Appendix One

The List of Betterment

(‘Asterisks denote the easiest to get into if you are starting from scratch . . . And if I missed your favourite one out, well excuse me.’ Julian Cope, Krautrocksampler.)

  1. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov*
  2. Middlemarch – George Eliot
  3. Post Office – Charles Bukowski
  4. The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
  5. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
  6. The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
  7. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
  8. The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
  9. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky – Patrick Hamilton
  10. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
  11. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy*
  12. Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
  13. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
  14. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
  15. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
  16. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
  17. The Odyssey – Homer
  18. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  19. The Unfortunates – B.S. Johnson
  20. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
  21. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
  22. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
  23. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë*
  24. Everyman – Philip Roth
  25. Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes*
  26. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
  27. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
  28. Beyond Black – Hilary Mantel
  29. The Diary of a Nobody – George and Weedon Grossmith
  30. The Epic of Gilgamesh – Anonymous
  31. The Mystery of Edwin Drood – Charles Dickens
  32. The Aerodrome – Rex Warner
  33. I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith*
  34. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
  35. Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
  36. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
  37. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
  38. Paradise Lost – John Milton
  39. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
  40. The Dice Man – Luke Rhinehart
  41. The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1 – Stan Lee, John Buscema, Jack Kirby*
  42. Krautrocksampler – Julian Cope*
  43. Beloved – Toni Morrison*
  44. Against Nature – Joris-Karl Huysmans*
  45. Atomised – Michel Houellebecq*
  46. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
  47. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
  48. Beowulf – translated by Seamus Heaney
  49. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
  50. The Code of the Woosters – P.G. Wodehouse