Top Fiction & Poetry

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The Stubbings list
Favourite Novels:

I am not suggesting that these are the ‘best’ novels ever written - they are just a
personal and subjective list of my favourites - (that I have actually read as of
March 2021). For the sake of variety and a fairly even time spread I have only
listed 3 or 4 titles by favourite writers like Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Charles
Dickens, and George Orwell etc. - even though I could have included more by
each of them. I have included novellas, but not short stories. There are many
novels that I have no doubt will have to be on the list when I finally find the time
to read them - I have included a short list of these at the end.
Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote 1605-1615
Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe 1719
Captain Singleton 1720
Memoirs of a Cavalier 1720
Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels 1726
Henry Fielding Joseph Andrews 1742
Tom Jones 1749
Voltaire Candide 1759
Oliver Goldsmith The Vicar of Wakefield 1766
Tobias Smollett The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker 1771
Johann von Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther 1774
William Godwin Caleb Williams 1794
Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility 1811
Pride and Prejudice 1813
Mansfield Park 1814
Mary Shelley Frankenstein 1818
Edgar Allan Poe The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket 1838
Stendhal The Charterhouse of Parma 1839
Mikhail Lermontov A Hero of Our Time 1840
Honoré de Balzac A Murky Business 1841

Nikolai Gogol Dead Souls 1842

Alexandre Dumas The Three Musketeers 1844

The Count of Monte Cristo 1844
Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights 1847
Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre 1847
William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair 1848
Charles Dickens David Copperfield 1850
Bleak House 1853
Little Dorrit 1857
Our Mutual Friend 1865
Herman Melville Moby Dick 1851
Elizabeth Gaskell Cranford 1851
George Eliot The Mill on the Floss 1860
Middlemarch 1872
Ivan Turgenev Fathers and Sons 1862
Virgin Soil 1877
Leo Tolstoy The Cossacks 1863
War and Peace 1869
Anna Karenina 1873-1877
Hadji Murad 1904
Fyodor Dostoyevsky Notes from Underground 1864
Crime and Punishment 1866
Demons 1871-1872
The Brothers Karamazov 1880
Jules Verne Around the World in Eighty Days 1872
Thomas Hardy Under the Greenwood Tree 1872
Far From the Madding Crowd 1874
The Trumpet Major 1880
The Mayor of Casterbridge 1886
Tess of the d’Urbervilles 1891
Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island 1883
Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1884
Anton Chekhov The Shooting Party 1884
William Morris News From Nowhere 1890
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray 1891
Stephen Crane The Red Badge of Courage 1895
H.G. Wells The Time Machine 1895

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness 1899

The Secret Agent 1907
Victory 1915
Rudyard Kipling Kim 1901
Puck of Pook’s Hill 1906
Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks 1901
The Magic Mountain 1924
Jack London The Call of the Wild 1903
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands 1903
Hermann Hesse The Prodigy 1906
Siddhartha 1922
Steppenwolf 1927
Arthur Schnitzler The Road to the Open 1908
E. M. Forster Howards End 1910
A Passage to India 1924
Anatole France The Gods Will Have Blood 1912

Franz Kafka Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) 1914

The Trial 1915
James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1915
Ulysses 1922
D. H. Lawrence The Rainbow 1915
Women in Love 1920
Lady Chatterley’s Lover 1928
John Buchan The Thirty-Nine Steps 1915
Greenmantle 1916
Willa Cather My Ántonia 1918
Rose Macaulay What Not 1918
Yevgeny Zamyatin We 1921
Knut Hamsun Dreamers 1921
Aldous Huxley Crome Yellow 1921
Antic Hay 1923
Brave New World 1931
Jaroslav Hašek The Good Soldier Švejk 1923
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway 1925
W. Somerset Maugham The Painted Veil 1925
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby 1925
Evelyn Waugh Decline and Fall 1928
Vile Bodies 1930
Scoop 1938
Sword of Honour - Trilogy 1952-1961
Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises 1926
A Farewell to Arms 1929
For Whom the Bell Tolls 1940
Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front 1929
Joseph Roth Right and Left 1929
Radetzky March 1932
The Emperor’s Tomb 1938
Patrick Hamilton Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky 1929-1934
Hangover Square 1941
Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities 1930-1942
P. G. Wodehouse The Luck of the Bodkins 1935
Graham Greene England Made Me 1935
Brighton Rock 1938
The Third Man 1949
Karel Čapek War With the Newts 1936
George Orwell Keep the Aspidistra Flying 1936
Animal Farm 1945
Nineteen Eighty-Four 1949
John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men 1937
The Grapes of Wrath 1939
The Moon is Down 1942
The Pearl 1947
J. R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit 1937
The Lord of the Rings - Trilogy 1954-1955
Irmgard Keun After Midnight 1937
Child of All Nations 1938
Jean Rhys Good Morning, Midnight 1939
Wide Sargasso Sea 1966
Christopher Isherwood Goodbye to Berlin 1939
Jean-Paul Sartre The Age of Reason 1945
Julian Maclaren-Ross Of Love and Hunger 1947
Hans Fallada Alone in Berlin 1947
Primo Levi If This is a Man/The Truce 1947/1963
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man 1952
Barbara Pym Excellent Women 1952
Roger Mais The Hills Were Joyful Together 1953

