The Guardian's "1000 novels everyone must read"

Finland has a lot of "national days of this and that", which are often celebrated on the birthday of a notable Finnish personality. They are not official holidays and it really depends on one's own interest how much or how little you care to mark the occasion. Personally, I mostly forget about these various dates completely and wouldn't even notice they existed if it wasn't for all the Finnish flags being hoisted up. Today, however, I'm actually aware that it's the birthday of Aleksis Kivi, which also stands for the national day of Finnish literature. Aleksis Kivi is renowned as the author of Seven Brothers (Seitsemän veljestä) – one of the first Finnish novels ever, published in 1870 – and he is also considered a Finnish pioneer in the genre of realism, and one of the first people over here to make their entire living by writing – though this never quite worked out as well as Kivi might have wished and his life was unstable both mentally and financially.

Well, my relationship with Finnish literature is what it is, but as I was planning a bookish blog post anyway, I will take this chance to appreciate literature in a more global sense. So here follows the original post which I planned some days ago and which now fits in very conveniently with the national day of literature.

While the BBC booklist went around the internet last spring, The Guardian's list of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read that had been compiled in 2009 re-surfaced. This list had been made by the Guardian's review team and a panel of expert judges, rather than by a public poll. I hope that readers everywhere will choose their reading according to their own interests (and occasionally because the teacher said so) instead of feeling pressure from some "definitive" list, but of course it was very interesting to see what this list looked like – and how I measured up against it myself. You can get your score on List Challenges. Here is what I have read out of the list:

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Emma by Jane Austen

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

That's 33 novels, which makes 3,3% out of the list. There were also a couple of books on the list that I started but never finished: Lord of the Flies by William Golding, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. The first two I gave up because I got too bored, but I really don't understand why I never finished the last book of His Dark Materials, because I was absolutely fascinated by the first two. I must have been busy with other stuff and put the book aside in order to return to it at a better time. I'll have to keep that in mind. I've also read City of Glass, which is one part of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy – I didn't think much of it, it was one of those compulsory reads for a University course. 

There were also many books on that list that I will definitely be reading some day. I just made myself a "near-future reading list" (meaning "I won't take up any other reading till I've finished these") which happens to include eight books from the Guardian list. (My "far-future reading list" is vague and constantly changing, with no time limits except "before I die" and includes all the Charles Dickens books, for example.)