1. Some people search for the truth in order to be free. For Sadyah Zapanta Lopez, Genevieve L. Asenjo's protagonist in her debut novel Lumbay ng Dila, the truth will only be revealed when she finally get to meet and hear the stories of her grandfather, former Antique Assemblyman Marcelo N. Lopez, and mother, Teresa Checa Z. Lopez, aka Kumander Rafflesia of the Coronacion Chiva Command in Central Panay. This establishes the novel's interest in political history more than just domestic drama--in the continuing struggle for power & justice, from the left, and from those who try to live in the right, despite conflicting sympathies.

Sadyah was born to revolutionary parents in the mountain, similar to Jun Cruz Reyes' Rebo in Etsa-puwera. Literary homage actually begins with Jose Rizal's Crisostomo Ibarra who wanted to build a schoolhouse; but here Sadyah was more successful in having her Balay Sugidanun built--a storytelling house with books, DVDs and internet available to people of her hometown. Filipino literary works more explicitly mentioned in the novel include Sunlight on Broken Stones (by Cirilo F. Bautista, who was incidentally Asenjo's mentor for this novel that was also her dissertation in DLSU), Barter in Panay (Ricaredo Demetillo), Alipato (Benilda S. Santos), Bago ang Babae (Rebecca T. Añonuevo), and Ben Singkol (F. Sionil Jose).

Sadyah is also a poet, and Lumbay ng Dila here is actually the title of her first poetry book in Kiniray-a with Filipino translations, and also of one of her poems which was quoted in full. She was also working on a novel about a speculative love story between Rizal and Magdalena Jalandoni, a Hiligaynon writer, because "she no longer wanted to tell stories and write poems about the realities that confront her everyday."

2. While Sadyah's life in Manila as a creative writer and professor of literature is conditioned by impermanence--by having to move from one rented space (apartment, condo unit) to another, her center always goes back to Barasanan, the "only place that could make her cry," a barrio in the town of Dao in Antique. Early in the novel, there was a need to establish the artistic outputs from her hometown, thanks to a priest musician and a poetess now residing in the US. The novel here becomes an almanac of the town's flora (manzanilla, herba buena, lampunaya, bogambilya, among many, many others), as it also becomes a dictionary of cultural terms which Filipinos who do not come from Panay were more likely to be ignorant of: sambayang, busalian, baras, buyong, tabungos, kingke, manunggal.

3. Sadyah's relationships with men were symptomatic of the Filipino's imagination of her other, who is paradoxically one with herself--the Chinese (Stephen Chua), the Muslim (Ishmael), the foreigner (Priya Iyer). Her encounters with each of them are also invitations and opportunities for her to tell stories. Her stories either go back to the myths (Tungkung Langit & Alunsina) and legends (Maragtas), or are punctuated by historical events (First Quarter Storm, EDSA 1, 9/11).

We tell stories because of this curse of the past: it can be forgotten, and what we know of it is ultimately based on people who claimed knowledge of it. Novels then become a continuing reintroduction of the pasts that we in turn continually forget.

4. Popular culture and technology that populate Asenjo's novel are not just functions of verisimilitude. There is a dominance of proper names here (even a pen is not just a pen, it's Reynolds) that they become projections of a particular class and consciousness. These are central to the novel's critique of mass and high culture, of our imagination of the necessary, of necessity, and it climaxed in a chapter-length dream sequence near the end of the novel, which is also a creative commentary on globalization and the continuing dislocations of individuals and the relationships they attempt to forge. For this was the root of our tongue's sorrow, the lumbay ng dila: whatever we taste, and say, is not--cannot be--fully ours.

1. Trese, written by Budjette Tan and illustrated by KaJo Baldisimo, is a thirteen-part comic series published in three book compilations: Murder on Balete Drive (Cases 1 to 4), Unreported Murders (Cases 5 to 8), and Mass Murders (Cases 8 to 13). Notice the insistence on/of murder: here were intended killings--deaths that needed to be resolved in a crime fiction fashion with supernatural twists.

Our protagonist is Alexandra Trese, the "sixth child of the sixth child" from the tribe of Trese. She, who was destined to become the "city's warrior and healer," solved the mysteries behind cases such as the death of a white lady, a tikbalang in a drag-race killing spree, a movie star getting killed during a film shoot--with the help of her accomplices the Kambal (whose origin was actually related to the novel's main villain), and informants Nuno, the wind-people of the Amihan & Habagat tribes, and Santelmo. The roots of these entities in Filipino lower mythology are deconstructed as Tan took them as his own, challenging the limitations in vision of popular flicks such as the Shake, Rattle & Roll series.

The earlier cases are stories almost independent of each other, with Alexandra solving cases here and there. Book 3 brings us back to the past when Alexandra was still an apprentice to her father Anton. Just like in most series, back stories proved important to understand the present--better, if not fully. As the series neared the end, the action intensifies, the narratives get tighter and more connected for a more unsettling ending, and the scope becomes wider and somewhat political when it made commentaries on militarization and acts of terrorism in many areas of the country.

2. Tan's stories and Baldisimo's inks reimagined some of the Filipino texts, mythologies, & urban legends (the most popular might be the white lady at the Balete Drive and the man-snake supposedly residing at the basement of a mall)--something which is not difficult to compare with what the TV series Supernatural did with American folk legends in its first season. Trese acknowledged its debts to Neil Gaiman's, among other works. The most interesting story, which is not necessarily as integral to the main narrative as the other stories, is Tan's early melodramatic take on the plight of superheroes when Trese paid homage to Mars Ravelo's Darna and took an unexpected turn.

3. Dark maps with identifiable place and street names found in Metro Manila (such as C-5, Malate, Quiapo, Tomas Morato, Mother Ignacia, Kalayaan, Ortigas) served as story dividers. The sources of our fears lived (with us, amongst us) in the city, in the banality of our everyday lives--something which Tony Perez achieved literarily for Cubao in his fiction. The ones from the forests and mountains of our pasts, the gods and demons of the ancients, had moved with us into the city--and paved the ways to terrors we thought completely forgotten, the kind of fright we must have missed so much and so we celebrate when we glimpse a few sides of it in works such as Trese.

Last year Guardian ran a series called 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read, and divided the installments according to themes: Love, Crime, Comedy, Family & Self, Science Fiction & Fantasy, War & Travel, and State of the Nation. Later they added a few more titles in a series they called The Ones That Got Away, which was supposedly the readers' recuperation to the editors' oversights. I combined the two lists and arranged the titles according to author's first name. The ones that got away are marked with an asterisk after the year of publication.

As you can see, the combined list does not even reach a thousand. I double-checked and found out that the titles in their installments do not perfectly correspond to the ones in their "definitive list." For instance, Virginia Woolf was not in the Family & Self installment, certainly a major slip, but was later in their definitive list. This is, needless to say, not their definitive list. Titles read in Atisan Novels are linked.

