The Modern Library Read Free

of the century, but not published, for various reasons, until the second half. (These include E. M. Forster’s Maurice , Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman .) Many of the novelists we have chosen flourished also in the earlier half of the century – Faulkner, Waugh, Lehmann, du Maurier, Welty, Hemingway, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, Patrick Hamilton, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen: we hope to send readers back to earlier years and so trace an enduring tradition.
    Why 194 choices, and not 200 as in the title of the book? As we chose and wrote, and agreed and disagreed, we came across novels, often famous novels, which we did not appreciate: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for instance, science fiction and fantasy novels, and most historical novels. We read and rejected them knowing that even two omnivorous readers cannot represent every taste. Indignation, as well as pleasure, will, we hope, be among the first reactions to this book. We are well aware of our omissions, and want the reader to spot them. This is a book which requires action on the part of the reader, and so six novels have been chosen by the book-reading public and added to this book for all future editions.
    We have chosen these novels for readers, readers of every age and taste, for those who have never read a novel before and for experts who want to quarrel with our choice; for school students and undergraduates, grandfathers, priests and nuns, Antarctic explorers. There are short novels and long novels, each kind providing a different kind of pleasure. A twelve-year-old could read Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird , a ninety-year-old Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons and be very happy; Thomas Flanagan’s historical masterpiece The Year of the French and Thomas Harris’s startling Red Dragon offer other pleasures, as indeed do Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
    For surrealists, there is Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett, for romantics Rosamond Lehmann, Louis de Bernières and Sybille Bedford, for wits Muriel Spark, J. G. Farrell, for murder fiends Agatha Christie and Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen and Donna Tartt, Roy Heath and P. D. James, not to speak of Bret Easton Ellis; for Cold War fanatics there is Graham Greene and Don DeLillo; for lovers of Dickens and Eliot there is Mistry, Byatt, Smiley, Storey. There are many crime novels and thrillers. Some of the greatest writers of the period are represented by their short stories – V. S. Prichett, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Mary Lavin, Raymond Carver. Most exciting was the discovery that some novels loved first twenty or thirty years ago have improved with age. For instance, Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates , Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, John O’Hara’s From the Terrace feel ready for reassessment. However good we thought them before, they seem finer now.
    There were no quotas for men, women or race in choosing these books. The only constraint on our choice was the lack of availability of books from certain countries. Otherwise, we began and ended with open minds, and the books we chose are here because we loved them.
     
     
    We both have memories from childhood and adolescence of being wrapped up in books. Books were a way of escaping the world, and also of entering it in a way that was more intense; a way of discovering feeling; a working out of how to live. Both of us were constantly reminded, as we did our research, of moments from childhood and adolescence – finding a book we hadn’t read or had forgotten, and after a few pages, suddenly being enclosed, cocooned, absorbed and totally involved in its world; finding ourselves anxious and dispossessed until we took it up again.
    Books were happiness. We were brought up in places where reading was a passion and a joy. It still is for us. And so here they are: books which we offer wholeheartedly to the