if there was a better way to go it would find me

[usuallyhats]

The BBC have released a list of books called "Novels that shaped our world" and since there is little I love more than going through lists like this and crossing off the things I've read, here we go.

(strikethrough=read, italics=part read)

Identity

• Beloved – Toni Morrison
  
• Days Without End – Sebastian Barry
  
• Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
  
• Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  
• Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
  
• Small Island – Andrea Levy
  
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
  
• The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
  
• Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
  
• White Teeth – Zadie Smith

Love, Sex & Romance

• Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
  
• Forever – Judy Blume
  
• Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
  
• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
  
• Riders – Jilly Cooper
  
• Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
  
• The Far Pavilions – M. M. Kaye
  
• The Forty Rules of Love – Elif Shafak
  
• The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
  
• The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton

Adventure

• City of Bohane – Kevin Barry
  
• Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett
  
• For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
  
• His Dark Materials Trilogy – Phillip Pullman
  
• Ivanhoe – Walter Scott
  
• Mr Standfast – John Buchan
  
• The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
  
• The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
  
• The Jack Aubrey Novels – Patrick O’Brian*
  
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – J.R.R. Tolkein

Life, Death & Other Worlds

• A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin
  
• Astonishing the Gods – Ben Okri**
  
• Dune – Frank Herbert
  
• Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
  
• Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
  
• The Chronicles of Narnia – C. S. Lewis
  
• The Discworld Series – Terry Pratchett
  
• The Earthsea Trilogy – Ursula K. Le Guin
  
• The Sandman Series – Neil Gaiman***
  
• The Road – Cormac McCarthy

Politics, Power & Protest

• A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
  
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
  
• Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie
  
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
  
• Noughts & Crosses – Malorie Blackman
  
• Strumpet City – James Plunkett
  
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker
  
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
  
• V for Vendetta – Alan Moore****
  
• Unless – Carol Shields

Class & Society

• A House for Mr Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
  
• Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
  
• Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
  
• Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
  
• Poor Cow – Nell Dunn
  
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe*****
  
• The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne – Brian Moore
  
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
  
• The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
  
• Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

Coming of Age

• Emily of New Moon – L. M. Montgomery
  
• Golden Child – Claire Adam
  
• Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
  
• So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell
  
• Swami and Friends – R. K. Narayan
  
• The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
  
• The Harry Potter series – J. K. Rowling
  
• The Outsiders – S. E. Hinton
  
• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ – Sue Townsend
  
• The Twilight Saga – Stephanie Meyer

Family & Friendship

• A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
  
• Ballet Shoes – Noel Streatfeild
  
• Cloudstreet – Tim Winton
  
• Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
  
• I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
  
• Middlemarch – George Eliot
  
• Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin
  
• The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
  
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte
  
• The Witches – Roald Dahl

Conflict & Crime

• American Tabloid – James Ellroy
  
• American War – Omar El Akkad
  
• Ice Candy Man – Bapsi Sidhwa
  
• Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
  
• Regeneration – Pat Barker
  
• The Children of Men – P.D. James
  
• The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
  
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
  
• The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
  
• The Quiet American – Graham Greene

Rule Breakers

• A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
  
• Bartleby, the Scrivener – Herman Melville
  
• Habibi – Craig Thompson
  
• How to be Both – Ali Smith
  
• Orlando – Virginia Woolf
  
• Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
  
• Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
  
• Psmith, Journalist – P. G. Wodehouse
  
• The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
  
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – Audre Lorde

*I really enjoyed this series up to the point where I noped out last year; I still recommend it very much up to that point and would not rule out a reread

**I remember going through a Ben Okri phase as a teenager, but either I never got to this one or it was before I started keeping records; Goodreads tells me I read Songs of Enchantment in 1999, but doesn't have The Famished Road, which I have definitely read.

***I have definitely read some if not all of this: basically I read whatever was in the library in whatever order I found them in, but it was before the time where I kept records of what comics I was reading so idk what I have actually read. I have records of all the books I've read since 1999, but comics only from the last decade or so.

****I may also have read this, but see above re improper record keeping.

*****I feel like I've read this, but Goodreads says no.

This actually feels like a pretty interesting list (probably due to the very solid panel who picked it) and I might well go back and read some of the things I haven't yet. Probably not everything, though: I'm too burned by Waverley and Moby Dick to try Ivanhoe or Bartleby, the Scrivener, I'm not sure I can be bothered with Riders or Twilight, and I feel like if I read A Game of Thrones, either I wouldn't like it or I would like it so much I'd end up reading all the rest, and I'm not sure I'm pro either of these outcomes. I also have a vague prejudice against A Conspiracy of Dunces but this may just be because someone recommended it in a vaguely obnoxious way in a book group I was in about thirteen years ago.