What better way to try and get back into the swing of posting more frequently than with a list? We all like lists, right?
Some time ago – December 2018 in fact – I put together a list of 50 of my then favourite works of fiction. Time has passed, more has been read – given I’ve averaged a good 30 books a year in the intervening rotations around the sun I’ll let you do the maths – and I’ve put together a second part to that list to bring it up to an even 100, just in time to share publication with The Guardian’s own list of ‘100 best novels of all time‘
So, once again, in no particular order other than alphabetical:
From the City to the Plough – Alexander Baron
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman – Louis de Bernières
The 7th Function of Language – Laurence Binet
2666 – Roberto Bolaño
The Passenger – Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
The Plague – Albert Camus
The Outsider – Albert Camus
The Amazing Adventues of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon
The Story of a Nobody – Anton Chekhov
The Killing Floor – Lee Child
The Courier – Kjell Ola Dahl
The Sisters Brothers – Patrick deWitt
All The Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Little Man, What Now? – Hans Fallada
Madame Bovery – Gustave Flaubert
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
The Dream Life of Sukhanov – Olga Grushin
Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemmingway
Saturnin – Zdeněk Jirotka
Out – Natsuo Kirino
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
IQ84 – Haruki Murakami
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
The Snowman – Jo Nesbø
The Sympathizer – Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Housekeeper and the Professor – Yōko Ogawa
Small Gods – Terry Pratchett
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Cather in the Rye – J.D Sallinger
Nausea – Jean-Paul Satre
Women – Mihail Sebastian
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
The Moon is Down – John Steinbeck
Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Lady Joker – Kaoru Takamura
The Makioka Sisters – Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
Rules of Civility – Amor Towles
Around The World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
Laurus – Eugene Vodolazkin
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut
Stoner – John Williams
How Do You Live? – Genzaburo Yoshino
All The Light We Cannot See is a wonderful book.