List: Jane Smiley's 101 Books

From Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. I will periodically update this post and strike through books as I read them. This isn't part of a particular challenge, though I suppose I could adopt it as my list if I tackle the 101 Books in 1001 days challenge.

1. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

2. Author unknown, The Saga of the People of Laxardal

3. Snorri Sturluson, Egil's Saga

4. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron

5. Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron

6. Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes

7. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, vols 1 & 2

8. Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves

9. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko

10. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Roxana

11. Samuel Richardson, Pamela

12. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

13. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote

14. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

15. Voltaire, Candide

16. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

17. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses

18. The Marquis de Sade, Justine

19. Sir Walter Scott, The Tale of Old Mortality, The Bride of Lammermoor

20. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

21. Jane Austen, Persuasion

22. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

23. Stendahl, The Red and the Black

24. Nicolai Gogol, Taras Bulba

25. Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

26. Honore de Balzac, Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette

27. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

28. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

29. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

30. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

31. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or the Whale

32. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

33. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

34. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

35. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, The Moonstone

36. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

37. Emile Zola, Therese Raquin

38. Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds

39. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

40. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

41. George Eliot, Middlemarch

42. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

43. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age

44. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

45. Bram Stoker, Dracula

46. Kate Chopin, The Awakening

47. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

48. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

49. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

50. Max Beerbohm, The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford Love Story

51. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

52. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

53. Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter, volume I, The Wreath

54. James Joyce, Ulysses

55. Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience

56. E M Forster, A Passage to India

57. F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

58. Franz Kafka, The Trial

59. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

60. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

61. D H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

62. Virginia Woolf, Orlando

63. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

64. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, volume 1

65. Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don

66. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

67. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

68. P G Wodehouse, The Return of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, Spring Fever, The Butler Did It

69. T H White, The Once and Future King

70. Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

71. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters

72. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

73. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows

74. Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, Don't Tell Alfred

75. Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

76. Jetta Carleton, The Moonflower Vine

77. Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

78. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

79. John Gardner, Grendel

80. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

81. Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish

82. Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

83. David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?

84. Muriel Spark, Loitering With Intent

85. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

86. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

87. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John

88. J M Coetzee, Foe

89. Toni Morrison, Beloved

90. A S Byatt, Possession

91. Nicholson Baker, Vox

92. Garrison Keillor, WLT: A Radio Romance

93. Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum

94. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

95. Francine Prose, Guided Tours of Hell

96. Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life

97. Arnost Lustig, Lovely Green Eyes

98. Zadie Smith, White Teeth

99. John Updike, The Complete Henry Bech

100. Ian McEwan, Atonement

101. Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

Reading the Author Challenge: Jane Austen

So, I had no idea (though I should have guessed) that there was this whole internet subculture of reading challenge blogs, but seeing as I am the queen of (mostly unfinished) reading lists and challenges, count me in!

This month, pretty much all of my reading for pleasure has been an attempt at Jane Austen's novels (and major fragments) in sequence, so I was really pleased to find this challenge to join. The "in sequence" bit has been a bit of a pain, actually, as Austen's books were not published in the sequence they were written, and some were published posthumously. Also, some of the novels were revised many years after they were written, but before publication, and scholars don't always agree as to the sequence of this work. What I really wanted was to get a sense of the development in Austen's style and thematic concerns, but because of the factors mentioned above, it's a more complicated question than I thought at first. I think if I were to do another Austen re-read (!) in the future, I would read the books in a slightly different sequence to the one I've read them in this month.

This month's order:

Lady Susan

Sense and Sensibility

Pride and Prejudice

Northanger Abbey

The Watsons

Mansfield Park

Emma

Persuasion

Sanditon 

Revised order:

Lady Susan

Northanger Abbey

Sense and Sensibility

Pride and Prejudice

The Watsons

Mansfield Park

Emma

Persuasion

Sanditon

The reason for the revised order is what I found to be the dramatic change in tone between the earlier books and the later books. After reading Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, which are very upbeat, sparky books, I was really struck, when I read The Watsons and Mansfield Park, with how much more complex and downbeat they were. When I did some research and found out that there was pretty much a decade where Austen didn't write (apart from the unfinished fragment of The Watsons) or publish any fiction, probably due to her uncertain family circumstances, and then the first book after this hiatus was Mansfield Park, it all became clear. I think it was more of a shock to go from the youthful sarcasm and high spirits of Northanger Abbey to The Watsons and Mansfield Park than it would have been to go from the more sedate perfection of Pride and Prejudice to the later books, and so that's why, if I had my time over again, I'd read Northanger Abbey earlier in the list. I've placed it before Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice as, whether or not it was started before them, it probably didn't get revised before publication, whereas S&S and P&P both went through considerable rewriting before attaining their final form.

So, at the moment I'm nearly finished Emma, with Persuasion and Sanditon to go. More Jane Austen thoughts soon!