Every so often I come across a list of 100 books - the result of a BBC project called The Big Read in which the British public was asked about their favourite books. The list is being circulated as part of an ongoing internet meme asking people how many of these books they have read. You know, as though this list is an authoritative and complete list of the best and most important books. It is not. It is filled with recent best-sellers, pop culture phenomena and books people vaguely remember from school. If you are searching for a good reading guide, please consider looking at these lists instead. Warning: these lists are purely aspirational and are filled with dead white men.
However, here is my personal list. It consists of 25 books not on the BBC list. I consider these books the cornerstones of my reading life and I recommend all of them. One book per author. Feel free to share your own recommendations in the comments section.
- Tom Kristensen: Havoc
- T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
- Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
- Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own
- Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophel & Stella
- Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons
- Hart Crane: The Bridge
- Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master & Margarita
- Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
- Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire
- Allen Curnow: Early Days Yet (esp. Landfall in Unknown Seas)
- John Cheever: Falconer
- Alexander Trocchi: Young Adam
- Primo Levi: The Periodic Table
- Alasdair Gray: Lanark
- Jeanette Winterson: Sexing the Cherry
- Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale
- Keri Hulme: the bone people
- Iain Banks: The Bridge
- Michel Faber: Under the Skin
- Andrew Crumey: Mobius Dick
- Jonathan Coe: The House of Sleep
- Jan Kjærstad: The Seducer
- Cormac McCarthy: The Road
- Erna Brodber: Myal
PS. If anybody looking at my list can figure out what to call or how define my taste in books, please let me know. I've tried to come up with a succinct description for years but the closest I have come is "I like small, nasty books".