Why This Is Hell

Read, unfinished, hated. Some typically perverse choices - and every pleasurable inclusion is matched by a stupid exclusion . Roundabout 70 out of 149. The first time I've felt well read!

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Brian W Aldiss, Non-Stop (1958)
Isaac Asimov, Foundation (1951)
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2000)
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (1987)
JG Ballard, Crash (1973)
JG Ballard, Millennium People (2003)
JG Ballard, The Drowned World (1962)
William Beckford, Vathek (1786)
Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory (1984)
Iain M Banks, Consider Phlebas (1987)
Clive Barker, Weaveworld (1987)
Nicola Barker, Darkmans (2007)
Stephen Baxter, The Time Ships (1995)
Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio (1999)
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (1956)
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Poppy Z Brite, Lost Souls (1992)
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798)
Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon (1960)
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1966)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871)
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1960)
Anthony Burgess, The End of the World News (1982)
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1912)
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)
Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees (1957)
Ramsey Campbell, The Influence (1988)
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (1977)
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984)
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
Arthur C Clarke, Childhood's End (1953)
GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
Michael G Coney, Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000)
Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales (1996)
Samuel R Delaney, The Einstein Intersection (1967) [argh – spell the name right!]
Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Philip K Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Thomas M Disch, Camp Concentration (1968)
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (1988)
Michel Faber, Under the Skin (2000)
John Fowles, The Magus (1966)
Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)
Alan Garner, Red Shift (1973)
William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)
William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)
Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (1974)
M John Harrison, Light (2002)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Robert A Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Michel Houellebecq, Atomised (1998)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (1995)
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
PD James, The Children of Men (1992)
Richard Jefferies, After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
Gwyneth Jones, Bold as Love (2001)
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon (1966)
Stephen King, The Shining (1977)
Marghanita Laski, The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas (1864)
Ursula K Le Guin, The Earthsea series (1968-1990)
Ursula K Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961)
Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
CS Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)  [parts read, not all]
MG Lewis, The Monk (1796)
David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
Ken MacLeod, The Night Sessions (2008)
Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (2005)
Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward (1994)
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954)
Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy (1992)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Jed Mercurio, Ascent (2007)
China Miéville, The Scar (2002)
Andrew Miller, Ingenious Pain (1997)
Walter M Miller Jr, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)
Michael Moorcock, Mother London (1988)
William Morris, News From Nowhere (1890)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor (1969)
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)
Larry Niven, Ringworld (1970)
Jeff Noon, Vurt (1993)
Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman (1967)
Ben Okri, The Famished Road (1991)
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996)
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (1818)
Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (1946)
Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth, The Space Merchants (1953)
John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
Terry Pratchett, The Discworld series (1983- )[cheat!]
Christopher Priest, The Prestige (1995)
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995-2000)
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space (2000)
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)
Geoff Ryman, Air (2005)
Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)
José Saramago, Blindness (1995)
Will Self, How the Dead Live (2000)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Dan Simmons, Hyperion (1989)
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992)
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Rupert Thomson, The Insult (1996)
JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937) [spelt right for once]
JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)
Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan (1959)
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Robert Walser, Institute Benjamenta (1909)
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes (1926)
Sarah Waters, Affinity (1999)
HG Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
HG Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
TH White, The Sword in the Stone (1938)
Angus Wilson, The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)  [first book only]
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
John Wyndham, Day of the Triffids (1951)
John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1924)

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)

Irvine Welsh reviews Murakami Ryū's latest novel in today's Guardina - "The dustjacket of Ryu Murakami's latest novel, Audition, somewhat pompously describes the author as a "renaissance man for the modern age"." Except that I saw Audition, the film based on this novel, some point around 2000 and it came out in about 1999. It's based on a novel by him - although the Wikipedia entry doesn't make clear which.

I subscribe via lj to two Guardian feeds: their general largely news one, and the books one. I tend to right click to follow up a story, and it fills me in with material I might not catch on their hideously designed webpage and certainly not see on the book pages (the blog seeming to consist of self-evident manifest bollox written by trolls of one shades or another, sample subject, "Why has no one ever written a novel about a whale?")

Last week the Guardian newsfeed switched from headline-and-a-gobbet to entire articles, saving me the need to click through but meaning I have to do a lot more scrolling. Now the book feed has adverts. Is this enough for me to unsubscribe?

Nearly. We'll see.