50 Greatest books of all time.

Midnights Children, The Satanic Verses. Both by Rushdie, Alice in Wonderland. The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Life of Pi, Gravity’s Rainbow, Jane Eyre, Consider Phlebas.

nanna8

Oh my- Ulysses. I had to read it as part of my degree and it was tedious and I wouldn’t put it up there with the greats. More that it was different with the stream of consciousness techniques.

I made the mistake of going to see the film with a friend. 😴 We went to the pub afterwards, much better.

"I read some Chaucer and Milton when i was doing A level English."

I had to read some Chaucer and lso other books which I might never have looked at if left to choose. Chaucer was in fact interesting but I'd never have chosen any for enjoyment.

One English lecturer used to throw out a line from a book which he thought we probably had not read and expand on the story. Some of the results could be quite amusing.

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There are four books in the series, Maybee, made into four TV series, all exceptionally good imo.

Available on several streaming services. The least expensive is NOW for £4.99 a month.

Thanks. I didn’t know about it. It’s on dvd too so I’ll get the first series to start off with. I’m afraid tv series have made me far too lazy to read books these days, even though I still buy them!

Agree with others such lists are a bit subjective, I tend to check lists on waterstones etc to make my tbr even bigger. On my list of great books would be A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry its not a new book over 30 years old but has a an Indian Dickensian type atmosphere.

I appreciate the list is subjective, the list was the inspiration for the thread, the questions are would you consider yourself well read and what book would you want to be added to the list.

Oh my- Ulysses. I had to read it as part of my degree and it was tedious and I wouldn’t put it up there with the greats. More that it was different with the stream of consciousness techniques.

There are four books in the series, Maybee, made into four TV series, all exceptionally good imo.

Available on several streaming services. The least expensive is NOW for £4.99 a month.

Just been listening to the Book Club podcast which features My Brilliant Friend. Decided to not listen to all of it because of spoilers; must admit that I’d never heard of it. They said that the author has chosen to remain anonymous and there is a lot of speculation about their identity. Book Club is one of my current favourite podcasts having somewhat taken over from Backlisted which is no longer producing new podcasts.

I saw a Q&A with Maya Angelou once in which a young girl called her Maya and she was horrible to her because of it .

Casdon

It’s very subjective I think- I don’t think that ten of the top fifty books of all time can have been written since 2000, that doesn’t make sense.

It was the point I was trying to make about the misleading title as if it’s a definitive list of must reads but it’s simply Kerridge’s choice of ten works from each of five time periods (and which combines 17C & 18C).

I think it’s a conversation piece more than anything else. Kerridge says ...

With the 21st century, the challenge was to identify the classics of the future … and

The fundamental criterion [for all the selected works] was that they’ve all made me think something, or feel something, or laugh at something, in a way that no other books have.

... so it’s very personal

There are some rather good books in his ten from the 21C.

I haven’t read the graphic novel Persopolis but the animated film version is very good.

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of her husband was very moving. It was published not so very long before my own husband died. It helped to know I wasn’t the only one worried by the sometimes illogical way I was thinking and feeling. A year later I went to the see Vanessa Redgrave star in David Hare’s theatre adaptation.

It’s quite an international list. I enjoyed the titles by Olga Tokarczuk, Hisham Matar and Sarah Bernstein as well as the better known McCarthy, Everett and Mantel’s marvellous Wolf Hall.

Anyone looking for a very quirky read, one of Kerridge’s choices from the 20C The Hearing Trumpet by artist Leonora Carrington is … unusual. There’s an audio version read by the actor Sian Phillips.

On the Telegraph list. 20 books and a half for Ulysses….I gave up on that.
My all time favourite is Jane Eyre.

I'll carry on reading what I enjoy, life's too short to wade through books because they are worthy.

My choice is The Water Babies, by Charles Kingsley, GrandmaT2010, which is allegorical and enjoyable too.

This list is a load of tosh. It is a reading list for the summer for someone about to go to university to read English, not the books that you pick up and become engrossed in.

I read some Chaucer and Milton when i was doing A level English. I would not otherwise have read then, nor any of the others on the Pre 17th century list. It is not clear whether these are meant be 50 greatest books in the world or in English - in which case why is the Iliad and several other books written in a foreign language included, and if it is world books, where are the great books of France, Germany or Russia on the list.

These books are also a matter of opinion. I am among quite a large group of people who think Wuthering Heights is far from being great literature, is only ever listed because a Bronte wrote it, and it is otherwise a very silly book.

