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Kate Atkinson's Top 10
Novels
1. The Great Gatsby
by F Scott Fitzgerald
Perhaps the best American novel (although see '10') or the best novel
about America and the hollowness at the heart of the dream. The closing
paragraphs of 'Gatsby' are surely some of the most poignant and powerful
ever written.
2. Slaughterhouse Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
The individuality of Vonnegut's style is a curious yet perfect match
for the pain of the emotional content. A humane, human book that always
remains a work of art rather than biography, no matter how apparent
the author's presence.
3. Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
The Mozart opera of novels and again a transcendent union of structure
and content in which unhappy marriage is the reward for those who show
a weakness of character and lifelong happiness is a province reserved
only for those "who truly know themselves."
4. Just William
by Richmal Crompton
The funniest English novels ever written?
5. What Maisie Knew
by Henry James
The other side of childhood and James' finest working of his preoccupation
with the theme of innocence corrupted. James is the master of making
what is not said the most important thing on the page.
6. Pricksongs and Descants
by Robert Coover/
Collected Stories
by Donald Barthelme
Two of the most innovative of all American short story writers. Recklessly
imaginative, they are both remarkable for the playfulness and sheer
brio of their writing. Coover's ingenuity and Barthelme's absurdity
made me look at writing in a different way. More than anyone else these
are the writers who made me want to be a writer myself.
7. Alice in Wonderland
and Through the Looking-Glass
by Lewis Carroll
And without these two books in my childhood I doubt whether my imagination
would have developed at all.
8. Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
The finest American novel not written by an American. Perhaps the finest
American novel ever (but see '1'. And don't forget '10'.) No one can
emulate Nabokov's dizzyingly vertiginous prose and his command of the
text.
9. Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot could write bad books (Romola) and half-brilliant books (Daniel
Deronda - the first half) but in Middlemarch her serious intelligence
produced a novel that no one else could have been capable of - a picture
of society as an organic, living, breathing synthesis - order and disorder,
hope and hopelessness, pride and humility, charity and greed. If only
she had seen fit to marry Dorothea to Lydgate.
10. Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
The perfect novel.
... And I can't believe there wasn't room for
11. The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford,
a novel about the wanton destruction caused by passion and bad behaviour,
written with the greatest delicacy and precision.
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