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The Book Club Review

The Guardian's 100 Best Novels of All Time: A Hot Take, with Phil Chaffee and Joseph Dance

Tuesday · 43 min · Episode 191 · 41.3 MB
0:00-43:00

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When the Guardian drops a list of the 100 Greatest Novels in English it's time to drop everything to talk about it. Luckily pod-regular guest, journalist Phil Chaffee and Joseph Dance, host of the Curious Readers podcast, also had views, and were willing to get together on a Sunday evening to share them. You'll hear our hits, our misses, how many we’ve read, whether we should have read more and much musing on whether a list like this is the way to get people excited about reading. We explore the joys of the sub-lists – the contributor lists – all squirrelled away on a sub-section of the Guardian's website, that arguably provide more excitement and inspiration than the fairly canonical top 100. Which is the best Brontë? Which is the best Austen? Do we age into certain books? If you've read all seven volumes of Proust shouldn't that count for more than one entry? All this and much, much more. Enjoy – this was an absolute delight to make and I hope it makes you smile as much as it did me.

Have your say: get in touch on Instagram @bookclubreviewpodcast or email thebookclubreview@gmail.com, or head to our website for full shownotes. What would be in your top-10?

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The Guardian’s List of the 100 Greatest Novels published in English, copied below for ease of reference.

*underlined – the ones Kate has read

  1. Middlemarch
  2. Beloved
  3. Ulysses
  4. To the Lighthouse
  5. In Search of Lost Time
  6. Anna Karenina
  7. War and Peace
  8. Jane Eyre
  9. Pride and Prejudice
  10. Madame Bovary
  11. The Great Gatsby
  12. Bleak House
  13. Emma
  14. Mrs Dalloway
  15. Moby-Dick
  16. Nineteen Eighty-Four
  17. One Hundred Years of Solitude
  18. Persuasion
  19. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
  20. Wuthering Heights
  21. The Portrait of a Lady
  22. Things Fall Apart
  23. Midnight’s Children
  24. The Remains of the Day
  25. Lolita
  26. Don Quixote
  27. The Trial
  28. The Brothers Karamazov
  29. Pale Fire
  30. Frankenstein
  31. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
  32. The God of Small Things
  33. David Copperfield
  34. Wolf Hall
  35. Great Expectations
  36. The Handmaid’s Tale
  37. Invisible Man
  38. The Age of Innocence
  39. Their Eyes Were Watching God
  40. Song of Solomon
  41. Heart of Darkness
  42. The Magic Mountain
  43. Housekeeping
  44. Giovanni’s Room
  45. The Golden Notebook
  46. The Leopard
  47. Vanity Fair
  48. The Metamorphosis
  49. A Fine Balance
  50. Wide Sargasso Sea
  51. My Brilliant Friend
  52. The Golden Bowl
  53. The Transit of Venus
  54. Orlando
  55. The Waves
  56. Mansfield Park
  57. The Sound and the Fury
  58. Disgrace
  59. Never Let Me Go
  60. Howards End
  61. The Rings of Saturn
  62. Half of a Yellow Sun
  63. White Teeth
  64. The Good Soldier
  65. The Color Purple
  66. The Master and Margarita
  67. The Man Without Qualities
  68. Blood Meridian
  69. Crime and Punishment
  70. Jude the Obscure
  71. Kindred
  72. Our Mutual Friend
  73. Austerlitz
  74. Nervous Conditions
  75. The Bluest Eye
  76. Dracula
  77. The Rainbow
  78. A House for Mr Biswas
  79. Go Tell It on the Mountain
  80. Rebecca
  81. Buddenbrooks
  82. The End of the Affair
  83. A Farewell to Arms
  84. The Talented Mr Ripley
  85. The Vegetarian
  86. The Turn of the Screw
  87. The Line of Beauty
  88. Ragtime
  89. The Left Hand of Darkness
  90. Jacob’s Room
  91. Life and Fate
  92. Sentimental Education
  93. Invisible Cities
  94. The Known World
  95. The Return of the Native
  96. Pedro Páramo
  97. Catch-22
  98. The Road
  99. The Go-Between
  100. My Ántonia

Particular books we touch on in the show


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