Or, more accurately, I have now read the last 22 titles in the Marshall Cavendish 54-installment Great Writers partwork that I bought, but did not read, religiously every week for a year in the mid/late 1980s, and which I blogged about last year.
And since those blogs were really about transclass identity and cultural capital, what better way to report my findings than star ratings!
In ascending order:
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies
★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
H.E. Bates, Love for Lydia
W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford
DH Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Other Stories
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
Graham Greene, The Comedians
EM Forster, A Passage to India
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
Anthology of Fear: 20 Haunting Stories for Winter Nights
★★★★★★★☆☆☆
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Robert Graves, I, Claudius
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
★★★★★★★★
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
I will not be taking any questions at this time.
Mark Bould 