Guardian F&SF book meme

[ltmurnau]

The Guardian are doing a series of 1000 novels everyone must read. Here's the Science Fiction & Fantasy component. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/22/1000-novels-science-fiction-fantasy-part-one has plot thumbnails for titles you may find interesting)

Bold the ones you've read; underline the ones you loved; strikethrough the ones that you hated.


Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Brian W Aldiss, Non-Stop (1958)
Isaac Asimov, Foundation (1951) (I even read the rest of the series when I was in Japan; it turned into a big bore, sorry.)
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) (BALLARD BALLARD BALLARD! Yay for Uncle Jim!)
William Beckford, Vathek (1786)
Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory (1984) (This was good in a sick kind of way)
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 Delany, The Einstein Intersection (1967)
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) (I've always meant to read this)
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)
P. D. 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)
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)(written OK but painful to read)
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) (Orwell is one of my favourite writers)
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-
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) (I started this a week or two ago but got disrupted by the move)
Geoff Ryman, Air (2005)
Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943) (Trite.)
José Saramago, Blindness (1995)
Will Self, How the Dead Live (2000) (I'm enjoying Will Self's short stories right now)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) (Do comic book versions count?)
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)
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)
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
John Wyndham, Day of the Triffids (1951)
John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1924)

153 titles, I've read only 47 of them. Clearly I'm an unlettered oaf.

Comments

[cherdt.livejournal.com]

Agreed, I'm also at just 36. (Although I'd have 7 more if I actually read all the books that are on my shelves. I've been meaning to finish A Canticle for Leibowitz for years.)

No once except graduate students studying the gothic novel should ever have to read Walpole's Castle of Otronto.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

Yes, I found the selection of early fantasy works a bit daunting too. I've never even made it to the end of Dracula (and that's hardly an early work).

Like many "best of" lists, much of the content veers between really early stuff that we are all supposed to have read, and last year's Great Big Thing.