I Read Therefore I Am discussion
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Hilary's Boxall List
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I'm totally agree about the mysterious absence of some of the classics (though I must admit to a prolonged and finally unsuccessful battle with The Divine Comedy) and the equally strange presence of things such as Captain Corelli (gave up on this one too but didn't put up too much of a fight).
I guess the people who compile these lists want to be a bit different.
OOooh just had a thought - do you think that the reason Dante and Homer aren't in is that they wrote in verse?
I guess the people who compile these lists want to be a bit different.
OOooh just had a thought - do you think that the reason Dante and Homer aren't in is that they wrote in verse?
That's a idea-I'd never thought about them being in verse. Bet you're right, it just doesn't make sense otherwise (not to me anyway)
By the way Lee, are there different versions of Boxall. I ask because I notice that another post has listed The Robber Bride by Atwood and its not in my Boxall which is presumably the latest edition.
1 Don Quixote - Cervantes2 Robinson Crusoe - Defoe
3 Gullivers Travels - Swift
4 Tom Jones - Fielding
5 An Interesting Narrative - Equiano
6 Sense and Sensibility - Austen
7 Pride and Prejudice - Austen
8 Mansfield Park - Austen
9 Frankenstein - Shelley
10 Ivanhoe - Scott
11 The Red and the Black - Stendahl
12 Hunchback of Notre Dame - Hugo
13 Oliver Twist - Dickens
14 The Pit and the Pendulum - Poe
15 Jane Eyre - C Bronte
16 Vanity Fair - Thackerey
17 Wuthering Heights - E Bronte
18 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - A Bronte
19 Moby Dick - Melville
20 Uncle Tom's Cabin - Stowe
21 Cranford - Gaskill
22 The Woman in White - Collins
23 The Mill on the Floss - Elliot
24 Great Expectations - Dickens
25 Silas Marner - Elliot
26 The Water Babies - Kingsley
27 Alice in Wonderland - Carroll
28 Journey to the Centre of the Earth - Verne
29 Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
30 The Moonstone - Collins
31 Little Woman - Alcott
32 War and Peace - Tolstoy
33 Alice Through the Looking Glass - Carroll
34 Middlemarch - Elliot
35 Far From the Madding Crowd - Hardy
36 Treasure Island - Stevenson
37 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain
38 King Soloman's Mines - Haggard
39 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Stevenson
40 A Picture of Dorian Gray - Wilde
41 The Time Machine - Wells
42 The Island of Dr Moreau - Wells
43 Dracula - Stoker
44 War of the Worlds - Wells
45 Hound of the Baskervilles - Doyle
46 Heart of Darkness - Conrad
47 The Call of the Wild - London
48 Nostromo - Conrad
49 The Forsythe Saga - Galsworthy
50 The Secret Agent - Conrad
51 Ethan Frome - Wharton
52 Sons and Lovers - Lawrence
53 The Age of Innocence - Wharton
54 The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
55 Mrs Dalloway - Woolf
56 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Christie
57 Lady Chatterley's Lover - Lawrence
58 Orlando - Woolf
59 Cold Comfort Farm - Gibbons
60 Brave New World - Huxley
61 Gone With the Wind - Mitchell
62 The Hobbit - Tolkien
63 Of Mice and Men - Steinbeck
64 Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
65 Rebecca - du Maurier
66 Goodbye to Berlin - Isherwood
67 The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
68 The Glass Bead Game - Hesse
69 Animal Farm - Orwell
70 Christ Stopped at Eboli - C Levi
71 Brideshead Revisited - Waugh
72 Titus Groan - Peake
73 If This is a Man - P Levi
74 Cry the Beloved Country - Paton
75 Nineteen Eighty Four - Orwell
76 I, Robot - Asimov
77 A Town Like Alice - Shute
78 Gormenghast - Peake
79 The End of the Affair - Greene
80 Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
81 Foundation - Asimov
82 The Day of the Triffids - Wyndham
83 Go Tell it on the Mountain - Baldwin
84 Casino Royale - Fleming
85 Lord of the Flies - Golding
86 Lolita - Nabokov
87 The Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
88 The Midwich Cuckoos - Wyndham
89 Portrait of a Lady - James
90 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - Sillitoe
91 Rabit Run - Updike
92 To Kill a Mockingbird - Lee
93 Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Spark
94 Stranger in a Strange Land - Heinlein
95 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Kesey
96 One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzenitsyn
97 The Bell Jar - Plath
98 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - le Carre
99 in Cold Blood - Capote
100 The Magus - Fowles
To be continued when my fingers have grown back
Hope your fingers are feeling better! Yes they keep "updating" the list - perhaps if this group is still going when we've read the current list we'll go back and read the rejects :o)
By the way I was impressed to see you've read Don Quixote - another battle I've lost.
