The “Sunday Times 100 Books to Love” list

Another British list, compiled by the Sunday Times and faithfully recorded on Good Reads at the end of 2013. Curiosity killed the proverbial cat, though – by whom was it compiled?? – thoughts at end of the hundred-strong list.

      

1. “Lucky Jim” by Kingsley Amis
2. “The Code of the Woosters” by P.G. Wodehouse
3. “Black Mischief” by Evelyn Waugh
4. “Changing Places” by David Lodge
5. “Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth
6. “Molesworth” by many
7. “How to Be a Woman” by Caitlin Moran
8. “Hope: A Tragedy” by Shalom Auslander
9. “A Visit from the Good Squad” by Jennifer Egan – read, 10/10
10. “Heartburn” by Nora Ephron – read, 5/10
11. “Get Shorty” by Elmore Leonard
12. “The Ask” by Sam Lipsyte
13. “Dear Lupin” by Roger & Charlie Mortimer – read, 8/10
14. “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Cedaris – read, 8/10
15. “Absurdistan” by Gary Shteyngart
16. “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion – read, 6/10
17. “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” by Louis de Bernières – read, 10/10
18. “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe – read, 10/10
19. “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath – read, 8/10
20. “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer – read, 6/10
21. “Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami – read, 6/10
22. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Mark Haddon – read, 10/10
23. “A Thousand Acres” by Jane Smiley
24. “Sour Sweet” by Timothy Mo
25. “Good Behaviour” by Molly Keane
26. “Last Orders” by Graham Swift – read, 5/10
27. “Breathing Lessons” by Anne Tyler – read, 9/10
28. “Beloved” by Toni Morrison – read, 5/10
29. “What I loved” by Siri Hustvedt
30. “A Fine Balance” by Rohinton Mistry – read, 10/10
31. “If This is a Man” by Primo Levi
32. “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James – read, 7/10
33. “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote
34. “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt – read, 7/10
35. “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy – read, 10/10
36. “We Need to Talk about Kevin” by Lionel Shriver – read, 10/10
37. “Silence of the Lambs” by Thomas Harris – read, 10/10
38. “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell – read, 10/10
39. “The Woman in White” by Wilkie Collins
40. “Fatherland” by Robert Harris – read, 8/10
41. “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” by John Le Carré
42. “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler
43. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” by Simon Armitage
44. “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald – read, 10/10
45. “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson
46. “Slaughterhouse” by Kurt Vonnegut
47. “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy
48. “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad
49. “Close Range” by Annie Proulx
50. “Momento Mori” by Muriel Spark
51. “Good Morning Midnight” by Jean Rhys
52. “The Leopard” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
53. “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway – read, 8/10
54. “The Outsider” / “L’Étranger” by Albert Camus – read, 10/10
55. “Never Mind” by Edward St. Aubyn – read, 8/10
56. “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga – read, 6/10
57. “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf
58. “Just Kids” by Patti Smith
59. “Experience” by Martin Amis
60. “Goodbye to All That” by Robert Graves
61. “Nickel & Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich
62. “Instead of a Book” by Diana Athill
63. “Persepolis I & II” by Marjane Satrapi – read 10/10
64. “The Naked Civil Servant” by Quentin Crisp
65. “Stuart” by Alexander Masters
66. “Bad Blood” by Lorna Sage
67. “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers
68. “Oranges are Not the Only Fruit” by Jeanette Winterson – read, 7/10
69. “The Hare with Amber Eyes” by Edmund de Waal – read, 9/10
70. “The Silent Woman” by Edward Marston
71. “Kim” by Rudyard Kipling
72. “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” by Alexandra Fuller
73. “The Flaneur” / “Le Flâneur” by Edmund White – read, 6/10
74. “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel – read, 10/10
75. “A Bend in the River” by V.S. Naipaul
76. “Naples ‘44” by Norman Lewis
77. “Midnight in Sicily” by Peter Robb
78. “Mountains of the Mind” by Robert Macfarlane
79. “The Portrait of a Lady” by Henry James – read, 10/10
80. “Vanity Fair” by William Makepeace Thackeray
81. “The Old Wives’ Tale” by Arnold Bennett
82. “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton – read, 10/10
83. “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy – read, 10/10
84. “The Eagle of the Ninth” by Rosemary Sutcliff
85. “The Annotated Alice” by Lewis Carroll
86. “Persuasion” by Jane Austen – read, 8/10
87. “The Little Prince” / “Le Petit Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – read, 10/10
88. “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee – read, 10/10
89. “I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith – read, 8/10
90. “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel – read, 7/10
91. “Middlemarch” by George Eliot – now read, 10/10, VERY FAVOURITE READ
92. “Freedom” by Jonathon Franzen – read, 9/10
93. “Life” / “La Vie Mode d’Emploi” by Georges Perec
94. “A Sentimental Education” / “Une Éducation Sentimentale” by Gustave Flaubert – read, 7/10
95. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – read, 3/10
96. “The Magus” by John Fowles – read, 10/10
97. “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie
98. “A Heart So White” by Javier Marias
99. “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann – read, 10/10
100. “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens – read, 10/10

Ooer, have read (and not always loved or adored) but 40-odd of these Sunday Times winners, and there seems to be quite a wide gulf between the things that make me tick and the books that are held up as exemplary by the echelons of good taste. A mere 30% of these works were penned by a female, I casually notice, SOOO, would it be heinously outrageous to wonder if the persons compiling this Love In list were of a more masculine disposition? Would be intrigued to know, purely for statistical reasons…

Images taken from here and here and here.