Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read or Else - Family and Self

Read, unfinished, hated (I don't do much hating, but the second and third groups meld). Note some series as series, and Banks. 145 titles; 24 read, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25.

Kobo Abe, The Face of Another (1964)
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)
Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
David B, Epileptic (1996-2003)
Nicholson Baker, Room Temperature (1990)
Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet (1833)
Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835)
Iain Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room (1960)
Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins (1954)
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (2006)
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (1951)
Sybille Bedford, A Legacy (1956)
Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift (1975)
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale (1908)
John Berger, G. (1972)
Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (1986)
Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (1943)
William Boyd, Any Human Heart (2002)
Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil (1945)
Fanny Burney, Evelina (1778)
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
Ron Butlin, The Sound of My Voice (1987)
Albert Camus, The Outsider (1942)
Angela Carter, Wise Children (1991)
Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)
John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles (1929)
Colette, The Vagabond (1910)
Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
Jim Crace, Being Dead (1999)
Jim Crace, Quarantine (1997)
Daniel Defoe, Roxana (1724)
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Julie Doucet, My New York Diary (1999)
Margaret Drabble, The Millstone (1965)
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals (1956)
Shusaku Endo, Silence (1966)
Anne Enright, The Gathering (2007)
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Richard Ford, The Sportswriter (1986)
EM Forster, Howards End (1910)
Michael Frayn, Spies (2002)
Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky (1992)
John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848)
André Gide, The Immoralist (1902)
André Gide, The Vatican Cellars (1914)
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)
Knut Hamsun, Hunger (1890)
LP Hartley, The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944)
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)
Hermann Hesse, Narziss and Goldmund (1930)
Paul Hornschemeier, The Three Paradoxes (2006)
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days (1857)
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)
Henry James, Washington Square (1880)
Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare (1954)
BS Johnson, The Unfortunates (1969)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Molly Keane, Good Behaviour (1981)
Yashar Kemal, Memed, My Hawk (1955)
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
DH Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913)
Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie (1959)
Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz (1932)
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962)
Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley (1939)
Jack London, Martin Eden (1909)
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947)
Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (1946)
Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk (1956)
Bernard Malamud, The Assistant (1957)
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901)
William Maxwell, Chateau (1961)
FM Mayor, The Rector's Daughter (1924)
George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859)
Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters (2002)
Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet (1982)
Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955)
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977)
Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are? (1978)
Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (1973)
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (1930-32)
VS Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (1961)
Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
Kenzaburo Oe, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (1969)
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961)
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (1972)
JB Priestley, The Good Companions (1929)
Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (1993)
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27)
Piers Paul Read, A Married Man (1979)
Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs (1915)
Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930)
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761)
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)
JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Cora Sandel, Alberta and Jacob (1926)
Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (1993)
Carol Shields, Unless (2002)
Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)
May Sinclair, The Three Sisters (1914)
Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Family Moskat (1950)
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (1991)
Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005)
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)
Noel Streatfeild, Ballet Shoes (1936)
Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno (1923)
Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)
Elizabeth Taylor, Angel (1957)
Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (1945)
Colm Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship (1999)
Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (1982)
William Trevor, Death in Summer (1998)
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862)
Miguel de Unamuno, Peace in War (1897)
John Updike, The Rabbit Omnibus (1960-90)
Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000)
Alan Warner, Morvern Callar (1995)
HG Wells, The History of Mr Polly (1910)
Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (1957)
Antonia White, Frost in May (1933)
Patrick White, The Tree of Man (1955)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Johann David Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson (1812)

Shh!

My plan is to try and watch an sf film a day for as long as I can - with a mix of 1950s films for teaching, and 1970s for research. At half eleven I will need to break off and watch the last half hour of the film which foirms day two of the resolution. Write-ups, where appropriate, at Solar Flares, with spoiler free comment here. I will also be blogging them for work if I get the Blackboard blog working.

Already I am struck by how little criticism there is on sf film in my usual sources, leaving aside 2001, Alien, Blade Runner, Star Wars, The Matrix. There is a job to be done - oh dearie me, yes. Time to take it seriously. We have a couple of general histories (Sobchack, Brosnan, Hardy, Telotte) and a couple of encyclopedias (Clute and Nicholls, Westfahl), a few essay collections of varying quality (Kuhn, Kuhn II, Redmond, Rickman) but it feels like surprisingly little. Neither James and Mendlesohn (essential one chapter) nor Seed (a rather arbitrary section) out of the existing companions really do justice to film - the half dozenish chapters in Bould, Butler, Roberts and Vint are the tip of a smallish iceberg as the theoretical chapters invoke film as well.

Oh, and it turns out I have one of the (apparently) two pieces written on Soylent Green - and remarkably found it immediately when opening the collection in question at random.