[Ramblingsid]

Well it has taken me some time but here they are as best as I can say. Only one rule - one title per author only - and the second rule is that they must have grabbed hold of me at some time or another in the last 40 (oh God!) years or so. Make of them what you will .......

Peter Ackroyd – Milton in America
Sherwood Anderson – Winesburg, Ohio
Julian Barnes – Arthur and George
Samuel Becket – Waiting for Godot
Bertolt Brecht – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths
Albert Camus – The Outsider
Wilkie Collins – The Moonstone
Edmund Cooper - Kronk
Bob Copper – A Song for every Season
Robertson Davies – What’s Bred in the Bone
Charles Dickens – The Pickwick Papers
Umberto Eco – Foucault’s Pendulum
T S Eliot – The Waste Land
Gavin Ewart – Or Where a Young Penguin Lies Screaming
J G Farrell – The Siege of Krishnapur
William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury
Jasper fforde – The Eyre Affair
Dario Fo – Accidental Death of an Anarchist
John Fowles – The Magus
Myles na gCopaleen – The Best of Myles
William Gibson – The Neuromancer
Gunter Grass – The Tin Drum
Trevor Griffiths - Comedians
Christopher Hampton (Ed) – The Radical Reader
Aleksandar Hemon – The Lazarus Project
Seamus Heaney – North
Christopher Hill – The World Turned Upside Down
Reginald Hill – On Beulah Height
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day
Jerome K Jerome – Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
Ben Jonson – Volpone
Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis and other stories
John Keats – Collected Poems
Philip Larkin – The Whitsun Weddings
A L Lloyd – Folk Song in England
Christopher Marlowe – The Tragical History of Dr Faustus
Thomas Middleton – Women Beware Women
George Orwell – The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters Vols 1-4
Arturo Perez-Reverte – The Dumas Club
Jean Paul Sartre – Huis Clos
W G Sebald – The Rings of Saturn
William Shakespeare - King Lear
Neal Stephenson – Cryptonomicron
Tom Stoppard - Jumpers
J R R Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings
Edward Thomas – The Poems of Edward Thomas
Barry Unsworth – Sacred Hunger
Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest
P G Wodehouse – Carry on, Jeeves

Yes I blame that idealistic young English teacher at our school who handed out a suggestion list for reading novels and literature when I was 15 and I haven't stopped since as far as I can tell.

If I'd spent the time earning money I'd be so much richer and a lot more bored and shallow and dull and ........ than I am even now.