1. A Sivanandan: When Memory Dies (1997)*
2. Abbé Prévost: Manon Lescaut (1731)
3. Ahdaf Soueif: The Map of Love (1999)
4. AG Macdonnell: England, Their England (1933)
5. AL Kennedy: Day (2007)
6. Alain-René Lesage: Gil Blas (L'Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane) (1715- 1735)
7. Alan Bennett: The Uncommon Reader (2007)
8. Alan Furst: Night Soldiers (1988)*
9. Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)
10. Alan Hollinghurst: The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)
11. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons: Watchmen (1986-87)*
12. Alan Paton: Cry, The Beloved Country (1948)
13. Alan Warner: Morvern Callar (1995)
14. Alasdair Gray: Lanark (1981)
15. Alastair Maclean: The Guns of Navarone (1957)
16. Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
17. Albert Camus: The Plague (1947)
18. Albert Cohen: Belle du Seigneur (1968)*
19. Alberto Moravia: The Time of Indi?erence (1929)
20. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
21. Aldous Huxley: Crome Yellow (1921)
22. Aldous Huxley: Island (1962)*
23. Alejo Carpentier: The Kingdom of This World (1949)
24. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
25. Alessandro Manzoni: The Betrothed (1827)
26. Alex Chance: The Final Days (2008)*
27. Alex Garland: The Beach (1996)
28. Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-45)
29. Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers (1844)
30. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
31. Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)
32. Alfred Hayes: In Love (1953)*
33. Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
34. Alice Munro: Who Do You Think You Are? (1978)
35. Alice Walker: The Color Purple (1982)
36. Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs (1984)
37. Alison Macleod: The Wave Theory of Angels (2005)*
38. Amin Maalouf: Samarkand (1989)
39. Anaïs Nin: Delta of Venus (1978)
40. André Brink: A Dry White Season (1979)
41. André Gide: Strait Is the Gate (1909)
42. André Gide: The Counterfeiters (1925)
43. André Gide: The Immoralist (1902)
44. André Malraux: La Condition Humaine (1933)
45. Andrew O'Hagan: Personality (2003)
46. Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
47. Andrey Kurkov: Death and the Penguin (1996)
48. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
49. Angela Carter: Wise Children (1991)
50. Angela Thirkell: Before Lunch (1939)
51. Angela Thirkell: Trooper to the Southern Cross (1934)*
52. Angus Wilson: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956)
53. Anita Brookner: Look at Me (1983)
54. Anita Loos: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925)
55. Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
56. Anna Sewell: Black Beauty (1877)
57. Anne Enright: The Gathering (2007)
58. Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
59. Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
60. Annie Proulx: The Shipping News (1993)
61. Anthony Berkeley: The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929)
62. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)
63. Anthony Burgess: Earthly Powers (1980)
64. Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
65. Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)
66. Anthony Powell: Afternoon Men (1931)
67. Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers (1857)
68. Anthony Trollope: The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)
69. Anthony Trollope: The Way We Live Now (1875)
70. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
71. Antonia White: Frost in May (1933)
72. Aphra Behn: Oroonoko or The Royal Slave (1688)
73. Armistead Maupin: Tales of the City (1978)
74. Arnaldur Indridason: Silence of the Grave (2001)
75. Arnold Bennett: Clayhanger (1910)
76. Arnold Bennett: Riceyman Steps (1923)*
77. Arnold Bennett: The Old Wives' Tale (1908)
78. Art Spiegelman: Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1973-1991)
79. Arthur C Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)
80. Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon (1940)
81. Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things (1997)
82. AS Byatt: Possession (1990)
83. AS Byatt: The Virgin in the Garden (1978)
84. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)
85. August Strindberg: The Red Room (1879)
86. Bao Ninh: The Sorrow of War (1994)
87. Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible (1998)*
88. Barbara Pym: Excellent Women (1952)
89. Barbara Pym: Less Than Angels (1955)
90. Barbara Vine: A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986)
91. Barbara Vine: A Fatal Inversion (1987)
92. Barbara Vine: King Solomon's Carpet (1991)
93. Baroness Emmuska Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)
94. Barry Hines: A Kestrel for a Knave (1968)
95. Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
96. Benjamin Disraeli: Sybil or The Two Nations (1845)
97. Bernard Cornwell: Sharpe's Eagle (1981)
98. Bernard Malamud: The Assistant (1957)
99. Bernhard Schlink: The Reader (1995)
100. Bernice Rubens: I Sent a Letter to My Love (1975)*
101. Beryl Bainbridge: According to Queeney (2001)
102. Beryl Bainbridge: Master Georgie (1998)
103. Beryl Bainbridge: The Bottle Factory Outing (1974)
104. Bibhutibhishan Banerji: Pather Panchali (1929)*
105. Bohumil Hrabal: I Served the King of England (1983)
106. Booth Tarkington: Penrod (1914)
107. Booth Tarkington: The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)
108. Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago (1957)
109. Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
110. Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho (1991)
111. Brian Moore: The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955)
112. Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
113. BS Johnson: The Unfortunates (1969)
114. Carl Hiaasen: Tourist Season (1986)
115. Carol Shields: Unless (2002)
116. Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
117. Carson McCullers: The Member of the Wedding (1946)
118. Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon: No Bed for Bacon (1941)
119. Cees Nooteboom: All Souls Day (1999)
120. Cesare Pavese: The Moon and the Bonfire (1949)
121. Chaim Potok: My Name is Asher Lev (1972)
122. Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
123. Charles Dickens: Bleak House (1852-53)
124. Charles Dickens: David Copperfield (1849-50)*
125. Charles Dickens: Dombey and Son (1848)
126. Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (1861)
127. Charles Dickens: Hard Times (1854)
128. Charles Dickens: Little Dorrit (1855-57)
129. Charles Dickens: Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)
130. Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist (1838)
131. Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers (1837)
132. Charles Frazier: Cold Mountain (1997)
133. Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
134. Charles Portis: True Grit (1968)*
135. Charles Simmons: Belles Lettres Papers: A Novel (1987)
136. Charles Webb: The Graduate (1963)
137. Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre (1847)
138. Charlotte Brontë: Shirley (1849)
139. Charlotte Brontë: Villette (1853)
140. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Daisy Chain (1856)*
141. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
142. Chester Himes: A Rage in Harlem (1957)
143. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)*
144. China Miéville: The Scar (2002)
145. Christina Stead: The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
146. Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
147. Christopher Isherwood: Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935)
148. Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
149. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
150. CJ Sansom: Dissolution (2003)
151. Clarice Lispector: Near to the Wild Heart (1990)*
152. Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
153. Colette: The Vagabond (1910)
154. Colin Dexter: Last Seen Wearing (1976)
155. Colin Dexter: The Remorseful Day (1999)
156. Colin MacInnes: Absolute Beginners (1959)
157. Colm Tóibín: The Blackwater Lightship (1999)
158. Compton Mackenzie: Whisky Galore (1947)
159. Cora Sandel: Alberta and Jacob (1926)
160. Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses (1992)
161. Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian (1985)
162. Cormac McCarthy: No Country for Old Men (2005)
163. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
164. CS Forester: The African Queen (1935)
165. CT Rawi Hage: De Niro's Game (2006)
166. Dacia Maraini: The Silent Duchess (1990)
167. Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
168. Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)*
169. Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders (1722)
170. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719)
171. Daniel Defoe: Roxana (1724)
172. Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
173. Daphne du Maurier: My Cousin Rachel (1951)
174. Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca (1938)
175. Daphne du Maurier: The Parasites (1949)
176. Dashiell Hammett: Red Harvest (1929)
177. Dashiell Hammett: The Glass Key (1931)
178. Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon (1930)
179. David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
180. David Lodge: Changing Places (1975)
181. David Lodge: Nice Work (1988)
182. David Lodge: The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965)*
183. David Madsen: Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf (1995)
184. David Malouf: Remembering Babylon (1993)
185. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
186. David Nobbs: The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1975-78)*
187. David Peace: Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999)
188. David Peace: Nineteen Seventy Seven (2000)
189. Denis Diderot: Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (1796)
190. Denis Johnson: Tree of Smoke (2007)*
191. Derek Raymond: I Was Dora Suarez (1990)*
192. DH Lawrence: Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960)
193. DH Lawrence: Sons and Lovers (1913)
194. DH Lawrence: The Rainbow (1915)
195. DH Lawrence: Women in Love (1920)
196. Dodie Smith: I Capture the Castle (1948)
197. Don DeLillo: Underwold (1997)
198. Don DeLillo: White Noise (1985)
199. Donald Westlake: Drowned Hopes (1990)*
200. Donna Tartt: The Secret History (1992)
201. Doris Lessing: Canopus in Argos (1979-83)*
202. Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
203. Doris Lessing: The Grass is Singing (1950)
204. Dorothy L Sayers: Murder Must Advertise (1933)
205. Dorothy L Sayers: Whose Body? (1923)
206. Dorothy Richardson: Pointed Roofs (1915)
207. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
208. Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
209. Douglas Coupland: Microserfs (1995)
210. E Phillips Oppenhein: The Great Impersonation (1920)
211. E Phillips Oppenheim: The Strange Boarders of Palace Crescent (1934)
212. EC Bentley: Trent's Last Case (1913)
213. Ed McBain: Cop Hater (1956)
214. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
215. Edgar Wallace: The Four Just Men (1905)
216. Edith Templeton: Gordon (1966)*
217. Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome (1911)*
218. Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence (1920)
219. Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth (1905)
220. Edmund Crispin: The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944)
221. Edna O'Brien: The Country Girls (1960)*
222. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
223. EF Benson: Queen Lucia (1920)
224. EL Doctorow: The Book of Daniel (1971)
225. EL Doctorow: The March (2005)*
226. Elfriede Jelinek: The Piano Teacher (1983)
227. Elias Canetti: Auto-da-Fé (1935)
228. Elizabeth Bowen: The Death of the Heart (1938)
229. Elizabeth Bowen: The Heat of the Day (1948)
230. Elizabeth Bowen: The Last September (1929)
231. Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford (1853)
232. Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton (1848)
233. Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South (1855)
234. Elizabeth Gaskell: Ruth (1853)
235. Elizabeth Jenkins: The Tortoise and the Hare (1954)
236. Elizabeth Smart: At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945)
237. Elizabeth Taylor: Angel (1957)
238. Elizabeth von Arnim: The Caravaners (1909)*
239. Elmore Leonard: 52 Pick-Up (1974)
240. Elmore Leonard: Get Shorty (1990)
