I am reading Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, (1868) which according to T.S. Eliot is "the longest, and the best of English detective novels." It is considered to be the first full length detective novel in the English language. Collins was a good friend of Dickens. That makes sense.
I had never heard of him until last year. I've been a reader all my life, but sometimes there are some terrific gaps in my awareness of certain writers. Collins was one of them, and so I read The Woman in White, which was a delight.
This year I'm reading The Moonstone, because Bill Bracy gave me a book called 1000 Books to Read Before You Die, written by the erudite James Mustich. It's Mr. Mustich's first book and it's well worth a read of its own, since reading about books is almost as fun as reading the book itself. At least Mr. Mustich makes it so.
Of course, booklists are a trap for ambitious readers. I actually went through 882 pages and marked in red ink the books I had already read. When I hit Wilkie Collins, I was disappointed to find that The Woman in White was not the book I should have read; it was The Moonstone. Should I take credit for having read Collins? Can I mark him with my red pen? No, I'm far too priggish.
Can I count all the books I haven't read but seen the movies? Or having sat through years of TV series like Father Brown, can I count G.K Chesterton?
What do you think?
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