We all love lists, don’t we. They’re irresistible to bookish nosy-parkers like me and once we’ve seen one it’s hard not to start putting together our own version, perhaps first in our own heads but before long committing them to screen beckons. So it was with Paula’s My One-Hundred-Book-Library way back in May, then I noticed that Annabel had had a go. It seemed rude not to join in but I’ve taken my time putting mine together. Here are Paula’s rules:
a) You may add up to 100 books (fiction or non-fiction) to your figmental collection.
b) Titles may be added or removed at any point, but the number of individual books on your virtual shelf must never exceed 100, i.e. one in, one out. Alternatively, you may set the size of your library at (for instance) 50 or 30. The choice is entirely your own.
c) You can include an author’s collected works (or a series) on your shelf provided it has at some point genuinely been published in a single volume.
d) This isn’t meant to be a list of great titles or the most highbrow books you have read. Indeed, your choices don’t have to be particularly well-known. Please include only published works (it doesn’t matter if they are out of print) that have been significant to you in some way during your life. Books holding your most powerful memories.
e) Please include a link back to Paula’s post.
I’ve stuck by them as best I can although I think I may have cheated with c). Here then, in no particular order, are my 100 books, some with links to reviews.
- Behind the Scenes at the Museum – Kate Atkinson
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt
- Talking to the Dead – Helen Dunmore
- Plainsong – Kent Haruf
- A Whole Life – Robert Seethaler (transl. Charlotte Collins)
- The Dark Room – Rachel Sieffert
- Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout
- Late Nights on Air – Elizabeth Hay
- The Bird Artist – Howard Norman
- U. S. A. – John Dos Passos
- Wise Children – Angela Carter
- The Next Step in the Dance – Tim Gautreaux
- Brooklyn – Colm TóibÃn
- That They Might Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern
- Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
- Any Human Heart – William Boyd
- The Rotters’ Club – Jonathan Coe
- Mãn – Kim Thúy
- Under the Visible Life – Kim Echlin
- Before Everything – Victoria Redel
- Burnt Shadows – Kamila Shamsie
- Last Hundred Years trilogy – Jane Smiley
- The Cutting Room – Louise Welsh
- The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor
- Weathering – Lucy Wood
- The Crow Road – Iain Banks
- Shotgun Lovesongs – Nickolas Butler
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay – Michael Chabon
- Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham
- Virtual Light – William Gibson
- The Last Banquet – Jonathan Grimwood
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Wait for Me, Jack – Addison Jones
- The Nakano Thrift Shop – Hiromi Kawakami (transl. Allison Markin Powell)
- Measuring the World – Daniel Kehlmann (transl. Carol Brown Janeway)
- The Vintner’s Luck – Elizabeth Knox
- Ingenious Pain – Andrew Miller
- The Story of My Teeth – Valeria Luiselli (transl. Christina MacSweeney)
- Charming Billy – Alice McDermott
- The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri
- Reservoir 13 – Jon McGregor
- Tender – Belinda McKeon
- Brightness Falls – Jay McInerney
- Anatomy of a Soldier – Harry Parker
- Spill Simmer Falter Wither – Sara Baume
- A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin
- White Houses – Amy Bloom
- The End of Days – Jenny Erpenbeck (transl. Susan Bernofsky)
- A Meal in Winter – Hubert Mingarelli (transl. Sam Taylor)
- Astrid and Veronika – Linda Olsson
- A Wild Sheep Chase – Haruki Murakami (transl. Alan Birnbaum)
- White Hunger – Aki Ollikainen (transl. Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah)
- Monte Carlo – Peter Terrin (transl. David Doherty)
- Life a User’s Manual – Georges Perec (transl. David Bellos)
- Close Range – Annie Prolux
- The Book of Lights – Chaim Potok
- Another Brooklyn – Jacqueline Woodson
- The Submission – Amy Waldman
- So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell
- Crossing to Safety – Wallace Stegner
- My Dear I Wanted to Tell You – Louisa Young
- The Book of Salt – Monique Truong
- Morality Play – Barry Unsworth
- The Sisters Brothers – Patrick deWitt
- Mr Fox – Helen Oyeyemi
- Our Magic Hour – Jennifer Down
- Strandloper – Alan Garner
- Monsieur Linh and His Child – Philippe Claudel (trans. Euan Cameron)
- Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin
- From a Low and Quiet Sea – Donal Ryan
- The Trick is to Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
- A Fine Balance– Rohinton Mistry
- Mrs Bridge – Evan S. Connell
- One Clear Ice-cold Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century – Roland Schimmelpfennig (transl. Jamie Bulloch)
- El Hacho – Luis Carrasco
- The End We Start From – Megan Hunter
- Moonstone – Sjón (transl. Victoria Cribb)
- The Fatal Tree – Jake Arnott
- The Refugees – Viet Thanh Nguyen
- The Nix – Nathan Hill
- Commmonwealth – Ann Patchett
- The Lauras – Sara Taylor
- The Republic of Love – Carol Shields
- Back to Moscow – Guillermo Erades
- The Power of the Dog – Thomas Savage
- 10:04 – Ben Lerner
- Sworn Virgin – Elvira Dones (transl. Clarissa Botsford)
- Mateship with Birds – Carrie Tiffany
- The Crimson Petal and the White – Michel Faber
- Stet – Diana Athill
- Being Mortal – Atul Gawande
- The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop – Lewis Buzbee
- Quiet – Susan Cain
- The Novel Cure – Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin
- The Thoughtful Dresser – Linda Grant
- Names for the Sea – Sarah Moss
- Motherless Daughters – Hope Edelman
- The Spirit Level – Kate Pickett and Richard G. Wilkinson
- Land’s Edge– Tim Winton
Some of the above are so important to me that they’ll remain a constant on my list but others I consider essential today may well end up at the charity shop in a couple of years which probably reflects my background working with the shiny and new. Perhaps I’ll come back to it in a year or two and see what’s changed.
