giovanni more books?

If you read the Wikipedia page for Giovanni's Room you'll see that there is a reference to it appearing on a list of "100 best gay and lesbian novels" in 1999; that list can be found here with Giovanni's Room at number 2. By my calculations (and counting The Alexandria Quartet as one, as they do here) I've read just nine of these, the ones I haven't already mentioned being A Boy's Own Story, Myra Breckinridge, The Swimming Pool Library, Naked Lunch, Pale Fire, Moby-Dick and To Kill A Mockingbird. Now you might say, as I did upon reading the list: well, fair enough, A Boy's Own Story, for instance, is pretty explicitly a gay coming-of-age novel, but the elements in, say, Moby-Dick (i.e. the whole Ishmael-Queequeg thing), are at best hinted at and not necessarily central to the plot, and I honestly (with the caveat that it must be thirty years since I read it) can't remember any in To Kill A Mockingbird. Scout is a bit of a tomboy by the standards of the time so you might argue for some challenging of traditional gender roles, but it's a bit of a stretch, unless the original text included some ferocious lesbian frottage that my 1980s Pan paperback omitted for some reason.

Anyhoo, as it happens there's been another "100 best novels" list doing the rounds this week, and it's this one from the Guardian. "Never has such a list been more needed", says the accompanying article explaining the methodology, which is a fogeyish reference to how kids today don't read books any more because they're all too busy sexting and playing Roblox, but which I also think is a bit of a stretch given how many of these lists there are out there already. The methodology is of interest, though, because this one was from a poll of novelists; others are quite commonly compiled from a public vote, and the two methods always generate quite different lists. I could have predicted in advance, for instance, that a list of novelists' favourite novels would have Middlemarch at number 1 (full disclosure: I've never read it), because they always do. Anything compiled by polling Joe and Josephine Public, on the other hand, will always feature Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings highly, among other things.

Anyway, my overall count from the Guardian list is, I think, thirty-two, of which nineteen have featured on this blog, and they are: Beloved, Pride And Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick, Midnight's Children, The Remains Of The Day, Lolita, The God Of Small Things, Wolf Hall, Giovanni's Room, The Leopard, Never Let Me Go, Blood Meridian, My Antonia, Rebecca, The Talented Mr Ripley, Ragtime, Invisible Cities and The Road. 

There are a handful of novels which feature on the gay and lesbian list and the Guardian list; I can't be bothered to try and find them all but Giovanni's Room is certainly among them, as is Moby-Dick. One that significantly isn't is To Kill A Mockingbird, which is absent altogether from the Guardian list. I don't want to get into the game of critiquing the contents of either list (though you might have noted that I have done exactly that a couple of paragraphs above), but a measure of how surprising I find this is that I had to re-do the search a couple of times just to make sure I hadn't messed it up (it does appear on the two previous Guardian lists from 2003 and 2015 I linked to above). That's one where I would side with the public vote, which would undoubtedly have included it.