These books are also just a cruise through books by well known writers, chosen by well known readers who want to show off by displaying their erudition.

My choice would be Peter Pan. Fantastic!

I have read 7 and have got Maya Angelou’s book in a pile ready to read. I haven’t read the Dickens, Hardy, Austen, or Ferrante on the list but have read others by the same author, some of which I personally judge superior , especially Ferrante.

Books are so subjective aren’t they, it’s very smug I feel to insist some are much better than others, especially when comparing the same author . Just read what you enjoy. I also read just as many factual books as novels .

I've had a very pleasant afternoon sitting in a cool place thumbing through the list of 1001 books I need to read before I die (only the post 1900's though) and realise I need to live for at least another 25 years to even begin to make a dent in them. I think I'm reasonably well read but I do tend to read later novels, just finished "Flesh" by David Szalay and started "Kin" by Tayari Jones, both relatively recent publications. "Flesh" is written in an interesting style, very short sentences, minimal description with a story that could have been made into a book at least twice the length, but wasn't. I couldn't help but wonder if it was written to reflect modern society and in particular people's unwillingness to invest time in reading more complex sentences.

These lists are always subjective and often the opinions of experts who declare what we ought to be reading.

I've read a few but could add some of my own choice to the list and disregard many others.

Having now been able to access the Telegraph's list, thanks to Skye's link up thread, there a lot of what I imagine to be very dry ancient writings on it, which are probably only going to be read by literature academics. Apart from the usual couple of books from the 19th and 20th century that are pretty much on most of these recommended compilations which I've read, the closest I got to further back in time, was a mention of Claire Tomalin as a biographer of Samuel Pepys I really enjoyed her book on him "The Unequalled Self" and sometimes biographies do the hard work without wading through works written by the actual person hundreds of years ago where the language is quite inaccessible. Ultimately, reading has to be about enjoyment if the book informs as well, usually they do about something or other even trivia is worth knowing, then that's an added bonus. Personally I don't want to wade through something just because it's on one of these prescriptive lists.

Is Anna Karenina Tolstoy on the list? My favourite book of all time. My son read it too and said it was like a modern day soap opera!

These lists are always so subjective.
I have read 7, inc. The Iliad, but that’s only because I once did an OU course on Homer, which I did in fact very much enjoy.

Favourites from the list are Persuasion and Middlemarch, both of which I’ve re-read more than once.

If Salman Rushdie really found MM lacking in humour - admittedly it’s not exactly bursting with it, but it’s there - I’d lump him in with Henry James*, who was quite rude about MM at the time.
*(That’s the Henry James whose sentences so often meander along for half a page.)
I was pleased to see that he didn’t feature in the list!

I’ve tried to get into Wuthering Heights more than once, but never got more than about halfway.
Jane Eyre, OTOH, is another I’ve re read more than once.

One of my daughters bought me "The 1001 Books you must read before you die" by Peter Boxall. My edition is 2011. It's divided into four sections: Pre 1800, 1800s, 1900s and 2000s. I haven't looked at it for years but have got it out to compare with the Telegraph and Guardian list. What I like about it is that it gives a brief synopsis of each book with a bit of a literary criticism and historical background that would be enough for anyone to bluff that they had read it, should they be of that mindset! I will add, that I am most definitely not.

It’s very subjective I think- I don’t think that ten of the top fifty books of all time can have been written since 2000, that doesn’t make sense.

I think these lists are a bit like watching University Challenge and makes someone a bit chuffed to find that they’ve managed to answer a couple of questions or read a few of them…

… our critic picks the half-century of highlights that any serious reader should have on their shelf.

Kerridge has organised his list in to pre-17C,17C & 18C, 19C, 20C and 21C.

Only a serious scholar of literature is going to have read most of those. Several of them are long verse novels and hard going.

I have read many of them as I have degree in English and they were course material but I wouldn’t have picked most of them as reading for pleasure.

I am afraid than like much in the Telegraph nowadays, the headline is misleading. It’s just one man’s choice and he’s trying to impress.

As lists go, I much preferred The Guardian’s recent list of 100 novels which was a collaborative affair, Still serious works but more accessible, in my opinion. I have read all of them.

www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/may/12/the-100-best-novels-of-all-time

I do consider myself well read. My favourite novel is Middlemarch, which I can read again and again, but some evenings I just want to sit with a cosy crime or something equally light that romps along, something by Graham Norton or similar.