Guardian’s 1000 novels
Arriving as daily supplements in the Guardian this week has been "1000 novels you must read", delivered in the seperate categories of love, crime, comedy, family & war, state of the nation, science fiction and fantasy, with the final -war and travel - tomorrow.
As with all lists of this kind the aggravations are many and manifold - all the ones they idiotically missed out, all the ones that shouldn't be there, the ridiculous reductionism of the whole enterprise, " don't tell me what to read Mister Joyless Arbiter" et al. Added to this the absurdly arbitrary categories and distinctions, (like those old music mail order catalogues that tried to seperate "pop" and "rock" - gah! don't start me!), and the rather crappy peppering of photos of film and TV adaptations throughout.
HOWEVER.
Brilliant! They're great! What a great set of supplements to have! I could literally drown in it for days, books you've read, the many sublime possibilites still to come. Mmmmm, the anal and the astral combined. Brit readers, if you ain't already got em, just order this last week's Grauns (you can get the "historic Obama" issues to keep too), sa grand thing to have.
It's not the same reading it online, but you can here.
Thousand novels – is there that many british novels that are that good any more… I still can’t seem to find one at the moment, and therefore remain a reader of non-fiction.