By the way I was impressed to see you've read Don Quixote - another battle I've lost.
101. 100 Years of Solitude - Marquez102. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Dick
103. 2001: A Space. Odyssey - Clarke
104. Cancer Ward - Solzhenitsyn
105. The Godfather - Puzo
106 The French Lieutenants Woman - Fowles
107. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Angelou
108. Rabit Redux - Updike
109. Invisible Cities - Calvino
110. The Seige of Krishnapur - Farrell
111. Interview With the Vampire - Rice
112. The Shining - King
113. The Sea, The Sea - Murdoch
114. Smiley's People - le Carre
115. The Name of the Rose - Eco
116. Rabit is Rich - Updike
117. The House of the Spitits - Allende
118. Schindler's Ark - Keneally
119. The Colour Purple - Walker
120. The Wasp Factory - Banks
121. The Empire of the Sun - Ballard
122. The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood
123. Hawksmoor - Ackroyd
124. Perfume - Suskind
125. The Cider House Rules - Irving
126. Life in the Time of Cholera - Marquez
127. The Old Devils - Amis
128. Beloved - Morrison
129. Bonfire of the Vanities - Wolfe
130. Oscar and Lucinda - Carey
131. A Prayer for Owen Meany - Irving
132. Remains of the Day - Ishiguro
133. American Psycho - Ellis
134. Regeneration - Barker
135. Wild Swans - Chang
136. The Crow Road - Banks
137. The Secret History - Tartt
138. The Stone Diaries - Shields
139. A Suitable Boy - Seth
140. Birdsong - Faulks
141. The Shipping News - Proulx
142. Captain Corellis Mandolin - Bernierres
143. The Reader - Schlick
144. Alias Grace - Atwood
145. Silk - Baricco
146. The God of Small Things - Roy
147. Memoirs of a Geisha - Golden
148. Underworld - Delillo
149. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
150. The Hours - Cunningham
151. Disgrace - Coetzee
152. The Human Stain - Roth
153. White Teeth - Smith
154. The Life of Pi - Matel
155. Vernon God Little - Pierre
156. Cloud Atlas - Mitchell
157. The Sea - Banville
158. The brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Diaz
159. Home - Robinson
PHEW!!!
Wow 259 - you're in first place at the moment!
I wish !!!! I think you'll find its159. But to be honest, I'm really surprised as I've only ever read what I fancied and haven't looked at lists like Boxalls before. I've been reading a long time though so I was bound to pick up a few "decent reads" along the way.
Doh! and I work in an Accounts Department !!
Mod
A very impressive list Hilary. I thought that I was doing well with 121. I need to speed up
I've decided to update this with ones I've read since joining the site and so 160 Death in Venice - Mann
161. We - Zamyatin
162. The Unconsoled - Ishiguro
163. A Severed Head - Murdoch
164. The Sense of an Ending - Barnes
165. Effi Briest - Fontane
166. I'm Not Scared - Ammaniti
I have spent a very happy afternoon going through Boxalls and spotting what I have read in the past and it strikes me that:
I can't understand why Homer and Dante are missing while Captain Corellis Mandolin and American Psycho are included
How many of the ones I have read I would consider very ordinary, boring and generally poor (including some I haven't counted in which I shamefully abandoned as not worth reading!!)
How many I read while I was very young, certainly before I was 12.
And finally how very few books I've read by non-English authors
The list of about 150 will need to follow in stages as I have a dog that needs feeding!!