When the Guardian drops a list of the 100 Greatest Novels in English it's time to drop everything to talk about it. Luckily pod-regular guest, journalist Phil Chaffee and Joseph Dance, host of the Curious Readers podcast, also had views, and were willing to get together on a Sunday evening to share them. You'll hear our hits, our misses, how many we’ve read, whether we should have read more and much musing on whether a list like this is the way to get people excited about reading. We explore the joys of the sub-lists – the contributor lists – all squirrelled away on a sub-section of the Guardian's website, that arguably provide more excitement and inspiration than the fairly canonical top 100. Which is the best Brontë? Which is the best Austen? Do we age into certain books? If you've read all seven volumes of Proust shouldn't that count for more than one entry? All this and much, much more. Enjoy – this was an absolute delight to make and I hope it makes you smile as much as it did me.

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The Guardian’s List of the 100 Greatest Novels published in English, copied below for ease of reference.

*underlined – the ones Kate has read

Middlemarch
Beloved
Ulysses
To the Lighthouse
In Search of Lost Time
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Madame Bovary
The Great Gatsby
Bleak House
Emma
Mrs Dalloway
Moby-Dick
Nineteen Eighty-Four
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Persuasion
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Wuthering Heights
The Portrait of a Lady
Things Fall Apart
Midnight’s Children
The Remains of the Day
Lolita
Don Quixote
The Trial
The Brothers Karamazov
Pale Fire
Frankenstein
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The God of Small Things
David Copperfield
Wolf Hall
Great Expectations
The Handmaid’s Tale
Invisible Man
The Age of Innocence
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Song of Solomon
Heart of Darkness
The Magic Mountain
Housekeeping
Giovanni’s Room
The Golden Notebook
The Leopard
Vanity Fair
The Metamorphosis
A Fine Balance
Wide Sargasso Sea
My Brilliant Friend
The Golden Bowl
The Transit of Venus
Orlando
The Waves
Mansfield Park
The Sound and the Fury
Disgrace
Never Let Me Go
Howards End
The Rings of Saturn
Half of a Yellow Sun
White Teeth
The Good Soldier
The Color Purple
The Master and Margarita
The Man Without Qualities
Blood Meridian
Crime and Punishment
Jude the Obscure
Kindred
Our Mutual Friend
Austerlitz
Nervous Conditions
The Bluest Eye
Dracula
The Rainbow
A House for Mr Biswas
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Rebecca
Buddenbrooks
The End of the Affair
A Farewell to Arms
The Talented Mr Ripley
The Vegetarian
The Turn of the Screw
The Line of Beauty
Ragtime
The Left Hand of Darkness
Jacob’s Room
Life and Fate
Sentimental Education
Invisible Cities
The Known World
The Return of the Native
Pedro Páramo
Catch-22
The Road
The Go-Between
My Ántonia

Particular books we touch on in the show