The Weekly List

When my sister was about to start A Levels (16, for the non-Brits reading this!), she asked me to write her a list of books she should read over the summer. To give an idea of time scale, she's now 19, so this was a list I made preblogging. I just found it last week and it got me thinking about book lists and what makes them good. Some of the titles on this list I haven't even read myself and looking at it now, I've really no idea why some of them were on here, but it made me wonder why I haven't turned my obsession with bookish lists into a feature on the blog before now. So here it is. This week, part 1, is the list I made for my sister, and next week I will publish a list of internet recommended reading for similar aged kids. This is how it will go; one week my list of certain subjects/genres, the second week an outside source (e.g 1001 books to read before you die, Guardian top 100 etc). I'm aware that this may not appeal to anyone but me, but if you're a similarly list loving person then I definitely welcome your input on things I've missed, things that you thought were awful and so on. It's all about the debate :-)

So here it is, Esther's A Level reading list, with the comments I wrote for her at the time:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
3. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. Paradise Lost - John Milton (and tell me if it's good, cos I've not read it )
6. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
7. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (this book is genius - if you don't love it, I will have to disown you)
8. Don Quixote - Cervantes (Dad has it - nick it)
9. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
10. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
11. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (stick with it - its worth it!)
12. A Passage to India - E.M Forster
13. Howards End - E.M Forster
14. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
15. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
16. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
17. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys (Do NOT watch the film)
18. Beloved - Toni Morrison
19. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
20. 1984 - George Orwell
21. Animal Farm - George Orwell
22. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier 
23. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
24. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
25. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
26. The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter (I have it. Just bloody brilliant. Read it. Now)
27. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
28. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall- Anne Bronte
29. T.S Eliot poetry - especially... The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes, and The Wasteland but also Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and others... he's a genius poet
30. A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams (WATCH WATCH WATCH the film starring Marlon Brando (very often shirtless :D) and Vivien Leigh... pure brilliance)
31. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Film Recommendation - Kenneth Branagh.. don't bother with Mel Gibson...)
32. Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare (Baz Luhrman, obv)
33. The Tempest - William Shakespeare (Return to the Forbidden Planet :p)
34. Othello - William Shakespeare (don't watch the film.. go see it at the Globe)
35. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
36. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
37. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Remarque
38. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
39. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
40. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
41. The End of Mr Y - Scarlett Thomas (absolutely GENIUS writer)
42. Our Tragic Universe - Scarlett Thomas
43. The Hunchback of Notre- Dame - Victor Hugo
44. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
45. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
46. The Odyssey - Homer (Dad has, but I'm reading atm so you can have it after :p)
47. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
48. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - R.L Stephenson
49. Wild Swans - Jung Chang
50. Quo Vadis? - Henryk Sienkiewicz
51. Translations - Brian Friel
52. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
53. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
54. An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
55. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - Jon McGregor
56. We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
57. Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
58. True Notebooks - Mark Salzman
59. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest - Ken Kesey
60. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
61. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
62. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
63. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak (due to Stalin, he wasn't allowed to leave Russia to get his NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE for Dr. Zhivago. This is one of the many reasons why we hate Stalin..)
64. Poetry of W.H Auden
65. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Unhand me, grey beard loon!)

Looking at it now, this list could otherwise be entitled 'All the books I'd loved at this point plus the ones I wanted to read but was too scared/lazy to have got around to yet'. 

It's not necessarily the books I'd recommend now, but I know that she's read a fair few of them now on my recommendation, and loved a lot of them :-) 

What would you put on a list like this? What have I missed, and what shouldn't be on here?