How about your library? Which books do you feel particularly attached to?
Excellent curation. I’ve many of them to read and I’ve even read one of them!
Thank you, and now of course you’ll have to tell me which one…
That looks like a good game. My list would be changing constantly, I think, as I remembered books from the very distant past.
Mine, too, and that’s part of the fun of it.
Oh, you are brave, I do’t think I could attempt such a list… There are perhaps 10-20 favourites that have travelled with me across many countries, but after that it gets very competitive.
I didn’t think I would do this when I first saw Paula’s post but it kept niggling at the back of my head when ever I passed the bookshelves, a fairly frequent occurence! I’d be very interested to see what you come up with should you decide to take the plunge, Marina.
Your choice is sublime, Susan. I would love to spend time mooching in your library. I have read a few titles on the list but there are many yet to be discovered. Thank you so much for the link and, of course, for taking part.
You’re very welcome, Paula, and thank you, not least for coming up with the idea. It was such an enjoyable post to put together. Hoping that a few others will join in.
Quite a few people agreed to take part but I expect it may take them some time to come up with a list. I’m so glad you enjoyed creating your library.
I’ll look out for future links to other lists on you blog.
I enjoyed reading your post & the list. Some of he older titles I’ve read, but the bulk of them: not. A 100-title booklist is pretty daunting – maybe I’ll tackle a much shorter list on our next rainy day. .
Thanks, Alison. I hope you’ll join in. I’m sure a smaller library would qualify!
Ooh, fun! I’ve got a shelf (physical and on Goodreads) which is labeled “books to save from fire”, but there’s only about twenty on that; after that, as Marina Sofia says, it gets very competitive…
Fun, indeed! It’ll be a challenge when I come to revise it.
A lovely list – we share just two titles, (Crow Road and Mrs Bridge) but more authors. Since I posted mine I’ve already swapped a few books out!
Thanks, Annabel. I’ve a feeling mine will look different in a year’s time. It’s the choosing what should go that’s tricky, I imagine.
What a wonderful idea, I must have missed those earlier posts. I love lists, so many of your list are completely unknown to me. That’s why lists are so great though. I would have to do a lot of thinking to come up with a list myself. But you have got me thinking.
Delighted to hear that, Ali. It’s great, isn’t it, and you’re absolutely right: the joy of these lists is all the new discoveries to be made. I hope you decide to take the plunge.
Yay for 5.5 Canadians on your list! (I’m not obsessed… really I’m not.)
So many great books on this list! I’m not sure how good I would be at making a list like this. I’m so indecisive, I would constantly be fiddling with it. But I love reading other people’s lists!
Ha! I’m sure there would have been more if British publishers would pay more attention to what you’re coming out with over there. I did have to exercise a bit of uncharacteristic self-restraint to stick to Paula’s rules.
I can imagine you did! 🙂
So many wonderful choices Susan! Also quite a few that are in my TBR so you’ve inspired me to move them higher up the list 🙂
Lovely – that’s what I like to hear!
A challenging exercise! I have thought about whether I could strim my library down to 50 books and I think I would struggle, but 100 might actually be manageable (I’m fooling myself, I think 150 at bare minimum!). Fascinating list. Nice to see Weathering on there. When I read it I was a little underwhelmed and yet I’ve found myself thinking about it often since, almost as though it seeped into my skin like all that water from the book. When I’ve finished with my buying / borrowing ban I might yet allow myself to acquire that one.
Challenging but enjoyable! It was the use of language in Weathering that made it stand out for me. I’m glad it grew on you, Belinda
There’s such overlap in our reading taste, that I thought I’d’ve read more of your choices, but I’ve only read about 15 (including, of course, all the Canadians that Naomi has already counted!) although I’ve read others by the authors you’ve listed in several cases and, in even more cases, have been longing aiming to read the titles you’ve selected. I was thinking that the dos Passos sequence might make for an interesting year-long project before long. I like the idea of your returning to the list periodically to see how your tastes have and haven’t changed, if you’re game.
I’m going to try to revisit – I think the difficulty will be choosing what to drop rather than what to add. I’ve long thought about rereading the dos Passos which made a very deep impression on me decades ago now but it does require a good deal of time.
Love this. Lots on your list that would also make my list. Lots on your list that are on my TBR list (you probably put them there!). I might start working on my own 100…
Haha! I’m sure a considerable portion my own TBR is your doing. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
I’ve seen this fab meme twice now and it’s so tempting to do my own list! This is such a good list too – really interesting and nice to see a few books on there that are currently on my TBR. I’m guessing their inclusion here is a big thumbs up! And it made me do a little happy dance to see both Stet and Weathering on your list. Love those so much.
Oh, me too, and thank you, Faye. Please do join in. It’s such an enjoyable list to put together.
Great list Susan! I’ve done this too but haven’t posted it yet. Tender, Tales of the City and Oscar and Lucinda are also on mine!
Thanks, Cathy. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I’m going to try to make this an annual post.
Hmmmm out of this list I’ve read 4. Something to mull over This week.
I hope the results of the mulling will be posted.
What, no Margaret Atwood? We might have to stop being friends! Change ‘What I Loved’ for Cat’s Eye! I would have a different Strout and a different Jon McGregor. And a different Dunmore. Will have to do my own list now. Just read Heat Wave by Penelope Lively and that will have to go on. What a good writer. And it has a lovely cover which is why I bought it.
I think we need a free and frank discussion over lunch! I plan to revisit the library next year but What I Loved is a fixture, I’m afraid. I loved Heat Wave too.
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