241. Elsa Morante: Arturo's Island: A Novel (1957)
242. Elsa Morante: History (1974)
243. EM Delafield: The Provincial Lady (1930)
244. EM Forster: A Passage to India (1924)
245. EM Forster: A Room With a View (1908)
246. EM Forster: Howards End (1910)
247. Émile Zola: L'Assommoir (1877)*
248. Émile Zola: The Debacle (1892)
249. Émile Zola: Therese Raquin (1867)
250. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights (1847)
251. Eric Ambler: The Mask of Dimitrios (1939)
252. Eric Hodgins: Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House (1946)
253. Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
254. Erich Segal: Love Story (1970)
255. Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms (1929)
256. Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
257. Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
258. Erskine Caldwell: Tobacco Road (1932)
259. Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands (1903)
260. Esther Freud: Hideous Kinky (1992)
261. Evelyn Waugh: Black Mischief (1932)
262. Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall (1928)
263. Evelyn Waugh: Men at Arms (1952)
264. Evelyn Waugh: Put Out More Flags (1942)
265. Evelyn Waugh: Scoop (1938)
266. Evelyn Waugh: The Loved One (1948)
267. Evelyn Waugh: Vile Bodies (1930)
268. F Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night (1934)
269. F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)
270. Fanny Burney: Evelina (1778)
271. Fay Weldon: The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983)
272. Flann O'Brien: At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
273. Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
274. Flora Thompson: Lark Rise to Candleford (1945)
275. FM Mayor: The Rector's Daughter (1924)
276. Ford Madox Ford: Parade's End (1924-28)
277. Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier (1915)
278. Frances Iles: Malice Aforethought (1931)
279. Francis Coventry: The History of Pompey the Little (1751)
280. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
281. Françoise Sagan: Bonjour Tristesse (1954)
282. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
283. Frank Norris: McTeague (1899)
284. Frank Norris: The Octopus (1901)*
285. Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
286. Frederick Forsyth: The Day of the Jackal (1971)
287. Frederick Manning: The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929)*
288. Frederick Marryat: The Children of the New Forest (1847)
289. Friedrich Durrenmatt: The Pledge (1958)
290. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment (1866)
291. Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
292. Gabriel García Márquez: Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
293. Gabriel Garcia Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
294. Gao Xingjian: Soul Mountain (1990)*
295. Garrison Keillor: Lake Wobegon Days (1985)
296. Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
297. Geoffrey Household: Rogue Male (1939)
298. Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle: Molesworth (2000)
299. George Eliot: Adam Bede (1859)
300. George Eliot: Daniel Deronda (1876)
301. George Eliot: Middlemarch (1872)
302. George Eliot: Silas Marner (1861)
303. George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss (1860)
304. George Gissing: New Grub Street (1891)
305. George Gissing: The Odd Women (1893)
306. George MacDonald Fraser: Flashman (1969)
307. George Meredith: The Egoist (1879)
308. George Meredith: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859)
309. George Orwell: Animal Farm (1945)
310. George Orwell: Burmese Days (1934)
311. George Pelecanos: Hard Revolution (2004)
312. George Pelecanos: The Big Blowdown (1996)
313. George RR Martin: A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-)
314. George V Higgins: The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972)
315. Georges Simenon: The Blue Room (1965)
316. Georges Simenon: The Madman of Bergerac (1932)
317. Gerald Durrell: My Family and Other Animals (1956)
318. Gerald Hanley: Consul at Sunset (1951)*
319. Gerald Hanley: See You in Yasukuni (1969)*
320. Gerald Kersh: Night and the City (1938)*
321. Gerard Woodward: I'll Go to Bed at Noon (2004)
322. Giorgio Bassani: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962)
323. Giovanni Guareschi: The Little World of Don Camillo (1948)
324. Giuseppe di Lampedusa: The Leopard (1958)
325. GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
326. Glen Duncan: Death of an Ordinary Man (2004)*
327. Gore Vidal: Williwaw (1946)
328. Graham Greene: A Gun For Sale (1936)
329. Graham Greene: Brighton Rock (1938)
330. Graham Greene: Our Man in Havana (1958)
331. Graham Greene: The End of the Affair (1951)
332. Graham Greene: The Ministry of Fear (1943)
333. Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory (1940)
334. Graham Greene: The Third Man (1950)
335. Graham Greene: Travels With My Aunt (1969)
336. Graham Swift: Waterland (1983)
337. Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999)
338. Günter Grass: The Tin Drum (1959)
339. Gustave Flaubert: Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881)
340. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary (1856)
341. Gustave Flaubert: Sentimental Education (1869)
342. Guy de Maupassant: Bel-Ami (1885)
343. Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
344. H Rider Haggard: King Solomon's Mines (1885)
345. H Rider Haggard: She (1887)
346. Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
347. Harper Lee: To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)
348. Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
349. Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood (1987)
350. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
351. HE Bates: Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944)
352. HE Bates: Love for Lydia (1952)
353. Heinrich Böll: The Bread of Those Early Years (Das Brot der frühen Jahre) (1955)*
354. Helen Dunmore: The Siege (2001)*
355. Helen Fielding: Bridget Jones's Diary (1996)
356. Henning Mankell: Sidetracked (1995)
357. Henri Alain-Fournier: Le Grand Meaulnes (1913)
358. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews (1742)
359. Henry Fielding: Tom Jones (1749)
360. Henry Green: Living (1929)
361. Henry Handel Richardson: Maurice Guest (1908)
362. Henry Handel Richardson: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930)
363. Henry Howarth Bashford: Augustus Carp, Esq By Himself — Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man (1924)
364. Henry James: Portrait of a Lady (1881)
365. Henry James: The Ambassadors (1903)
366. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
367. Henry James: The Wings of the Dove (1902)
368. Henry James: Washington Square (1880)
369. Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer (1934)
370. Henry Roth: Call It Sleep (1934)
371. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick or, The Whale (1851)
372. Herman Melville: The Confidence Man (1857)
373. Herman Wouk: The Caine Mutiny (1951)
374. Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil (1945)
375. Hermann Hesse: Narziss and Goldmund (1930)
376. Hermann Hesse: Steppenwolf (1927)
377. Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
378. HG Wells: Tono Bungay (1909)
379. HG Wells: The History of Mr Polly (1910)
380. HG Wells: The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)
381. HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
382. HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
383. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
384. Honoré de Balzac: Eugénie Grandet (1833)
385. Honoré de Balzac: La Comédie Humaine (1830-1848)
386. Honoré de Balzac: Le Père Goriot (1835)
387. Howard Jacobson: The Mighty Walzer (1999)
388. Howard Spring: Fame Is the Spur (1940)*
389. HP Lovecraft: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941)*
390. Hubert Selby Jr: Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964)
391. Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
392. Iain Banks: The Crow Road (1992)
393. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
394. Iain Sinclair: Downriver (1991)*
395. Ian Fleming: Casino Royale (1953)
396. Ian Fleming: Goldfinger (1959)
397. Ian Fleming: You Only Live Twice (1964)
398. Ian McEwan: Atonement (2001)
399. Ian McEwan: Enduring Love (1997)
400. Ian McEwan: The Child in Time (1987)
401. Ian Rankin: Black & Blue (1997)
402. Ian Rankin: Exit Music (2007)
403. Ian Rankin: The Hanging Garden (1998)
404. Ira Levin: The Boys From Brazil (1976)*
405. Irène Némirovsky: Suite Française (2004)
406. Iris Murdoch: Under the Net (1954)
407. Iris Murdoch: The Black Prince (1973)
408. Irvine Welsh: Trainspotting (1993)
409. Irwin Shaw: The Young Lions (1949)
410. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
411. Isaac Bashevis Singer: Enemies, a Love Story (1972)
412. Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Family Moskat (1950)
413. Ismail Kadare: Chronicle in Stone (1971)
414. Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities (1974)
415. Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
416. Italo Svevo: Confessions of Zeno (1923)
417. Ivan Goncharov: Oblomov (1859)
418. Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons (1862)
419. Ivan Turgenev: First Love (1860)
420. Ivy Compton-Burnett: Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
421. Ivy Compton-Burnett: Parents and Children (1941)*
422. Jacqueline Susann: Valley of the Dolls (1966)
423. Jack London: Martin Eden (1909)
424. Jack London: The Call of the Wild (1903)
425. James Baldwin: Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953)
426. James Buchan: A Good Place to Die (1999)*
427. James Buchan: Heart's Journey (1995)*
428. James Dickey: Deliverance (1970)
429. James Hadley Chase: No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939)
430. James Hilton: Lost Horizon (1933)*
431. James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
432. James Hynes: The Lecturer's Tale — A Novel (2001)
433. James Jones: From Here to Eternity (1951)
434. James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
435. James Joyce: Finnegans Wake (1939)
436. James Kelman: How Late It Was, How Late (1994)
437. James M Cain: Double Indemnity (1943)
438. James M Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
439. James Michener: Tales of the South Paci?c (1847)
440. James Robertson: Joseph Knight (2003)*
441. James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime (1967)
442. James Salter: Light Years (1975)
443. James Salter: The Hunters (1956)
444. Jane Bowles: Two Serious Ladies (1943)
445. Jane Smiley: A Thousand Acres (1991)
446. Jane Smiley: Moo (1995)
447. Jaroslav Hasek: The Good Soldier Svejk (1923)
448. Javier Marías: A Heart So White (1992)
449. Jay McInerney: Bright Lights, Big City (1984)
450. JB Priestley: The Good Companions (1929)
451. Jean Cocteau: Les Enfants Terribles (1929)
452. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
453. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761)
454. Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)
455. Jeanette Winterson: The Passion (1987)
456. Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
457. Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
458. Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex (2002)
459. Jeffrey Eugenides: The Virgin Suicides (1993)
460. Jerome K Jerome: Three Men in a Boat (1899)
461. Jerzy Kosinski: The Painted Bird (1965)
462. Jim Crace: Being Dead (1999)
463. Jim Crace: Quarantine (1997)
464. Jim Thompson: The Getaway (1959)
465. JB Priestly: Angel Pavement (1930)*
466. JG Ballard: Empire of the Sun (1984)
467. JG Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
468. JG Farrell: Troubles (1970)*
469. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)
470. JL Carr: A Month in the Country (1980)
471. JL Carr: A Season in Sinji (1967)
472. JL Carr: The Harpole Report (1972)
473. JM Coetzee: Disgrace (1999)
474. JM Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
475. João Guimarães Rosa: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1956)
476. Joan Didion: Play It As It Lays (1970)
477. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis: Dom Casmurro (1899)
478. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1871)
479. Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
480. Johann David Wyss: The Swiss Family Robinson (1812)
481. Johann Wolfgang Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
482. John Berger: G. (1972)
483. John Buchan: Greenmantle (1916)
