1000 Novels Everyone Must Read

Yep, as listas, os topes...

Social questions or political changes: State of the Nation novels

Part One (lotsa Dickens...)
Part Two (Machado de Assis, no less)
Part Three (N to W shows the most geographically diverse set, methinks)

Sense of self, and self in a group: Family & Self novels

Part One (lotsa women writers)
Part Two (yep, women know best :)
Part Three (France, India, Spain, Russia... and Adrian Mole :)

Every comic, it is said, wants to play Hamlet: Comedy, which is not the same as humour

Part One (Don Quixote, of course :)
Part Two (Finnegans Wake!...)
Part Three (yessss)

Saki: The Westminster Alice (1902)

This political parody uses Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland to critique the British government. As enthusiasm for the Boer war declined, questions were being asked about how it was handled. And in the episode "Alice goes to Lamberth", even the Church of England is criticised. It was first published in the Westminster Gazette in collaboration with cartoonist Francis Carruthers Gould. Saki, the pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro, was a famous satirist who contributed political sketches to the Gazette and was the political correspondent for the Morning Post.

Saki: The Unbearable Bassington (1912)

Cosmus Bassington is an upper-class young man with a cynical outlook. As his mother keeps trying to sort out his life, "his naughtiness, his exasperating selfishness" interferes. Set within Mayfair and Westminster, it delights in depicting parks, clubs, theatres and drawing rooms. Sandie Byrne (the biographer of HH Munro, aka Saki) recently accused it of "unbearable anti-semitism".

Crime

Part One

José Maria de Eça de Queiroz: The Crime of Father Amaro (1875)

Amaro, a young priest in small-town 19th-century Portugal, is having an affair with the teenage daughter of his hostess. Rather than condemning his actions, the clergy covers up his mistakes. Eça de Queiroz admired Dickens, and the two writers shared a gift for comic dialogue and a desire to chart society's ills. Portugese naturalism, though, can be bleaker stuff than anything Britain produced during the Industrial Revolution: Eça de Queiroz explores a world where the innocent are condemned and the guilty prosper. In 2002, Carlos Carrera's adaptation saw Catholic groups protesting outside cinemas.

Part Two
Part Three (oh, I seem to have read a lot of these last parts...)

Love

Part One (Machado de Assis, again :), the Brontës, Madame de Lafayette...)
Part Two (Elfriede Jelinek and Anais Nin, inter alia...)
Part Three

The Guardian