Telegraph 100 Essential Novels

It is in the vogue for newspapers to come up with lists of novels that everyone should read now, and the latest list I have found is on the Telegraph website. I probably only discovered it so late because I don't read the Telegraph as a general rule but was directed there when a friend sent me a link about a new Jane Austen biography, claiming, you guessed it, to have found that mysterious man that broke her heart and eventually led her becoming the ultimate literary chick lit novelist.

The Telegraph's selections are:

100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
96 One Thousand and One Nights by Anonymous
95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
83 Germinal by Emile Zola
82 The Stranger by Albert Camus
81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
68 Crash by JG Ballard
67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
59 London Fields by Martin Amis
58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
50 Beloved by Toni Morrison
49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
47The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
38 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
24 Ulysses by James Joyce
23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
22 A Passage to India by EM Forster
21 1984 by George Orwell
20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
1 Middlemarch by George Eliot

I've personally managed almost a quarter of them. 24 out of 100. Mostly classic choices on the list but some odd ones - Waiting for the Mahatma by R.K Narayan? The Savage Detective by Robert Bolano? Strangely, it is those odd ones that I want to seek out first, if only to slake my curiousity as to why they were included!