A proliferation of reading lists has appeared since quarantine began: ‘comfort reading’ (Susan Hill), lists about pandemics, lists of new novels (nearly all by women) and so on. But isn’t this a good time to catch up on our serious reading? I recently mentioned to a friend, novelist David Joiner, that in The Pregnant Widow, the protagonist Keith Nearing manages to read practically the whole canon of the British novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in fact up to about 1920) during a single long vacation, while he stays at a castle in Italy with a bevy of nubile young women, one of them named Scheherazade. DH and Frieda Lawrence were once guests at the same castle, which happens to have an excellent English library. Classic Amis territory, and incidentally The Pregnant Widow is a brilliant comic novel too.

My friend David thought he might need a couple of years to read the canon, but I wonder if he, and most of us, might be over-estimating how big and daunting it really is. Let’s say Keith has at least three months at his disposal—which is probably the amount of time we still have in quarantine. That’s twelve or thirteen weeks. Allowing for two novels a week (let’s be realistic: some of them are going to be eight-hundred page doorstops), that’s twenty-five or so. Can it be done? Here’s Keith’s list (and, perhaps a bit unfair to assume) Amis’s:

1. Clarissa, Richardson (which he finds boring.)
2. Pamela, Richardson
3. Peregrine Pickle, Tobias Smollett
4. Roderick Random, Tobias Smollett
5. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne (which he abandons on page 15)
6. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
7. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
8. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
9. Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
10. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
11. Emma, Jane Austen (he’s a fan of Jane’s, as you may surmise)
12. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
13. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
14. Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
15. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
16. The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
17. Middlemarch, George Eliot
18. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
19. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
20. Thomas Hardy – Tess and Far From the Madding Crowd (abandoned)
21. Women in Love, DH Lawrence
22. The Rainbow, DH Lawrence
23. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence

Not a bad list, eh, to begin with? And quite a ‘doable’ one. We might quibble with a few of his choices—why read Smollett, for example, but not Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) or Defoe (Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders)?

And here are a few others I think Keith (Martin Amis?) misses out—perhaps simply because the themes of the novels don’t fit sufficiently with his sex comedy plot:

1. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
2. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
3. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
4. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy (I think Keith has a blind spot there)
5. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
6. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
7. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
8. Victory, Joseph Conrad
9. Nigger of the Narcissus and Typhoon, Joseph Conrad
10. A Room with a View, EM Forster
11. Howard’s End, EM Forster
12. Passage to India, EM Forster

–Which is still only 35 or 35 titles. So what are you waiting for? If you’re a writer, but did not read all the classics at university (and in passing, I’ll say this: if you must do an MFA, do one of the longer ones which requires you to basically do an MA in English Lit. first), then you really should have read all this—and of course the twentieth century classics too. And the American ones (and Irish and Canadian, etc.)

But more of that anon, if anyone’s interested. What am I reading right now? Dante, Sophocles, Omar Khayyam and the brilliant and underrated Elizabeth Taylor’s short stories. And my apologies to Mr Amis for coupling his name with mine, without his permission. I do so with the greatest respect and admiration: in my view, he’s the most gifted living English novelist.