484. John Buchan: The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
485. John Cheever: The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)
486. John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
487. John Crowley: Aegypt (1989)*
488. John Crowley: Little, Big; or, The Fairies' Parliament (1981)*
489. John Dickson Carr: The Hollow Man (1935)
490. John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers (1921)
491. John Dos Passos: U.S.A. (1930-36)
492. John Fante: Ask the Dust (1939)*
493. John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)
494. John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
495. John Galsworthy: The Man of Property (1906)
496. John Grisham: A Time to Kill (1989)
497. John Grisham: The King of Torts (2003)
498. John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
499. John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
500. John King: The Football Factory (1996)*
501. John Lanchester: The Debt to Pleasure (1996)
502. John le Carré: The Constant Gardener (2001)
503. John le Carré: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
504. John McGahern: Amongst Women (1990)
505. John Mortimer: Charade (1947)
506. John Mortimer: Titmuss Regained (1990)
507. John Steinbeck: East of Eden (1952)
508. John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men (1937)
509. John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
510. John Updike: Couples (1968)
511. John Updike: The Rabbit Omnibus (1960-90)
512. John Updike: The Witches of Eastwick (1984)
513. John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
514. John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
515. Jon McGregor: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002)*
516. Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections (2001)
517. Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn (1999)
518. Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything Is Illuminated (2002)
519. Jonathan Swift: A Tale of a Tub (1704)
520. Johnston McCulley: The Mark of Zorro (1919)
521. José Maria de Eça de Queiroz: The Crime of Father Amaro (1875)
522. José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
523. Josef Skvorecky: The Miracle Game (1972)
524. Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1902)
525. Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim (1900)
526. Joseph Conrad: Nostromo (1904)
527. Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent (1907)
528. Joseph Conrad: Under Western Eyes (1911)
529. Joseph Conrad: Victory: An Island Tale (1915)
530. Joseph Roth: The Radetzky March (1932)
531. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
532. Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time (1951)
533. Joyce Cary: Mister Johnson (1939)
534. Joyce Cary: The Horse's Mouth (1944)
535. JP Donleavy: A Fairy Tale of New York (1973)
536. Jules Verne: A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864)
537. Jules Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)
538. Julian Barnes: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989)
539. Julian Barnes: Before She Met Me (1982)*
540. Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot (1984)
541. Julian Maclaren-Ross: Of Love and Hunger (1947)
542. Julio Cortazar: Hopscotch (1963)*
543. Junghyo Ahn: Silver Stallion (1990)
544. Junichiro Tanizaki: Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961)
545. Kate Atkinson: Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)
546. Kate Chopin: The Awakening (1899)
547. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day (1989)
548. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
549. Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
550. Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows (1908)
551. Kenzaburo Oe: Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (1969)
552. Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner (2003)
553. Kilgore Trout: Venus on the Half-Shell (1974)
554. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
555. Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim (1954)
556. Knut Hamsun: Hunger (1890)
557. Kobo Abe: The Face of Another (1964)
558. Kurban Said: Ali and Nino (1928)
559. Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
560. Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
561. Lao She: Rickshaw Boy (1936)
562. Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
563. Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey (1768)
564. Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759)
565. Laurie Lee: Cider with Rosie (1959)
566. Lawrence Durrell: Justine (1957)
567. Len Deighton: Bomber (1970)
568. Len Deighton: The Ipcress File (1962)
569. Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (1877)
570. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace (1869)
571. Leonardo Sciascia: To Each His Own (1966)
572. Leonora Carrington: The Hearing Trumpet (1976)
573. Leopoldo Alas Clarin: La Regenta (1884-85)*
574. Leslie Thomas: Tropic of Ruislip (1974)
575. Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
576. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
577. Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Sunset Song (1932)
578. Lionel Shriver: We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)
579. Louis de Bernières: Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1993)*
580. Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
581. Louisa May Alcott: Little Women (1868)
582. LP Hartley: The Go-Between (1953)
583. LP Hartley: The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944)
584. Lynne Reid Banks: The L-Shaped Room (1960)
585. M John Harrison: Light (2002)
586. MacKinlay Kantor: Andersonville (1955)
587. Madame de Lafayette: The Princess of Clèves (1678)
588. Magnus Mills: The Restraint of Beasts (1998)
589. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö: The Laughing Policeman (1968)
590. Malcolm Bradbury: The History Man (1975)
591. Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano (1947)
592. Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre: Fantômas (1911)
593. Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27)
594. Margaret Atwood: Cat's Eye (1988)
595. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
596. Margaret Drabble: The Millstone (1965)
597. Margaret Mitchell: Gone with the Wind (1936)
598. Margery Allingham: The Fashion in Shrouds (1938)*
599. Margery Allingham: The Tiger in the Smoke (1952)*
600. Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
601. Marguerite Duras: The Lover (1984)
602. Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent (1800)
603. Maria Edgeworth: Ennui (1809)
604. Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
605. Marilynne Robinson: Gilead (2004)
606. Mario Puzo: The Godfather (1969)
607. Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis (2003)*
608. Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
609. Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)
610. Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)
611. Mark Twain: Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
612. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
613. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
614. Mark Twain: The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
615. Martin Amis: Money (1984)
616. Martin Amis: The Information (1995)
617. Martin Cruz Smith: Gorky Park (1981)
618. Mary E Braddon: Lady Audley's Secret (1862)
619. Mary McCarthy: The Group (1963)
620. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
621. Max Beerbohm: Zuleika Dobson (1911)
622. Maxim Gorky: Mother (1906)
623. May Sinclair: The Three Sisters (1914)
624. Mervyn Peake: Gormenghast (1950)*
625. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
626. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
627. Michael Crichton: Jurassic Park (1990)
628. Michael Crichton: The Andromeda Strain (1969)
629. Michael Frayn: Spies (2002)
630. Michael Frayn: Towards the End of Morning (1967)
631. Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
632. Michael Green: Squire Haggard's Journal (1975)
633. Michael Innes: Death at the President's Lodging (1936)
634. Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
635. Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
636. Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient (1992)
637. Michael Sadleir: Fanny by Gaslight (1940)*
638. Michael Shaara: The Killer Angels (1974)*
639. Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
640. Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
641. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote (1605)
642. Miguel de Unamuno: Peace in War (1897)
643. Mike Stocks: White Man Falling (2006)
644. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
645. Mikhail Bulgakov: The White Guard (1955)*
646. Mikhail Sholokhov: And Quiet Flows the Don (1934)*
647. Miklos Banffy: They Were Counted (1934)
648. Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978)
649. Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982)
650. MM Kaye: The Far Pavilions (1978)
651. Molly Keane: Good Behaviour (1981)
652. Mordecai Richler: Solomon Gursky Was Here (1990)
653. Mrs Henry Wood: East Lynne (1861)
654. Mulk Raj Anand: Untouchable (1935)
655. Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji (11th century)*
656. Nadine Gordimer: July's People (1981)
657. Naguib Mahfouz: Khan Al-Kahlili (2008)*
658. Naguib Mahfouz: Palace Walk (1956)
659. Nancy Mitford: Love in a Cold Climate (1949)
660. Nancy Mitford: The Pursuit of Love (1945)
661. Nathanael West: The Day of the Locust (1939)
662. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter (1850)
663. Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon (1999)
664. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
665. Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
666. Nella Larsen: Passing (1929)
667. Nelson Algren: The Man with the Golden Arm (1949)
668. Nevil Shute: A Town Like Alice (1950)
669. Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
670. Nicholas Blake: The Beast Must Die (1938)
671. Nicholson Baker: Room Temperature (1990)
672. Nick Hornby: High Fidelity (1995)
673. Nigel Balchin: Darkness Falls from the Air (1942)
674. Nigel Dennis: Cards of Identity (1955)*
675. Nigel Williams: The Wimbledon Poisoner (1990)
676. Nikos Kazantzakis: Zorba the Greek (1946)
677. Nina Bawden: Carrie's War (1973)
678. Noel Streatfeild: Ballet Shoes (1936)
679. Norman Douglas: South Wind (1917)
680. Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948)
681. Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
682. Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
683. Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)
684. Olivia Manning: The Fortunes of War novels (1960-80)
685. Orhan Pamuk: My Name Is Red (1998)
686. Orson Scott Card: Ender's Game (1985)*
687. Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
688. Ousmane Sembène: God's Bit of Wood (1960)
689. Owen Wister: The Virginian (1902)
690. Pat Barker: Regeneration (1991)
691. Patricia Cornwell: Postmortem (1990)
692. Patricia Highsmith: Strangers on a Train (1950)
693. Patricia Highsmith: The Price of Salt (1952)*
694. Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)
695. Patrick Hamilton: Hangover Square (1941)
696. Patrick Hamilton: The Slaves of Solitude (1947)
697. Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
698. Patrick O'Brian: Master and Commander (1969)
699. Patrick Suskind: Perfume (1985)
700. Patrick White: Riders in the Chariot (1961)*
701. Patrick White: The Tree of Man (1955)
702. Patrick White: Voss (1957)
703. Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
704. Paul Auster: The New York Trilogy (1985-86)
705. Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky (1949)
706. Paul Scott: Staying On (1977)
707. Paul Gallico: The Snow Goose (1941)
708. Paul Golding: Senseless (2004)*
709. PD James: A Taste for Death (1986)
710. PD James: Cover Her Face (1962)
711. PD James: The Children of Men (1992)
712. Penelope Fitzgerald: The Blue Flower (1995)
713. Peter Carey: Illywhacker (1985)
714. Peter Carey: Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
715. Peter Carey: True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
716. Peter De Vries: Slouching towards Kalamazoo (1983)
717. Peter Høeg: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (1992)
718. Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
719. Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
