those - thanks. We have Rushdie at the bottom of out document because we can't decide on what to read by him. I find him quite a tedious writer and so only want to read one book by him. Matthew wants to read Midnight's Children, which admitedly would fit in better with our list probably than The Satanic Verses (which is a possibility not because of the quality of the book but because it's culturally important), but I've read MC and not TSV and really don't want to read it again. So Shame might be a good option...

Oh, and yeah, Matthew didn't put down all the authors and I went over them and added ones he'd missed - I must've missed that one. One of my earliest and clearest memories of my dad is seeing him read Birdsong for a long time. Sebastian Faulks is seared into my brain.

I don;t think he is, but you're right - he should be.

You guys are great.

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