William Golding Lord of the Flies 1954

The Inheritors 1955
Sam Selvon The Lonely Londoners 1956
Jack Kerouac On the Road 1957
Boris Pasternak Doctor Zhivago 1957
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa The Leopard 1958
Gunter Grass The Tin Drum 1959
Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird 1960
V. S. Naipaul A House for Mr Biswas 1961
Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 1961
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 1962
August 1914 1971

Kurt Vonnegut Cat’s Cradle 1963

Slaughterhouse-Five 1969
Milan Kundera The Joke 1965
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting 1978
The Unbearable Lightness of Being 1984
Immortality 1990
Chaim Potok The Chosen 1967
Charles Bukowski Post Office 1971
Tove Jansson The Summer Book 1972
Penelope Fitzgerald The Bookshop 1978
Human Voices 1980
The Blue Flower 1995
Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose 1980
Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children 1981
Haroun and the Sea of Stories 1990
Alice Walker The Color Purple 1982
Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale 1985
Hanif Kureishi The Buddha of Suburbia 1990
Iain Banks The Crow Road 1992
Bernhard Schlink The Reader 1995
W. G. Sebald The Rings of Saturn 1995
Austerlitz 2001
Philip Pullman His Dark Materials - Trilogy 1995-2000
Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible 1998
Michel Houellebecq Atomised 1998
Sebastian Barry A Long Long Way 2005
Cormac McCarthy The Road 2006
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun 2006
Laurent Binet HHhH 2010
Teju Cole Open City 2011
Thomas Seethaler The Tobacconist 2012
A Whole Life 2014
Emily St. John Mandel Station Eleven 2014
Jarett Kobek i hate the internet 2016

Some books I should have read, but haven’t

got round to yet:

Victor Hugo Les Misérables 1862

Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure 1895

Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time 1913-1927

John Dos Passos U.S.A. - Trilogy 1930-1936

Hermann Hesse The Glass Bead Game 1943

Vasily Grossman Stalingrad + Life and Fate 1959

David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest 1996

Favourite Short Story Collections, Long
Poems/Poetry Collections and Plays:

Again, I am not claiming that the following list of titles are the ‘best’ - just a list
of some personal favourites that I have read - presented in chronological order
(dates for Shakespeare’s plays are possible year of first performance):
Homer The Odyssey 8th-7th Century BCE (approx)

Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy 1308-1320

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1595

Much Ado About Nothing 1598
Henry V 1598
Twelfth Night 1599
Hamlet 1600
Macbeth 1605
The Tempest 1611

John Milton Paradise Lost 1667

Friedrich Schiller The Robbers 1781

William Blake Songs of Innocence and of Experience 1794

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge Lyrical Ballads 1798

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust, Part One 1806

Alexander Pushkin The Tales of Belkin 1831

Nikolai Gogol Village Evenings Near Dikanka and Mirgorod 1832

The Government Inspector 1836

Ivan Turgenev Sketches from a Hunter’s Album 1852

Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass 1855-1892

Herman Melville Bartleby the Scrivener and other Stories 1856

Henrik Ibsen Peer Gynt 1867

An Enemy of the People 1882
The Wild Duck 1884

August Strindberg Master Olof 1872

Creditors 1889
Easter 1901

Anton Chekhov Platonov 1878

Anton Chekhov (continued) Ward Number 6 and other Stories 1892-1895
 The Seagull 1895
Uncle Vanya 1897

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan 1892

The Importance of Being Earnest 1895

Katherine Mansfield In a German Pension 1911

James Joyce Dubliners 1914

Hope Mirrlees Paris 1920

T.S. Eliot The Waste Land 1922

Nancy Cunard Parallax 1925

Ernest Hemingway The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories 1938

Anna Akhmatova Requiem 1940-1961

Poem Without a Hero 1940-1962

J.B. Priestley An Inspector Calls 1945

Jorge Luis Borges The Aleph and Other Stories 1949

Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman 1949

The Crucible 1953

V.S. Naipaul Miguel Street 1959

Philip Larkin The Whitsun Weddings 1964

High Windows 1974

Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber 1979

Günter Grass My Century 1999

Tom Stoppard The Coast of Utopia - Trilogy 2002

Nadine Gordimer Life Times - Stories 1952-2007 2011

W.G. Sebald Across the Land and the Water - Poems 1964-2001 2012