720. Philip Kerr: March Violets (1989)*
721. Philip Larkin: A Girl in Winter (1947)
722. Philip Roth: American Pastoral (1997)
723. Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
724. Philip Roth: The Human Stain (2000)
725. Philippa Pearce: Tom's Midnight Garden (1958)*
726. Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Ragazzi (1955)
727. Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782)
728. Piers Paul Read: A Married Man (1979)
729. Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
730. Primo Levi: If Not Now, When? (1982)
731. Rabindranath Tagore: The Home and the World (1916)
732. Rafael Sabatini: Captain Blood His Odyssey (1922)
733. Rafael Sabatini: Scaramouche (1921)
734. Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (1953)
735. Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
736. Randall Jarrell: Pictures from an Institution (1954)
737. Raymond Briggs: When the Wind Blows (1982)
738. Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep (1939)
739. Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye (1953)
740. Raymond Queneau: Zazie in the Metro (1959)
741. RC Sherriff: The Fortnight in September (1931)*
742. RD Blackmore: Lorna Doone (1869)
743. Rebecca West: The Fountain Overflows (1957)
744. Rebecca West: The Return of the Soldier (1918)
745. Reginald Hill: Bones and Silence (1990)
746. René Goscinny: Asterix the Gaul (1959)
747. RH Mottram: The Spanish Farm trilogy (1924-26)*
748. Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero (1929)
749. Richard Condon: The Manchurian Candidate (1959)
750. Richmal Crompton: Just William (1922)
751. Richard Ford: Independence Day (1996)
752. Richard Ford: The Sportswriter (1986)
753. Richard Greaves (George Barr McCutcheon): Brewster's Millions (1902)
754. Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica (1929)
755. Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
756. Richard Llewellyn: How Green Was My Valley (1939)
757. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
758. Richard Powers: The Time of Our Singing (2003)*
759. Richard Price: Lush Life (2008)
760. Richard Rayner: The Cloud Sketcher (2000)*
761. Richard Wright: Native Son (1940)
762. Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road (1961)
763. RJ Ellory: A Quiet Belief in Angels (2007)
764. RK Narayan: The Painter of Signs (1976)
765. Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
766. Robert Graves: Count Belisarius (1938)
767. Robert Graves: I, Claudius (1934)*
768. Robert Harris: Enigma (1995)
769. Robert Harris: Fatherland (1992)
770. Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped (1886)
771. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
772. Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island (1883)
773. Robert Ludlum: The Bourne Identity (1980)
774. Robert Plunkett: My Search for Warren Harding (1983)
775. Robert Stone: A Flag for Sunrise (1981)
776. Robert Tressell: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914)
777. Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
778. Robert Westall: The Machine-Gunners (1975)
779. Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives (1998)
780. Roddy Doyle: The Commitments (1987)
781. Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light (1967)*
782. Rohinton Mistry: A Fine Balance (1995)
783. Rohinton Mistry: Family Matters (2002)
784. Ron Butlin: The Sound of My Voice (1987)
785. Ronald Firbank: Caprice (1917)
786. Ronald Searle: Hurrah for St Trinian's (1948)
787. Ronan Bennett: Havoc In Its Third Year (2004)
788. Rosamond Lehmann: Invitation to the Waltz (1932)
789. Rosamond Lehmann: The Echoing Grove (1953)
790. Rosamond Lehmann: The Weather in the Streets (1936)
791. Rose Macaulay: The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
792. Rose Tremain: Music and Silence (1999)
793. Ross Macdonald: The Underground Man (1971)*
794. Ross Macdonald: The Way Some People Die (1951)*
795. RS Surtees: Handley Cross (1843)
796. Rudolf Erich Raspe: The Surprising Adventures Of Baron Munchausen (1785)
797. Rudyard Kipling: Kim (1901)
798. Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
799. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
800. Ruth Rendell: Judgment in Stone (1977)
801. Ruth Rendell: Live Flesh (1986)
802. Saki: The Unbearable Bassington (1912)
803. Saki: The Westminster Alice (1902)
804. Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (1981)
805. Salman Rushdie: Shame (1983)
806. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
807. Samuel Beckett: Molloy (1951)
808. Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
809. Samuel Butler: The Way of All Flesh (1903)
810. Samuel Johnson: Rasselas (1759)
811. Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
812. Samuel Richardson: Clarissa (1748)
813. Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740)
814. Samuel Selvon: The Lonely Londoners (1956)
815. Sara Paretsky: Blacklist (2003)
816. Sara Paretsky: Toxic Shock (1988)
817. Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
818. Sarah Waters: Fingersmith (2002)
819. Sarah Waters: The Night Watch (2006)
820. Saul Bellow: Herzog (1964)
821. Saul Bellow: Humboldt's Gift (1975)
822. Saul Bellow: More Die of Heartbreak (1987)
823. Saul Bellow: The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
824. Sebastian Barry: A Long Long Way (2005)
825. Sebastian Faulks: Birdsong (1993)
826. Shirley Hazzard: The Transit of Venus (1980)
827. Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
828. Shiva Naipaul: Fireflies (1970)
829. Shusaku Endo: Silence (1966)
830. Shusaku Endo: The Sea and Poison (1958)*
831. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette: Claudine à l'école (1900)
832. Sidone-Gabrille Colette: Chéri (1920)
833. Sinclair Lewis: Elmer Gantry (1927)
834. Sinclair Lewis: Main Street (1920)
835. Siri Hustvedt: What I Loved (2003)*
836. Somerset Maugham: Of Human Bondage (1915)
837. Somerville and Ross: Some Experiences of an Irish RM (1899)*
838. Spike Milligan: Puckoon (1963)
839. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
840. Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
841. Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)
842. Stendhal: The Red and the Black (1830)
843. Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
844. Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
845. Stephen Donalson: chronicles of Thomas Covenant (1977-83)*
846. Stephen King: Dolores Claiborne (1992)
847. Stephen King: Misery (1987)
848. Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
849. Steven Erikson: Malazan Book of the Fallen (1999-)*
850. Stevie Smith: Novel on Yellow Paper (1936)
851. Sue Townsend: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (1982)
852. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
853. Sybille Bedford: A Legacy (1956)
854. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
855. Tabucchi: Sostiene Pereira (1994)*
856. TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
857. Theodore Dreiser: An American Tragedy (1925)
858. Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie (1900)
859. Thomas Bernhard: Extinction (1986)
860. Theodor Fontane: Effi Briest (1896)
861. Thomas Hardy: A Fair of Blue Eyes (1873)*
862. Thomas Hardy: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
863. Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure (1895)
864. Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891)
865. Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
866. Thomas Hardy: The Woodlanders (1887)
867. Thomas Harris: Black Sunday (1975)
868. Thomas Harris: Red Dragon (1981)
869. Thomas Hughes: Tom Brown's School Days (1857)
870. Thomas Keneally: Confederates (1979)
871. Thomas Keneally: Schindler's Ark (1982)
872. Thomas Love Peacock: Headlong Hall (1816)
873. Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
874. Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks (1901)
875. Thomas Mann: Death in Venice (1912)
876. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain (1924)
877. Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
878. Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
879. Thomas Pynchon: V (1963)
880. Thomas Pynchon: Vineland (1990)
881. Thorne Smith: Topper Takes a Trip (1932)
882. Thornton Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)*
883. Tim O'Brien: The Things they Carried (1990)
884. Timothy Mo: Sour Sweet (1982)
885. Tobias Smollett: The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753)
886. Tobias Smollett: The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751)
887. Tobias Smollett: The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748)
888. Tobias Smollett: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)
889. Tom Sharpe: Blott on the Landscape (1975)
890. Tom Sharpe: Porterhouse Blue (1974)
891. Tom Wolfe: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)
892. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
893. Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon (1977)
894. Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye (1970)
895. Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)
896. Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)
897. Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose (1980)
898. Upton Sinclair: The Jungle (1906)
899. Vassilis Vassilikos: Z (1967)
900. Vasily Grossman: Life and Fate (1960)
901. Victor Hugo: Les Misérables (1862)
902. Victor Pelevin: The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2008)
903. Victor Serge: The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1950)
904. Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy (1993)
905. Viktor Shklovsky: Zoo, or Letters Not About Love (1923)*
906. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
907. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita, or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male (1955)
908. Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire (1962)
909. Vladimir Nabokov: Pnin (1957)
910. Voltaire: Candide (1759)
911. VS Naipaul: A Bend in the River (1979)
912. VS Naipaul: A House for Mr Biswas (1961)
913. W Somerset Maugham: Cakes and Ale — Or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930)
914. Walker Percy: The Moviegoer (1961)
915. Walter Greenwood: Love on the Dole (1933)
916. Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
917. Walter Mosley: Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)
918. Walter Scott: Ivanhoe (1819)
919. WE Bowman: The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956)
920. WH Hudson: Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904)
921. WM Thackeray: The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844)
922. Wilfred Sheed: Office Politics (1966)
923. Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868)
924. Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White (1860)
925. Will Self: Great Apes (1997)
926. Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
927. Willa Cather: A Lost Lady (1923)
928. Willa Cather: My Ántonia (1918)
929. Willa Cather: One Of Ours (1922)
930. Willa Cather: The Professor's House (1925)
931. Willem Elsschot: Cheese (1933)
932. William Boyd: A Good Man in Africa (1981)
933. William Boyd: An Ice-Cream War (1982)
934. William Boyd: Any Human Heart (2002)
935. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
936. William Eastlake: The Bamboo Bed (1969)
937. William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying (1930)
938. William Faulkner: Sanctuary (1931)
939. William Gaddis: The Recognitions (1955)
940. William Gerhardie: The Polyglots (1925)
941. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
942. William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
943. William Golding: To the Ends of the Earth trilogy (1980-89)
944. William Irish: Phantom Lady (1942)*
945. William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair (1848)
946. William Maxwell: Chateau (1961)
947. William Maxwell: So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980)
948. William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
949. William Styron: Sophie's Choice (1979)
950. William Trevor: Death in Summer (1998)
951. Winifred Holtby: South Riding (1936)
952. WR Burnett: The Asphalt Jungle (1949)
953. Wu Cheng'en: Monkey (1590s)
954. Yashar Kemal: Memed, My Hawk (1955)
955. Yasunari Kawabata: Beauty and Sadness (1964)
956. Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)
957. Zadie Smith: On Beauty (2005)
958. Zadie Smith: White Teeth (2000)
959. Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

