Yet another 100 books

That book-list thing really seems to be making the rounds. Even those of us complaining about it seem compelled to do it, though Frank McGahon, perhaps wisely, demurs. Down in the comments to my previous post, Des von Desbladet links to a second list over at the Grauniad (with a fair amount of overlap with the bloggish list). Meanwhile, over at Pharyngula I see a new list, all ready to be copied, pasted and boldfaced.

In hope of turning this 'meme' into a metameme, below the fold I give you yet another list. It's mostly prose fiction, though I've been far from doctrinaire in my selection. Some of the entries are included on some of the other lists. (So sue me.) I make no claim as to whether or where the listed works fit into the Official Canon of Literary Greatitude. I do not even represent that I have read them all.

But go ahead, have a crack at it - how many of them have you read? And what does that tell you about your literariness? (Hint: precious little.) More importantly, put together your own list and post it on your site. If everybody would do this, we'd all have a lot less time for war and accounting fraud and deliberately spreading typhoid infections, and the world would be a better place.

[UPDATE: Richard of Castrovalva is the first to take up my challenge with this mighty fine list of his own. You should all strive to be more like Richard. Get cracking on those lists - you can't be the first, but you might be the next! (By the way, I once saw a woman wearing a t-shirt with that slogan on it. Whether it referred to the composition of DIY book-lists, I cannot say.) ]

Though I said I hadn't read all of these, it should not be a surprise that, having put together the list, I'd seriously skew the results by boldfacing those I had read. So I won't boldface any. (If anybody is really interested, email me and I'll tell you what my results would have been.) Some of these are not English-language works, but give yourself credit if you've read them in translation.

You know the drill:

Abbott, Edward – Flatland
Acker, Kathy – Blood and Guts in High School
Ackroyd, Peter – Chatterton
Aeschylus – The Oresteian trilogy
Amis, Kingsley – Lucky Jim
Ashford, Daisy – The Young Visiters
Austen, Jane – Sense and Sensibility
Barth, John – The End of the Road
Beckett, Samuel – Molloy
Beckett, Samuel – Malone meurt
Beckett, Samuel – L’Innommable
Bellamy, Edward – Looking Backward
Bernhard, Thomas – Holzfällen
Bierce, Ambrose – The Devil’s Dictionary
Böll, Heinrich – Ansichten eines Clowns
Boswell, James – Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
Burgess, Anthony – A Clockwork Orange
Burke, Edmund – Reflections on the Revolution in France
Burns, Charles – Big Baby
Cambrensis, Giraldus – Expugnatio hiberniae
Campbell, John W. – Who Goes There?
Camus, Albert – La Chute
Camus, Albert – L’Étranger
Camus, Albert – La Peste
Carleton, William – Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry
Catullus – Carmina
Cela, Camilo José – La familia de Pascual Duarte
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand – Voyage au bout de la nuit
Chatwin, Bruce – The Songlines
Childers, Erskine – The Riddle of the Sands
Connolly, Cyril – Enemies of Promise
De Haven, Tom – Freaks Amour
Edgeworth, Maria – Castle Rackrent
Erasmus, Desiderius – Moriae encomium
Fabre, Jean-Henri – Souvenirs entomologiques
Fontane, Theodor – Effi Briest
Frayn, Michael – Headlong
Gide, André – Les faux-monnayeurs
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
Goncharov, Ivan – Oblomov
Gray, Alasdair – Poor Things
Gray, Alasdair – Unlikely Stories, Mostly
Grimmelshausen, H.J.C. von – Der abentheuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch
Hašek, Jaroslav – Dobrý voják Švejk
Hauptmann, Gerhart – Bahnwärter Thiel
Herbert, James – Others
Hughes, Sean – The Detainees
Humboldt, Alexander von – Die Reise nach Südamerika
Kafka, Franz – Der Process
Kierkegaard, Søren – Sickness unto Death
Kirst, Hans Helmut – 08/15
Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di – Il Gattopardo
Landesman, Peter – The Raven
Langland, William – Piers Ploughman
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim – Nathan der Weise
Levin, Ira – This Perfect Day
Lewis, Clive Staples – Till We Have Faces
Lewis, Matthew – The Monk
Macaulay, Rose – The Towers of Trebizond
Malan, Rian – My Traitor’s Heart
Manzoni, Alessandro – I promessi sposi
Maturin, Charles – Melmoth the Wanderer
Mayakovskiy, Vladimir – Oblako v Shtanakh
McCabe, Patrick – The Butcher-Boy
McEwan, Ian – The Child in Time
McLiam Wilson, Robert – Ripley Bogle
Moers, Walter – Kleines Arschloch
More, Thomas – Utopia
Mortimer, John – Paradise Postponed
Nabokov, Vladimir – Pale Fire
Nogent, Guibert de – Gesta Dei per Francos
O’Brian, Patrick – The Aubrey/Maturin cycle
O’Brien, Flann – An Béal Bocht
O’Brien, Flann – At Swim-Two-Birds
Orton, Joe – What the Butler Saw
Patterson, Glenn – The International
Percy, Walker – The Moviegoer
Petrarch – The Ascent of Mont Ventoux
Pynchon, Thomas – Gravity’s Rainbow
Reck-Malleczewen, Friedrich Percyval – Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten
Rilke, Rainer Maria – Duineser Elegien
Rolfe, Frederick – Hadrian VII
Rybakov, Anatoli – Deti Arbata
Sartre, Jean-Paul – Huis clos
Schiller, Friedrich von – Die Räuber
Sophocles – The Theban trilogy
Sterne, Laurence – Tristram Shandy
Strachey, Lytton – Eminent Victorians
Symons, A.J.A. – The Quest for Corvo
Tacitus – De Germania
Tey, Josephine – The Daughter of Time
Theroux, Paul – The Mosquito Coast
Trevor, William – The Old Boys
Trevor, William – The Story of Lucy Gault
Trollope, Anthony – Barchester Towers
Voltaire – Candide
Waugh, Evelyn – Vile Bodies
Wiesel, Elie – Night
Wilde, Oscar – De Profundis
Zamyatin, Evgeny – We