1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Such is the title of a five inch thick book I treated myself to during the week. In almost a thousand, lavishly illustrated pages it sums up in 300-word entries a selection of Western literature that has been picked by a 100-strong committee of journalists, academics and novelists. ‘What each entry does,’ explains editor Peter Boxall, ‘is to respond, with the cramped urgency of the deathbed confession, to what it is about each novel that makes one absolutely need to read it.’ Actually it’s pretty fab – one of those books that you can’t help dipping into to every time you pass it and coming across another little plum of a novel that you’ve been considering reading but didn’t know much about. I thought my husband took the arrival of the book in our household quite calmly. ‘If I thought that that alone was going to be responsible for you buying books,’ he told me, ‘I’d worry. But you’re quite capable of buying them all on your own.’ One part of the introduction I’d particularly like to share with you is the editor’s justification for including all kinds of different literary genres under the overall heading of ‘the novel’.

‘There is no consensus concerning among readers and critics about when the novel as a form came into being; there is no definite boundary that separates a novel from a short story, from a novella, from a prose poem, from autobiography, witness testimony, or journalism, from a fable, or a myth or a legend. And there is certainly no consensus concerning how one distinguishes between the trashy novel and the literary masterpiece. Rather the novel as a form, and as a body of work, is an inspired idea that we can only grasp fleetingly, fragmentarily; an idea that makes prose fiction possible, but that is also itself something of a fiction.’

Absolute nonsense, is all I can say to that, in the light of the careful, thoughtful and intriguing discussions about genre boundaries that have been taking place recently in the litblogosphere. Sounds to me like he had too many contributors twisting his arm and saying, oh but you can’t possibly NOT have X represented…. blah blah. And what of the ‘novels’ that have been chosen? Well, it’s a fun parlour game to see who’s in and who’s out. The vast majority are twentieth century and some authors, like Coetzee, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster are very heavily represented, whereas others like Roddy Doyle, Garrison Keillor, Anita Brookner, Ben Okri and Raymond Carver don’t get a look in. For your entertainment, I list below some of the titles offered for the section of 21^st Century literature. See if you agree whether these are the ‘must read’ books since the year 2003:

Elizabeth Costello, J. M. Coetzee

Islands, Dan Sleigh

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon

What I Loved, Siri Hustvedt

The Light of Day, Graham Swift

Thursbitch, Alan Garner

The Colour, Rose Tremain

Drop City, T. Coraghessan Boyle

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Dining on Stones, Iain Sinclair

The Lambs of London, Peter Ackroyd

Vanishing Point, David Markson

The Master, Colm Tóibín

The Plot Against America, Philip Roth

The Red Queen, Margaret Drabble

The Sea, John Banville

Adjunct: An Undigest, Peter Manson

Slow Man, J. M. Coetzee

On Beauty, Zadie Smith

Saturday, Ian McEwan

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Now my litblogging friends, we can do better than this, can’t we? My must read novels since 2003 include: Ali Smith, The Accidental, Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad, Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal and Jonathan Coe, The Closed Circle. Any other suggestions?