1. In Peter Boxall's ever-tentative 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (which will have its third revision this year) that claims to chronicle "the history of the novel," Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style found a spot, arguing that pioneering anti-novels are necessarily part of the canon. Adam David's The El Bimbo Variations' homage to Queaneau's (among many other creators) earned its own place here in Atisan Novels, despite David's recognition of it as a "book of poetry" in the second printing's afterword.

2. Novel, of course, is not all about story. But if we demand story from David's book it will not fail us: its narrative source was the first two lines of a famous Filipino band's song, "Ang Huling El Bimbo," which was not unlike most of Eraserheads' songs--it has a story, it is not purely lyrical abstractions to which most pop songs exhaust their "creative" energies. It has specific characters, point of view, setting, tension, and insight--and when David decided to make 99 variations of its first two lines ("Kamukha mo si Paraluman/ Nung tayo ay bata pa"), we knew that novelization is not necessarily about a story, but the stories behind a story. Here we come face to face with plurality and endurance--two of the things we sometimes demand of art, aside from beauty, of course, which Paraluman, the simile to the object of the persona's nostalgia, should represent. In the Eraserheads song, the beloved died of the accident; in our lived reality, Paraluman is long gone. Beauty is no more. Beauty becomes memory. We are left with numbers, with probabilities, with the paradoxical attempts to create something new out of restrictive (mostly, traditional or popular) forms: diona, tanaga, dalit, ghost story, detective fiction, erotica. The stories behind the writing of these variations David did not hesitate to expose in the "Notes On These Pages," and to this framing of the book I'd give its better conflict and resolution: a writer revealing his gods and demons, explaining himself, remembering and forgetting and reminding himself of what current Philippine art needs to achieve.

