Glenda Larke

David and I have a lot in common. We both write fantasy. We both read history at Uni. We’re both birders. We both like Australia. (I suspect if you want to meet David, the Aussiecon4 in Melbourne might be a good place to go.) So, a birdwatching – Australia-fan – history-buff – fantasy writer. What more can you ask of a man?

I read David’s five-book Winds of the Forelands last year, and really enjoyed it. In fact as I read the first book (Rules of Ascension), I decided he must know a lot about the rules of the Malaysian sultanates and ascension to the monarchy in Malaysia, where the King is – well, sort of – elected…

Apart from writing a rattling good tale filled with memorable characters, he also showed he had a marvellous understanding of how prejudice works, and how hatreds are bred, and the perils of defining a person by his race. A wonderful read, and I’m not saying that just ‘cos David will kill me if I don’t. He’s far too nice.

Want to know more about his new series The Blood of the Southlands? (Horseman’s Gambit is book 2). Take a look here for what David has to say.

Sharon over at Bibliobibuli drew attention to this, a list from the Telegraph of 100 novels everyone should read. Hmmm. Apparently in reverse order of importance. Ok, let’s have some fun – have you read ’em all?

The bold are the ones I have read from start to finish in the full version. 47 all told.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Of course!
The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams Of course!
One Thousand and One Nights Anon Hmm. Only the expurgated version.
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie Never finished it.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin Hmm. Saw the opera – does that count?
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
The Red and the Black by Stendhal Saw the film in French – can’t remember if I have also read the book.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Germinal by Emile Zola
The Stranger by Albert Camus Read part of it in French and gave up
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
Crash by JG Ballard
A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz The first two books anyway
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
London Fields by Martin Amis
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass Never finished it
Austerlitz by WG Sebald
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark Can’t remember if I read the book. Remember the film…
The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Rabbit books by John Updike
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Ulysses by James Joyce First page only
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
A Passage to India by EM Forster
1984 by George Orwell
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene Possibly
The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Disgrace by JM Coetzee
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust I did try…
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville I did try…I swear
Middlemarch by George Eliot Oh lord. The most important? I did try this one too. Truly. Read a few chapters in fact… “One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf. Ok, always knew I was a kid at heart!