Tag Archives: ulysses

My list of 100 best novels: A lifetime’s treasure trove

In one of the classrooms in the Inst W block, soon to be demolished, there was a small fiction library.  One day in the late 1960s, as I was examining the books on loan, I discovered a flyer announcing a competition to decide on the best novels published by Penguin. A list of 50 titles was proposed. I didn’t enter the competition but kept the flyer and decided to make it my aim to read each of those 50 books.

My Irish bookcase

Recently the Guardian came up with another list, this time of the 100 best novels of all time, chosen by a panel of contemporary authors. I had read half of them, many also included in the 1960s Penguin list. However times and tastes have changed and some titles from the 1960s were missing. T. E Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a book I never got round to reading, was not included. Surprisingly neither was Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Perhaps the Guardian no longer considers some authors to be politically correct.  Woman authors take up a large part of today’s Guardian list, whereas they accounted for only a quarter of titles in the 1960s. I find that I am reading more woman authors these days, but I don’t think that four novels by Virginia Woolf should be included in the top 100.  

So I’ve been working on my own list of 100 best novels. It’s drawn from the Penguin list of the 1960s, the Guardian list of 2026, with additions of my own. Unlike the Guardian I decided to choose only one title per author. This gave scope to include many more novelists. The titles have not been put in order of merit, although books that are widely recognized as among the best ever written tend to be near the beginning. The novels are named in the language in which I read them. Over the last sixty years I have read every page of all these books, with the exception of Proust, where I have only read the first two volumes. Does he merit the time and effort to read all 4,000 pages?

Of course all lists like this are subjective: there is no such thing as the perfect list of best novels. Each year new novels are written and old ones are forgotten.  I’m not the same reader I was when I was a schoolboy. Books that moved me then, may today leave me cold. My list is unbalanced, prejudiced even, including a disproportionate number of Irish writers. Many amendments have been made to the list since I started it, and no doubt it will change again until I press the publish button on this post. Whatever the final choice, I find something intriguing, magical even, in a list of best novels. It’s like a lifetime’s treasure trove.

Please send me your comments and suggestions. Do you think that I have neglected any first-class authors? If so, who and why?  Have I chosen the best book by each author?  Is there an author or book here that you find poor, pretentious, boring or unreadable?  What’s your favourite?  What about a top ten?

Here goes:

  My best hundred novels

  1. George Eliot: Middle-march
  2. James Joyce: Ulysses
  3. Jane Austen: Persuasion 
  4. Marcel Proust:  A la recherche du temps perdu 
  5. Joseph Conrad: Nostromo
  6. Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
  7. Italian Calvino: If On A Winter’s Night 
  8. Miguel Cervantes: Don Quixote
  9. Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
  10. Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities
  11. Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter
  12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
  13. Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman
  14. Edna O’Brien: The Country Girls
  15. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
  16. Ernest Hemingway: For Whom The Bell Tolls
  17. Eugene Mc Cabe: Death and Nightingales 
  18. Kipling: Kim
  19. Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
  20. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
  21. Emile Zola: Germinal
  22. Stendhal: Le Rouge et le Noir
  23. Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
  24. Nabokov: Lolita
  25. Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5
  26. Heller: Catch 22
  27. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
  28. Henry James: Portrait of a Lady
  29. Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles
  30. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
  31. Ian McEwan: Atonement 
  32. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day 
  33. Murakami: The Wind-up Bird
  34. Brian Moore: Lies of Silence
  35. George Orwell: 1984
  36. Herman Melville: Moby Dick 
  37. Laurence Sterne: The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy 
  38. Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things  
  39. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale  
  40. William Thackeray: Vanity Fair
  41. Rohinton Mistry: A Fine Balance
  42. Amitav Ghosh: The Hungry Tide
  43. J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace
  44. E.M. Forster: Howard’s End
  45. Albert Camus: La Peste
  46. Chimananda Ngozi Adichie: Half of a Yellow Sun 
  47. Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca 
  48. Iris Murdoch: The Sea, the Sea
  49. John Banville: The Sea
  50. Irving Welsh: Trainspotting 
  51. Elisabeth Bowen: The Last September 
  52. Molly Keane: Good Behaviour
  53. Anna Burns: Milkman
  54. Isabelle Allende: The House of the Spirits
  55. Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island
  56. Walter Scott: Old Mortality
  57. Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
  58. Herman Hesse: The Glass Bead Game 
  59. D.H Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
  60. J.G Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur 
  61. Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
  62. Igor Turgenev: Fathers and Sons
  63. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso sea 
  64. Doris Lessing: The Grass is Singing
  65. Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
  66. Jack Kerouac: On the Road 
  67. V.S. Naipaul: A House for Mr Biswas 
  68. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels 
  69. Alain Fournier: Le Grand Meaulnes
  70. Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  71. Leila Slimani: Chanson Douce
  72. Anthony Trollope: Phineas Finn
  73. Honoré de Balzac : Père Goriot
  74. Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
  75. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
  76. Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
  77. Robertson Davies: What’s Bred in the Bone
  78. John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath 
  79. Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders 
  80. Evelyn Waugh: Scoop 
  81. Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn
  82. Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy 
  83. Alexandre Dumas: Vingt an après
  84. Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl 
  85. Alan Paton: Cry the Beloved Country
  86. Jose Saramago: Blindness
  87. Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose 
  88. Italo Svevo: Zeno’s Conscience 
  89. Homer: The Odyssey
  90. Pat Barker: Regeneration Trilogy 
  91. Nadine Gordimer: The Handgun
  92. Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient
  93. Jan Carson: The Raptures
  94. Carlo Levi: Christ stopped at Eboli
  95. William Boyd: The Ice-Cream War
  96. Claire Keegan: Foster
  97. Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland
  98. Saul Bellow: Herzog 
  99. Bernard McLaverty: Grace Notes 
  100. Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano

Since first publication I’ve amended this list to take account of a number of suggestions. Several readers quickly pointed out spelling mistakes and doubles. This proves that my list was not a copy/paste effort or one generated by AI. AI has become so all pervasive these days that I think that writers prone to human errors and misspelling (sp ?) will soon make a comeback. Mark Twain and W.B.Yeats spring to mind. The most controversial choice was Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, considered by two readers as one of his weakest books. But I loved it when I first read it, aged 15, and there is no other book whose first and last lines I can remember.

. 

Reading about pirates

Ancient and Modern in Greece 

 As I close one decade and enter a new one, I ask myself whether it is better to revisit familiar places or to explore new horizons. Is it more rewarding to travel back, and learn what has changed and what remains, or to set out on a fresh adventure and be surprised by the new? One way to enjoy both old and new worlds is to visit places you know about but have never properly visited. So I have come to Greece for my 70th birthday celebrations.

I find Greece a wonderfully hospitable country. Each of our friendly guides asks us the same three questions: What’s your name? Where do you come from? Have you been here before? Well, I have been here, but my previous visits have been two and far between: a stifling night in a hotel in Piraeus in 1978, returning from my wedding in Tanzania, and a week on the island of Corfu in the 1990s, when we exited the Club Med once for a half day tour. 

If academic studies were an accurate guide to destiny, I would have spent more time in Greece. Ancient Greek is my third foreign language, after French and Latin. My investment in the first two languages has already paid off well. I spent much of my working life in francophone countries, and now, in retirement, I’ve enjoyed almost six months in Italy, where they speak a modern version of Latin. So why haven’t I spent more time in Greece? 

Greece in early spring is as beautiful as it is supposed to be. The birds are singing, and wildflowers explode under the olive trees. The poppies are a deeper more blood-red colour than those showing their first growth in my Edinburgh garden. A few days ago, in the blue and white seaside village of Galaxidi, I listened to the water lapping on the shore and watched as “rosy-fingered dawn” appear over Mt. Parnassus. My thoughts turned to the Odyssey, taught to us by the late Michael Longley, to Odysseus and Telemachus, and then to my son David running at the same moment across England from West to East. We too also crossed mountains, the snow-covered Pindus range, not on foot but in a jeep. For a few hours, in that remote part of Greece, close to Albania, we were well away from the madding crowd of other tourists.

Before this visit I already knew much about this country’s history, culture, and religion. For two years in the mid-1960s I was one of a small band of pupils who chose to study Ancient Greek, and obtained two O-levels—one in the language and one in the Greek New Testament. The Good Book was first written in Greek, as I was reminded when we visited Corinth, and saw where St. Paul faced his accusers. When I was fifteen I was able to translate the entire Gospel according to St. Mark into English. It helped that I was well-versed in the English text.

When we visited the Acropolis on my birthday, and posted a picture to prove it, one of my Facebook friends remarked that this was a ‘confluence of ancient ruins’. Ha ha, Dave. I had a similar thought, but kept it to myself. Good word ‘confluence’, but of Latin origin. I would prefer ‘synchronization’ from the Greek, meaning ‘in time with’.  

The Temple at Delphi

From that vantage point, high above the city of Athens, we looked down at the theatre where Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone was first performed. I thought of our teachers, Old Rothers and Charlie Fay. It is the only play I have ever performed in —in both Greek and English—hiding my nerves behind a giant mask of the Chorus.  

The Agora and temple of Hephaestus

Of course, today there is the slight problem of updating my knowledge of Ancient Greek to Modern Greek. Judging by their puzzled reactions, today’s Greeks have difficulty understanding their own archaic tongue, particularly when spoken with a Belfast accent. Over the last two millennia some vowels have shifted, and some consonants have clustered in confusing ways. 

Notwithstanding these impediments, as I travel through this country I feel that the Greek language insurance policy I took out fifty years ago has finally matured. It is satisfying to be able to decipher and make sense of the characters of the 24-letter Greek alphabet. In a restaurant, this reveals the simplest words for potatoes and tomatoes. Along the highway, I discovered the place name Thermopylae, just in time to ask the driver to stop at the battlefield where the ancient Spartans made their last stand. And in the amazing monasteries of Meteora I was able to decipher the biblical texts on the walls. Each small success — with menus, the names of streets, or scripture— gives me the simple joy of connecting with ancient and modern people through a shared language.

‘I am the light of the World.’ St John’s gospel