#what's the rationale behind disliking 1st person?

[arathos]

It has come to our attention that some millennials on Tumblr people don’t like 1st person narrative in fiction. We were quite baffled by the notion (”But... like... Song of Achilles is 1st person. And half of Bleak House. And Gone Girl!”). Immortality AU, of course, is 1st person, and so are the books on this list which we compiled off the top of our heads because they are immensely popular and/or personal faves:

British and Irish Classics:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (the omniscient narrator narrates in the 1st person)

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

all (?) of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

half of Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Vendetta by Marie Corelli

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

as well as other Christie stories, including Poirot ones

loads of classic horror short stories

American Classics:

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

all or most of Edgar Allen Poe

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

Other Classics:

Justine by the Marquis de Sade

Much of Pushkin’s work

La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils

Modern English-language novels

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann

half of The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

also: some of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s short stories, most notably the one with the Lesbian Reveal

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

half of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Mysterious Skin by Scott Heim

Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite

The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Modern non-English novels

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

A Heart So White by Javier Marias

ALL epistolary, memoir and diary-style novels:

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Les Liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Fanny Hill by John Cleland

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Carrie by Stephen King

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend

The Diary of Bridget Jones by Helen Fielding

We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

World War Z by Max Brooks

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

half of Emily Climbs by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Children’s Books:

How to Survive Summer Camp by Jacqueline Wilson

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson

There’s also books that pass by English speakers because they’ve never been translated or never caught on, but are popular in other countries:

Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (the first novel in the German language)

Six Bullerby Children by Astrid Lindgren

Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren

Felidae by Akif Pirinçci (cat detective mysteries)

Der Rumpf by Akif Pirinçci (thriller from the PoV of a disabled mastermind)

Confessions of Felix Krull by Thomas Mann

Olfi Obermeier und der Ödipus by Christine Nöstlinger (coming-of-age story of a boy who grows up in a household ruled by women)

Konopielka by Edward Redliński

The Devil's Elixirs by E.T.A. Hoffmann

Aischa by Federica de Cesco (coming-of-age story of a Muslim immigrant girl in Paris)

Lélia by George Sand

Chronicler of the Winds by Henning Mankell

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki