Choosing 1000 novels to read before you die

We didn't want a list of 'greatest novels', or a list of 'favourite novels', but what have we left off our list of 1000 novels everyone must read?
Reading a book
Reading a book. Photograph: Chemistry/Getty Images/Digital Vision

How many novels did you manage to read over Christmas? I usually pack about six books, then barely open a third of them. This year, I managed two. One, though, was for work (very long and quite bad) and only one of them for pleasure (very short and very good). So let's say one: reading one novel per month definitely sounds like a manageable project. If over the course of an entire year you read one novel a month, I'd guess that you could probably fit in one extra as well (perhaps during the summer holidays). Embark on this 13-novels-per-year schedule when you're eight (with, say, Asterix the Gaul or Black Beauty) and stick to it until you're 85 (finishing perhaps with Tolstoy's War and Peace or Thomas Bernhard's Extinction), you'd have read a thousand novels in a lifetime. Easy, isn't it?

I'm exaggerating to make a point. A thousand novels might sound like an awful lot of pages and a dizzying number of words, but the idea behind this series was always to come up with a list that was, in its own way, realistic. Not necessarily in the sense that you might be able to work your way through all of our picks in a month, but in the sense that it can inspire and guide book-lovers of all tastes and ages. The temptation, when coming up with projects such as these, is to plump with much bravado for either an elitist or a populist approach. We could have listed the worthy but dull "1000 greatest novels of all time", including a few more recherché Victorian epics and forgotten gems of late Mexican vanguardist modernism. Or we could have come up with a fun but shallow list of "1000 most popular novels of all time", inevitably adding Paolo Coelho's The Alchemist and Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Neither of these approaches felt quite right. It would have meant either excluding those novels we had read but felt we shouldn't, or those we felt we should read but hadn't.

In the end we came up with a solution that, we hoped, allowed room for both the Mrs Dalloways and Bridget Joneses of this world. Rather than dividing up our series alphabetically or by decade, we invented our own seven genre categories, each of which highlights a different aspect of the novel. First was Love, which prioritised writers with a gift for psychological verisimilitude, such as Austen, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, James, Hardy and Kundera. It was followed by Crime, where plot and suspense were king, and those often sidelined as "genre fiction" — Crichton, King or Rendell — were given credit for their craft.

Comedy tied together "funny" comics and comics more philosophical, ranging from Amis to Wodehouse via Gogol and Mitford. The next category, Family and Self, was tailored to the cusp between 19th century realism and 20th century modernism, comprising both sweeping family sagas and mumbled interior monologues, while State of the Nation dealt mainly with novelists who had a social vision and a political message: Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Zola came into their own. A bold and vivid imagination marked out the titles in Science Fiction and Fantasy, including classics such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Lord of the Rings and Frankenstein. The series concludes with War and Travel, where a narrative gift for evoking the excitement of a journey and the specifics of a place brought together popular classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and more recent works such as WG Sebald's Austerlitz.

None of the these are "hard" categories — which is to say that we couldn't resist sticking a few likely books in unlikely places. Zola's Therese Raquin and Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men aren't obvious contenders for Crime in the same way that books from Edgar Wallace and Henning Mankell are, but it's illuminating to consider them as investigations into the same subject matter.

Naturally, the process of coming up with this list wasn't always easy. To start with, the Guardian Review's editorial team came up with a list of almost 1500 titles. Over a lengthy lunchtime session, the longlist was then whittled down to a shortlist of a thousand. A crack team of our leading critics and experts tried to save us from embarrassment, spotting inaccuracies and oversights.

Certain books triggered particularly heated debates. Was Evelyn Waugh's Scoop a comedy, faux war reportage or a satire on the state of 1930s Britain? Is The Trial an existential investigation of the self, a proto-sci-fi yarn or a philosophical comedy?

But the most interesting thing about any list of books is always the titles that have been left off. We'd like to hear all your suggestions of crucial books that haven't made it onto our list. Tell us your nominations, and explain why they should be on the list in less than 150 words — you can also email them to or post them to The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, by 4 February. We'll publish a list of readers' recommendations in Review next month.

Today's best video