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

When the Guardian newspaper drops a list of the 100 Best Novels of All Time 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.

Listen via the media player above, or in your preferred podcast player with this Podfollow link.

The Guardian’s List of the 100 Best Novels of All Time, 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 our conversation.

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
• Villette by Charlotte Brontë
• Orlando, The Waves and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
• Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
• The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
• The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
• A Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
• The Princess of Clèves by Madame de Lafayette
• The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
• The Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
• The Trial and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
• The New Life by Tom Crewe
• Miss Marjoribanks by Mrs Oliphant
• The Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope
• The Warden by Anthony Trollope
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones