When BBC Culture asked book critics to name the top 100 British novels and then published the results earlier this month, I couldn’t resist going through the list to see how many I’d read. As it turns out, I’ve only read 15 of them:
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Laurence Sterne)
- Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
- Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift)
- The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
- Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)
- Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
- Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
- A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
- David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
- The Forsyte Saga (John Galsworthy)
- Animal Farm (George Orwell)
- A Room with a View (E.M. Forster)
- Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
- Sons and Lovers (D.H. Lawrence)
I do have Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) on my Kindle, so sometime next year I’ll make it 16. Until then, however, I’ve got some nonfiction to catch up on.
For more from the BBC, see “What makes a ‘Great British Novel’?”