3. But the two lines are not only content (signified), of course; they're also signifier. And so the majority of the experiments here dwelt with the function of words as sign, and their instability because of this, thus their tendency to variate. A missing or added letter or word, a repeated sound, the recurring or avoided letters in lipograms, univocalisms, tautograms, et. al., are a movement away from what we mean, but how we mean things, what we do to create meaning, even if meaning becomes almost obsolete in a world where we do not always value things enough to find time to look at them in 99 different ways.

1. Every city was once a deep forest—that primordial space that cradled the memory of the human race, of her songs and stories. It was the same space that haunted the settings of two of the most classic Tagalog texts, that “madilim and mapanglaw” where Florante was held captive in Francisco Balagtas’ Florante at Laura, and the woods owned by the Ibarras that witnessed the deaths of Sisa and Elias and the promise of a new life for Basilio, in Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere. In Abdon M. Balde Jr.’s first novel, Sa Kagubatan ng Isang Lungsod, the forest lurks amidst the city, and remains the breeding ground for the “fierce beast.”

2. Here nostalgia is not a personal matter—or: nostalgia is experienced by the person only in the sense that it was part of a past that she shared with a particular collective. And so the protagonist Bobby Mercado would be devoured by his job, only to hear the stories of a legendary Bicol via an interesting character in the novel, a tourist guide named Bandoy aka James Bond. Mercado then became a tourist in his own country, experienced estrangement and contradictions even from within himself; meanwhile Balde, as Bicolano, was the real guide, and this return, these retellings, would add a pleasant texture on a nostalgia situated within a detailed narrative about the workings of corruption, in an otherwise typical plot-driven novel, with the intensity of a soap opera finale toward the end.

