Great Books
Books mean a lot to us and so we talk about them quite a bit. One of the debates that constantly bounces around the office is that of the greatest books. Every now and then there are list of the 100 greatest books or equivalent. This always causes debate, because what constitutes a great book. Well, even our small group at Augustus Books has struggled there. It all comes down to opinion.
Opinion or not, it has not stopped us in making our own list. Criteria is simple: the book has to be read by someone in the office, then they have to make the case. As long as no one then objects it is in there. Sounds simple - oh dear me, no. However, here we are, we have, after debate, much anger, fighting, swearing and ponderous shakes of the head come up with what stands as the Augustus Books list of Great Books.
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A Farewell to Arms - by Ernest Hemmingway
A Tale for the Time Being - by Ruth Ozeki
A Room with a View - by E.M. Forster
After the First Death - by Robert Cormier
The Age of Innocence - by Edith Wharton
All Quiet on the Western Front - by Erich Maria Remarque
And Then There Were None - by Agatha Christie
Animal Farm - by George Orwell
Anna Karenina - by Leo Tolstoy
The Beast in Man - By Emile Zola
Bel-Ami - by Guy de Maupassant
The Blind Assassin - by Margaret Atwood
Bonfire of the Vanities - by Tom Wolfe
Brave New World - by Aldous Huxley
Candide - by Voltaire
Cannery Row - by John Steinbeck
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - by Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22 - by Joseph Heller.
A Confederacy of Dunces - by John Kennedy Toole
The Count of Monte Cristo - by Alexander Dumas
The Death of Ivan Ilyich - by Leo Tolstoy
Decline and Fall - by Evelyn Waugh
Disgrace - by J.M. Coetzee
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
The Dumas Club - by Arturo Peréz-Reverte
Espadair Street - by Iain Banks
Far From The Madding Crowd - by Thomas Hardy
Fight Club - by Chuck Palanahuik
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions - by Edwin A. Abbott
The Glass Bead Game - by Hermann Hesse
The Godfather - by Mario Puzo
The Grapes of Wrath - by John Steinbeck
Gulliver's Travels - by Jonathan Swift
Handmaid's Tale - by Margaret Atwood
Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy - by Douglas Adams
Holes - by Louis Sachar
The Hobbit - by J.R.R. Tolkien
The House of Mirth - by Edith Wharton
Jane Eyre - by Charlotte Bronte
The Life of Pi - by Yann Martel
Lord of the Rings - by J.R.R. Tolkien
Love in the Time of Cholera - by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madam Bovary - by Gustave Flaubert
Mayor of Casterbridge - by Thomas Hardy
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Midnight's Children - by Salman Rushdie
Misery - by Stephen King
Money - by Martin Amis
Mort - by Terry Pratchett
Nineteen Eighty Four - by George Orwell
Of Mice and Men - by John Steinbeck
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch - by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Hundred years of Solitude - by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Oryx and Crake - by Marageret Atwood
The Outsider - by Albert Camus
Perfume - by Patrick Suskind
The Pilgrim's Progress - by John Bunyan
The Razor's Edge - W. Somerset Maugham
The Reader - by Bernard Schlink
Rebecca - by Daphne Du Maurier
Regeneration Trilogy - by Pat Barker
The Secret History - by Donna Tartt
The Shadow Over Innsmouth - by H.P. Lovecraft
The Shipping News - by Annie Proulx
Slaughterhouse Five - by Kurt Vonnegut
Solaris - by Stanislaw Lem
The Stone Diaries - by Carl Shields
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - by Thomas Hardy
The Time Machine - by H.G. Wells
The Tin Drum - by Gunter Grass
To Kill A Mockingbird - by Harpur Lee
Ulysses - by James Joyce
Under The Skin - Michel Faber
Veronica Decides to Die - by Paulo Coelho
The Wasp Factory- by Iain Banks
Watchmen - by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Wuthering Heights - by Emily Bronte
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The list is by no means complete and may alter as we continue to debate the merits of these works, but at the moment we are happy that this is at least a decent list containing some of the greatest books ever written
Yes, we know, there is no Dickens or Austen, but believe it or not both fell at the debating hurdle. Rarely has either bastion of English literature been so cruelly denied (by such a pointless list). For the record, both were proposed and both shot cruelly down. We will mention no names.
This book list is for books of fiction, even if they are mostly autobiographical (yes Harper Lee, we mean you). 'The Bible' and 'The God Delusion' are, in the opinion of the one who decides such things, not works of fiction and are therefore ineligible for this list.
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