Wednesday 6 May 2009

100 Spanish-speaking writers choose the 100 books that changed their lives

Last year I, in common with other Talis employees, posted a list of 100 important novels. This time I'm posting another list which is similar but different. It too is a list of books, but this one is of interest because it reveals to me how Anglocentric I can be in my reading. Maybe other people will experience a similar realisation when they read this list and will broaden their cultural horizons as a result. That could only be a good thing. It was published in El Pais magazine last August. I generally score highly in this kind of list, as I'm quite well read. I also speak fluent Spanish. And yet I've only read 18 of them and a good few I'd never even heard of. It's always good to be jolted out of complacency. I accept that the list has a strong European bias.
1. Don Quixote de la Mancha - Miguel de Cervantes
2. In search of lost time - Marcel Proust
3. The Odyssey - Homer
4. The trial - Franz Kafka
5. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
6. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
7. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
8. Selected stories - Anton Chekhov
9. War and peace - Leo Tolstoy
10 - Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges
11. Poet in New York - Federico Garcia Lorca
12. The brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
13. Crime and punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
14. The bible
15. The magic mountain - Thomas Mann
16. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
17. Ulysses - James Joyce
18. The sound and the fury - William Faulkner
19. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
20. 1001 Arabian nights
21. Under the volcano - Malcolm Lowry
22. The death of Virgil - Hermann Broch
23. Essays - Michel Montaigne
24. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
25. The red and the black - Stendhal
26. The Aleph - Jorge Borges
27. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
28. The heart is a lonely hunter - Carson McCullers
29. Heart of darkness - Joseph Conrad
30. The flowers of evil - Charles Baudelaire
31. The banquet - Plato
32. Catcher in the rye - J.D. Salinger
33. A sentimental education - Gustave Flaubert
34. Duino elegies - Rainer Maria Rilke
35. Rhymes and legends - Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
36. This business of living - Cesare Pavese
37. The book of disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
38. Complete works - Jorge Luis Borges
39. Thus spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzche
40. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
41. Rayuela - Julio Cortazar
42. Fortunata and Jacinta - Benito Perez Galdos
43. Extraordinary stories - Edgar Allan Poe
44. The city and the dogs - Mario Vargas Llosa
45. The waste land - T.S.Eliot
46. Metamorphoses - Ovid
47. Poems - Emily Dickinson
48. King Lear - William Shakespeare
49. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
50. Trilce - Cesar Vallejo
51. The outsider - Albert Camus
52. Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
53. Odes - Horace
54. The long goodbye - Raymond Chandler
55. The idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
56. The shipyard - Juan Carlos Onetti
57. The first man - Albert Camus
58. The maker - Jorge Luis Borges
59 100 years of solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. The divine comedy - Dante Alighieri
61. La Regenta - Leopoldo Alas Clarin
62. The waves - Virginia Woolf
63. As I lay dying - William Faulkner
64. The diaries of Franz Kafka
65. Celestina - Fernando de Rojas
66. Richard The Third - William Shakespeare
67. Residence on Earth - Pablo Neruda
68. Demian - Hermann Hesse
69. Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
70. Conversation in the cathedral - Mario Vargas Llosa
71. Pride and prejudice - Jane Austen
72. The leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
73. Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
74. Lazarillo de Tormes - Anonymous
75. Journey to the end of the night - Louis Ferdinand Celine
76. Canto General - Pablo Neruda
77. The Iliad - Homer
78. Bohemian lights - Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan
79. The war of the end of the world - Mario Vargas Llosa
80. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
81. Aphorisms - G.C. Lichtenberg
82. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx
83. Mortal and Rose - Francisco Umbral
84. Dubliners - James Joyce
85. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
86. Peter Pan - James Matthew Barrie
87. Sonnets - Quevedo
88. Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter - Maria Vargas Llosa
89. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
90. The Alexandria quartet - Lawrence Durrell
91. The fall - Albert Camus
92. Orlando - Virginia Woolf
93. The unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
94. Time and space - Juan Ramon Jimenez
95. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
96. The garden of the Finzi-Contini - Giorgio Bassani
97. The wild palms - William Faulkner
98. Stone and country - Gabriel Aresti
99. Complete works - Pio Baroja
100. The second sex - Simone de Beauvoir