3. In contrast to Bobby’s, his wife Chit had a different relationship with folk material. In between certificates of attendance to various seminars and conventions, citations for outstanding contributions or performance, management books, souvenirs she collected from her travels around the world, in her room we find Bulfinch’s Mythology, Damiana Eugenio’s Epics and Folklore, and Ibalong by Merito Espinas. Chit also wanted to call her daughter Mayon, but Bobby thought it was “corny”—and so she settled for May. And later, while she was considering the situation of May and Jayson, the latter also her son although yet to be revealed to her, she was reminded of the “lash of fate that came in between Takay and Kanaway,” the cursed lovers in Bicol legends.

Nostalgia is not moral, it is not necessarily good or bad; but it has the aura of the necessary. It presents itself as if the use of and return to folklore is a matter of course in a novel.

1. Hear the Wind Sing is Haruki Murakami's first novel, and, even if the only edition available is the one published by Kodansha in 1987, it is crucial to understand the development of Murakami's fiction for here he introduced the themes that would attract readers around the world in his later novels: mortality, isolation, disappearance. This novel is also considered as the first book in his Trilogy of the Rat that will continue with Pinball, 1973 (also not widely distributed in English) and end with A Wildsheep Chase.

Here was the voice of an I, who was mute until he was fourteen and would interest seemingly disturbed women, just like the woman who only had four fingers on her left hand. There were also suggestions that he was a student-activist (protest rallies, student strikes) , but notice how he relegated this part of himself into the background, as if it was not that important, but later, on a different issue, he would tell the woman with only four fingers on her left had that he was "always forgetting to say whatever's most important," anyway.

2. This slim novel is a testament on writing; the narrator acknowledges it as a novel, and that he wrote these pages while having himself spurred on with beer and cigarettes. Although early on he recognizes that "there is no such thing as perfect writing," he later claims that "at least this writing is my present best."

Murakami created a fictional Derek Heartfield as his narrator's model, "one of those few writers distinguished by an ability to put up a good fight with words." Our narrator would quote from Heartfield's equally fictive works, and this one he said about good writing: "The task of writing consists primarily in recognizing the distance between oneself and the things around one. It is not sensitivity one needs, but a yardstick." Heartfield, who killed himself by jumping off the Empire State Building, was an American--and it probably contributed to early criticisms against Murakami's being too westernized. There's "nothing of value in living authors," and so aside from Heartfield's he would intensively read Flaubert's Sentimental Education, and others, despite a radio dj's warning that reading only isolates a person.

3. It is difficult to create true art when you experience hunger, he thought. "If it's art or literature you're looking for, you'd do well to read what the Greeks wrote. In order for there to be true art, there necessarily has to be slavery." And so this is also somewhat a critique on the production of art as work against the labor that is demanded by a capitalist economy.

Our narrator would be friends with The Rat, a rich guy his age who hated the rich. The Rat was "horribly unread," until he decided to "write a completely different kind of novel," which has no sex and no one will have to die. The Rat began reading Henry James, Moliere, Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ, and dreamed of writing "for the cicadas and frogs and spiders, and for the summer grass and the breeze." But he couldn't write a thing--not one line. Until our narrator would leave the town to go to Tokyo, and would receive a manuscript of The Rat's novel every Christmas, with this dedication (because his birthday's December 24): Happy Bithday and White Christmas--reported to be the initial title of this novel.

1. Originally published in Pilipino Komiks from November 1953 to September 1954, Francisco V. Coching's Lapu-Lapu is a 25-part komiks serial that was reissued in book form by Atlas Publishing in 2009. This is the first graphic novel to be featured here in Atisan Novels. For illustrated novels such as this I will only comment largely on their literary aspect: the use of language to depict beauty, narrative and meaning; its visual aspect I will leave to more qualified critics and practitioners of that particular art.

2. Lapu-Lapu is of course considered the earliest Filipino hero, even before there were Filipinos in the islands not even collectively called the Philippines yet. Filipinos were taught this in early school--that Lapu-Lapu fought against, and eventually killed, the man who claimed to have first voyaged around the world, Ferdinand Magellan. Only much later would students learn, if they were lucky enough, that the source of his heroism was an account by Magellan's chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta. This travel account called Primo Viaggio Intorno al Mondo could be Coching's main source of most historical details in his narrative. These precolonial events we also read in later history textbooks, of course, although rendered in ways less dramatic and descriptive.

Coching's contribution lies in his own imagination of Lapu-Lapu's life outside Pigafetta's gaze. Here Lapu-Lapu had a strong huntress and Sultana, Miraha, for a beloved, and he had to fight against Datu Rahab and the Chinese Kim Long in order to win her hand in marriage, even if he already had her heart secured. His younger sister was Yumina, who fell in love with Arturo, a member of Magellan's fleet. Enrique, Magellan's translator, who considered Lapu-Lapu and his men as his own people, also figured heavily in the narrative. The story was inevitably romantic; it was a hero's story, after all. The story had to end in Lapu-Lapu's success in battle, for why spoil his victory with our privileged knowledge of how things would eventually turn out, only a few decades later, after Legazpi successfully established a colonial system in the islands? Novels have the luxury of a happy ending, of an end, at least.

3. The editor of Atlas admitted that Lapu-Lapu was one of the titles they chose to reissue because "it was part of our history." It was indeed a good marketing choice: I imagine teachers requiring their students (in grade school, and maybe even high school) to read this novel in order to get a glimpse of Lapu-Lapu's life despite the text's obvious fictionality. Jose Rizal, with his novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo and the eventual mass production of their komiks translations, set the tone toward this mass confusion between history and fiction. Meanwhile I look forward to other komiks novels from Atlas.

1. The Judgment is Chart Korbjitti's study of the complicity of communal opinion and traditional sense of normalcy in the destruction of an otherwise virtuous young man. The young man was Fak, who was rumored to take his mentally ill stepmother, Somsong, as wife after the death of his father Foo. Gossip directs the formation of extended narratives, and, interestingly, of actual lives: Fak became an alcoholic in a misguided attempt to avoid the people's judgment. This led to his ultimate ruin.

Meanwhile the people who spread the rumors had their own lives to think about, and Fak's scandal was only something in the periphery of their concerns, without realizing that the stories that only help them pass time was the root of someone else's tragedy.

2. Korbjitti exposed religion's central role in the formation of morality and its paradoxical difficulty in maintaining such morals for its own subjects. Fak's childhood revolved around the temple and "was filled with the smell of incense, the sound of chanting and the sight of the heavens and hells of Buddhist mythology." He was a model boy even before he became a novice. But when he disrobed to help his father with work, the abbot reminded him that "the world of man moves between extremes ... and lacks the serenity of religious life."

Fak would miss the insinuations that "teahouse" (as brothel) and "having rice soup for lunch" (as making love) suggest; it revealed how much he misunderstood the "world of man's" play with signifiers, which was consequently detrimental to his attempts to build true relationship with people. He trusted the headmaster of the school where he served as janitor, only to be betrayed in the end; he initially doubted the sincerity of Khai the undertaker, only to realize later that the old man was the only real friend he had. Fak tried to make work the source of his happiness, but there was an ironic commentary on his further dehumanization whenever he did.

3. There was also a critique on progress: while the village was being modernized (with the construction of road leading to the city, the arrival of electricity and various appliances with it), the people remained the same with their old beliefs and biases, except, of course, for Fak. In a narrative such as this, change seems a privilege exclusive to its hero. In the end Fak had to die, and his death only meant that he was no longer allowed knowledge of things and events in this world of man, for better or worse.