Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die discussion

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Under Fire by Henri Barbusse.

Silas Marner by George Eliot. Eliot never disappoints.

Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell.

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. A series of interlinked short stories that weren't really for me.

I finally got to The Turn of the Screw. Loved it! A short James is a good James. :-)

The Adventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis. Actually the list book is "The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll" which contains seven stories about the main characters while this collection has four of those stories- but I think I'm going to count it anyway. Well-written but I wouldn't say you need to read it before you die.

Jess wrote: ...I just read another Robert Louis Stevenson book that I don't think should be on the list, The Master of Ballantrae. His best book by far is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales of Terror"

I think his Treasure Island, which remains on the 2018 edition, is a very good story also.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.
Enjoyable but sad.

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky.

Just finished The Golden Ass by Apuleius, quite an enjoyable quick read.

Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham.
Whilst I can admire the author's writing skill the story overall failed to really grab me.

Tarr by Wyndham Lewis

The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig

The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary.

Fever and Spear by Javier Marías this being the first volume of the three book single novel Your Face Tomorrow. I'll be looking forward to shortly moving on the second volume

The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett

Two kind of obscure ones: The Adventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis (Colombia) a couple weeks ago and now Here's to You, Jesusa! by Elena Poniatowska (Mexico).

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace.

Pallieter by Felix Timmermans

Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

I finished Half of Man is Woman yesterday. Some lovely observations of nature. A different flavour to Russian gulag literature, worth reading. It's amazing what humans will do to one another. :(

Finished: Spring Flowers, Spring Frost by Ismail Kadare - 3* - My Review

Rebecca by Daphine Du Maurier. The plot twists were well used

Finished: Remembering Babylon by David Malouf - 4* - My Review

Middlemarch by George Eliot - 4*

Ivanhoe by Walter Scott.

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch.

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

I just finished Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette.

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.
Technically this is a reread for me as I read it as a teenager. Thankfully I thoroughly enjoyed it once again.

Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

This was a fantastic thriller with atmospheric and beautiful writing. I thought the main character (just realized she was unnamed the whole time!) was sympathetic as someone going through anxiety and unease.

And of course there are the book's unexpected twists that had me glued to its pages. I saw that some reviewers criticized the morality of the characters but I think its that ambiguity which made the book even more of a success.

All Souls by Javier Marías

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow. A 3.4 stars read for me, rounded down to 3.

Caught by Henry Green

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos