The plan.

The book trade is capitalising on obligation. How many books are there that you're told you should read, that you simply must drag your eyes over before you die, that are 'classics' which will improve your life in some abstract and ethereal way? And how many books are bought each year, only to be leafed through for a couple of pages and then relegated to a dusty shelf once the reader realises that there's a film adaptation with Colin Firth?

My name is Helen Crane, I am a 21-year-old English student, and I hate reading. I really do. What was once a childhood pleasure, then an invaluable tool in my attempt to be quirky and dark in my teenage years, and finally the foundation of my University career is now nothing but an irritating fact of life; a neccessity. As with so many literature students before me, I have gone into novelistic overkill and ended up in a situation where even a takeaway menu is a bit more syntactically complex than I'm really comfortable with. However, I don't think it has to be this way, and I have come up with a plan to get my interest in literature back.

I've decided to have one final fling with literature. So I'm going to read. A lot. I'm going to read every single book I've ever felt like I ought to read, every book that I've been told is a 'classic', every book that I've heard being talked about and wished that I could comment on. I'm going to find out why anyone bothers to read through 560, 000 words of War and Peace, and why Lady Chatterley is always met with a look of prudish disdain. And then I'm going to write about them, and why they deserve to be applauded or why they don't, and try and make some kind of distinction between which books are actually worth reading and which are just classics for classic's sake. And I think that, even if I don't love books again by the end of this, I can at least say that I gave them one hell of a bloody chance.

I've done the obligatory run-through of the classics, so there will be no Jane Eyre, or Animal Farm, or To Kill A Mockingbird. What I'm really interested in is the books which everyone seems to talk about, which have gained some kind of cult status or intellectual capital, but which I suspect very few people have actually done the old cover-to-cover with. Quite a few of these are books which I have bought with such honourable intentions only to dump them unceremoniously when the going got tough. So here is my list. 23 books, which I'm going to read in 20 weeks. A book a week is what English courses generally say you have to read, and I have never done it, not ever. But I have a very long summer to contend with. I'm giving myself the 3 extra books so that I get 3 opportunities to swap out one text for another in cases where it is particularly unbearable, or an extra three weeks at the end if I really do become that enamoured with the written word. I hereby promise to read at least 100 pages of each, and to give a full justification if I decide to give up at any point. I haven't gone by any official list, these are just books which a) I have heard of through reputation b) Are considered to have some kind of inherent cultural value, and c) I haven't read before.

1. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
2. The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
3. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
4. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
5. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
6. Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
7. Post Office - Charles Bukowski
8. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
9. The Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
10. Ulysses - James Joyce
11. The Plague - Albert Camus
12. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H Lawrence
13. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
14. Middlemarch - George Eliot
15. 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
16. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
17. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
18. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
19. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
20. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
21. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
22. Howard's End - E.M Forster
23. Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell


Why am I doing this to myself, you might ask. Well, it's a challenge, primarily, and I'm the type of sadistic person who seems to enjoy setting themself ridiculous and barely achievable tasks. I think I'd also enjoy being able to sound like a bit of a tosser in everyday conversation, and, if spending the last two years around English students has taught me anything, it's that reading books most certainly equips you with the raw material necessary for this.

Really though, I suppose I want to find out why we feel we should read these books; are they good? Why are they good? Why is doing this better than watching TV? At best, this will be a life-affirming crusade through the very cream of the English literary crop, and one which I will leave immeasurably more eloquent and worldly-wise than when I began. And at worst? I'll do five pages of Middlemarch and need a month in front of America's Next Top Model to recover.