You know those lists of books you get hit with from time to time and of which, for some reason, there have been a lot lately? In the last few days we have had '100 books to love' and 'The books we secretly love - our 50 favourite page-turners' from, respectively, The Sunday Times and The Times (both £). And before that there was the '100 novels everyone should read', and - with inflation - the '1000 novels everyone must read', and '100 Books To Read Before You Die'. There were also the 'top 100 books of all time' and the top 100 titles from the BBC's Big Read. As well as plenty more.
While I'm sure these lists are meant to be helpful, guiding us towards books we might want to try, they can also be a bit oppressive, don't you find? I mean, they tempt you to start counting, to see how well you fare as a literary fishbo. And it can be a little depressing. 'Oh no, I've only read a quarter of these!' Or it might be better than a quarter - a third maybe or just over half - but anyway if you're me (which is true for at least one case) there are always a whole lot of books I haven't read. I start muttering that someone is trying to make me feel bad.
All of which is by way of introducing another such list of books that I recently fell upon and that has an interesting feature I want you to consider. What this feature is I'll leave till you've glanced at the list itself. It's '100 works of fiction you might enjoy' and is as follows.
Jane Austen, Emma
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way
Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler's Planet
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
André Brink, A Chain of Voices
Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Fyodor, Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Fyodor, Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Marina Endicott, Good to a Fault
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels
E.M. Forster, Howards End
E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
Margaret Forster, Have the Men Had Enough?
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Helen Garner, The Spare Room
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows
Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude
Knut Hamsun, Hunger
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Kent Haruf, Eventide
Kent Haruf, Plainsong
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton
Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
John McGahern, Amongst Women
Belinda McKeon, Solace
David Malouf, The Great World
William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows
William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It
Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener
Philipp Meyer, American Rust
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good
Maggie O'Farrell, After You'd Gone
Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
George Orwell, Animal Farm
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Charles Portis, True Grit
Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time
Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Marilynne Robinson, Home
Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Edward St Aubyn, Never Mind
José Saramago, Blindness
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
Colm Tóibín, The Master
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
William Trevor, Love and Summer
William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Anthony Trollope, The Warden
Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun
Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler, A Patchwork Planet
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters
Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Richard Yates, The Easter Parade
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Émile Zola, Germinal
That's it. Now, in all my experience of such book lists, this one has a unique feature. Which is that I've read all the books on it. Yup, every single one - 100%. That's because I compiled the list from... the books I've read (choosing titles, as well, that I liked enough that I'm happy to recommend them). Why should I let other people make lists to browbeat me with? If I make the list myself, I get to have read everything on it. Enough bullying is what I say. You, too, can make your own list and rebel against the tyranny of the book-dictators. I suggest you do it.