Your top 10 novels

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Flow My Tears The Policeman Said - Philip K Dick
Howl’s Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
Mort - Terry Pratchett
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
On A Sunbeam - Tillie Walden
Nimona - N D Stevenson
From Hell - Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell

Don’t really read much prose fiction so I got cheeky and stuck 3 graphic novels on the end. Kept it to one per author.

This has made me realise that every author I’ve read fiction by in my adult life is white except for N K Jemisen, which is pretty disgraceful.

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Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
The End Of The Affair - Graham Greene
The Red Riding Quartet - David Peace (Counting this as one pick fuck off)
The Damned United - David Peace
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Death And The Penguin - Andrey Kurkov
Rabbit Run - John Updike
Three Men In A Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
The Old Man And The Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Twits - Roald Dahl

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I have a copy of what’s apparently the best translation

how easy a read is it? bit wary of Russian classics because I worry there will be all sorts of historic cultural stuff that goes over my head

Some young adult fiction in here too, still sticks with me:

Zorba the Greek
American Psycho
The Song of Pentecost - WJ Corbett
Baptism of Fire (Witcher series # 3) - Sapkowski
Dune - Herbert
One Night Out Stealing - Alan Duff
Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe (cheating and choosing 2 in one here)
Catcher in the Rye
Wizard of Earthsea
Wasp Factory

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Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
John Fowles - The Magus
Kobo Abe - Secret Rendezvous
Haruki Murakami - The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
Alain Robbe-Grillet - Jealousy
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Unconsoled
Franz Kafka - The Castle
Margaret Atwood - Surfacing

Probably forgetting loads but these were some of the most formative. Feels a bit wrong not having Camus, Sartre, Tolkien, Ryu Murakami, Stephen King, Iris Murdoch… and others but had to be brutal.

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Note that I’m nowhere near my bookshelves so loads of things not coming to mind

Joris-Karl Huysmans: À rebours

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

Doris Lessing: Shikasta

Virginia Woolf: Orlando

Philip Pullman: Northern Lights

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart

John Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar

Stanisław Lem: Solaris

Kōbō Abe: The Woman in the Dunes

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from the Underground

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Really hard, so I concentrated on those rare novels that I’ve read more than once.

F.Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A Hundred Years of Solitude
W.G. Sebald - Austerlitz
Jane Austen - Emma
Haruki Murakami - The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
Kurt Vonnegut- Slaughterhouse Five
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
Jeffrey Eugenides- The Virgin Suicides
Alasdair Grey - Lanark
Patricia Highsmith - The Talented Mr Ripley

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This is the book I’ve read most recently that I feel might make my top ten one day. I really feel I need to give it a bit more time and then read it again to sort out what I feel about it though. It’s so completely unique that it’s difficult to process.

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Absolutely. I threw it across the room and gave up on it several times. Was so glad when I was done with it. Then weeks later started to be like… hang on a minute… :thinking: …was that actually amazing? :face_with_monocle:

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I went through (in roughly this order): this is a bit odd; hang on a minute, what the hell’s going on?; this is amazing; this is the best thing I’ve ever read; wait a minute is this actually a bit annoying?; no I think it is actually amazing.

I feel I could land on any of those when I read it again.

Murakami is probably the other author I’ve read that comes closest to The Unconsoled and I’ve had mixed results re-reading his novels. I still love them but I have to be in the right frame of mind.

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I love these two! Tillies art is so beautiful and Nimona is such a fun, warm hearted read.
Have FL to thank for introducing me to TW :heart:

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Kobo Abe is a definite precursor to Murakami but errs much more towards Kafka. Robbe-Grillet is also great at those kind of detective story unravelling type things, would recommend the Voyeur or the Erasers. I’ve absolute rinsed all of both of their stuff and I loved a lot of it.

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Norwegian Wood
The Bell Jar
Rebecca
Kill Your Friends
The Very Hungry Caterpillar :sparkling_heart:
Wuthering Heights
High Fidelity
Starter For 10
The End of the Affair
The Mennyms

That was tough, I don’t really love many novels. They rarely leave a print even if they’re quite good. Non fiction is more impactful

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I’ve meant to get round to reading The Woman in the Dunes for a while - from what I know of the plot it reminds me a bit of a Ballard’s Concrete Island, which very nearly made my top ten.

Have you read any of Daphne De Mauriers short story collections?

So fucking good.

Woman in the Dunes is amazing, I would recommend it to everyone in the world

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My go-to Greene.

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I have not!

The End of the Affair is the only Greene book I listened to rather than read (narrated by Colin Firth). Still excellent of course, but think I really need to read it again myself to fully appreciate it.