I have always been an inveterate list maker. Only in the last day or so I have treated Bluesky to two lists, a one-off post listing ten bands/musicians that I have seen in live performance, and a somewhat unwise commitment to 30 days of posting books that I have read and also seen in a film or TV adaptation. I can’t help it.

So obviously I leapt upon the Guardian’s 100 Best Novels list and was slightly smug to find that I had read 68 of the 100. Of course, I then started to think about the books that should (IMHO) be there but aren’t, and the strange gaps in my compulsive and voracious reading over 60+ years that this list exposed.

The most egregious gap is Virginia Woolf. I have read Orlando, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, but that’s all. There’s no good reason for this, and I feel I must do something about it. I’ll start with Mrs Dalloway, I think.

Henry James rates three entries, but I have only read The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers (both notably short by James’ standards). I have over the years made forays into Portrait of a Lady but have been defeated each time, and I don’t feel terribly inclined to have another go.

I have read no Faulkner at all. This may be because M did As I Lay Dying for A level and hated every minute of it, and although our tastes in books were often a bit different, I think his loathing has given me low expectations for reading pleasure. That may be something I should remedy, but I probably won’t go for As I Lay Dying.

The only Nabokov I’ve read is his autobiography, Speak, Memory, which I read whilst working on my thesis on Butor and Sebald (in relation to the latter). I have a resistance to Lolita, so maybe I will try Pale Fire.

And I’ve read nothing by Willa Cather but have been told firmly by a friend whose reading advice I usually take note of that I should crack on and read her.

There are also two books on the list of which I had never heard – neither the title nor the author’s name had ever impinged on my consciousness. Those two – Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo, and The Known World by Edward P Jones – have been added to my TBR list.

And what about the no. 1? In the end, although I’ve spent 40 years arguing with my sister-in-law that Bleak House is in fact the greatest novel in the English language, I don’t begrudge Middlemarch its place at the top. But I do take a very dim view of Bleak House‘s placing at only 12th on the list, and no Dickens in the top 10. I’d keep Middlemarch and Bleak House as kind of jockeying for that top spot. They’re both magnificent.

I have, of course, been pondering what I would add. If I kept all those on the list that I have read, I could choose another 32. Obviously, I have done. And here they are, in no particular order.

Michel Butor – Passing Time; Jon McGregor – If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things; Pierre Choderlos de Laclos – Dangerous Liaisons; Anne Bronte – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Albert Camus – The Stranger; Heinrich Böll – The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum; Alan Garner – Red Shift; Ian McEwan – Atonement; Stella Gibbons – Cold Comfort Farm; Nella Larson – Passing; Peter Carey – True Story of the Kelly Gang; Yaa Gyasi – Homegoing; John Irving – A Prayer for Owen Meany; Emile Zola – Germinal; John Galsworthy – The Forsyte Saga; Paul Scott – Jewel in the Crown; Louise Doughty – Fires in the Dark; Simone de Beauvoir – A Woman Destroyed; Honoré de Balzac – Colonel Chabert; Susan Hill – Strange Meeting; Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Stephen King – The Stand; Kate Atkinson – Life After Life; François Mauriac – Thérèse Desqueyroux; John le Carré – The Perfect Spy; Winifred Holtby – South Riding; Susannah Clarke – Piranesi; Ali Smith – Autumn; Elizabeth Gaskell – North and South; Brit Bennett – The Vanishing Half; Francis Spufford – Light Perpetual; Giorgio Bassani – The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

I’m not going to explain or justify those choices. After all, no one actually seriously thinks it is possible to determine objectively the 100 best novels in English. Reading a novel is not a scientific process. My response to any novel I read is a complex interweaving of ideas and memories, it draws upon everything else I’ve read. And if my predominant feeling on reaching the final page is ‘that was very cleverly done’, it’s unlikely to make my list. The books I’ve chosen are all very cleverly done, but they draw you into the narrative so that you’re not conscious of the mechanisms. Michel Butor’s Passing Time was the basis for my PhD thesis, and for the purposes of the thesis I analysed its structure and time frame in considerable detail. But when I first read it, I experienced that structure and time frame, without knowing exactly what Butor was up to.

The books on my list (and many others) have made me who I am. I can recall the experience of reading them, the sense of both satisfaction and sadness that accompanies reaching the final page, the desire to read everything else by that author, or to explore further something about the world or the time that author describes. For some I can still recall, decades after I last read them, odd phrases (‘Not really now not any more’, ‘Steady the Buffs’, ‘Darkness fell’). I can recall my emotional response, often as powerful on re-reading as it was that first time. And I’m not just talking tears – laughter may be in shorter supply on my list but there are books that, at least somewhere along the way, make me laugh out loud. I know more about the Raj, about the porajmos, about the phenomenon of ‘passing’, because the novels I read led me in turn to read more, fiction and non-fiction. My sympathies, to draw on George Eliot’s remarks on the benefits of the arts, have been expanded by each of these books, and I am much the richer for every one.

Of course, if I were to repeat this exercise in another ten years, I would probably tweak this list a little. Much of it would remain though, having been thoroughly tested by time and re-reading.

Every time a list like this is produced, some people get very cross, about what’s included and what’s not. That baffles me. I find it intriguing to see that books that I’ve never read are so valued by others, and even that books that I didn’t care for have shaped someone else’s life. I hope that anyone who reads my selection will be intrigued, and may even decide to read something that they hadn’t come across before or had not thought they would like. If you’re in the latter camp, I’d be delighted to hear from you.