why isn't Piers Anthony on this?!
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why isn't Piers Anthony on this?!
Is it me, or is Jane Austen way above where she should be? I read Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Mansfield (Insert other name nere, forgot) and I thought it was poor. Tolstoy should be a few slots lower.
Where's Thoreau? (Walden) Or Melville? A few complaints on my part, but then again, I wasn't here to vote.
You forget IceM that the Janeites are legion. Like Firefox fanboys they are everywhere. I bet most of them voted more than once. I am fairly sure Edgar Allen Poe lived not far from Austen at one stage in his life. I could just imagine them meeting as children & *scrumping apples together or something. She would be blabbering on about which gentleman farmer she would most likely marry when she grew up & Poe probably scaring the living crap out of her with some creepy story about the undead headless squire from hell.
*English dialect for stealing apples from orchards. (from dialect 'scrump' meaning withered apples.)
I noticed this omission on the bestest ever I luv top 100 books. It's basically a list of 'what books should I be seen to advocate?' from the kind of people who haven't been driven away by the hostile, belittling environment this forum generates. No appreciation of other people's points of view or tastes, just 'how can I be seen to be the most erudite and cle-ver person on the forum?'.
I mean, how up your own arse do you have to be, not only to have such a list, but to actually tell people on the internet that you have this list:
"If I look at my own list of 150 favorite films I have LotR at #46 and Lawrence at #58"?
{edit}
Talk about inclusive. Best not, eh?
Calm down my friend.
Calm! Calm!!! Whaddyamean calm?? Surely a new and unnatural experience for some!!!
My! Pheww! That's got some exclamation marks off my chest.
Just out of curiosity, may I ask why Alighieri is the only author to not be listed by his surname?
Sure, he's more famous by his first name (Dante), but in libraries and book stores you'll (often) find him at the A, not D.
The list itself looks good to me. I haven't read all, so I can't really judge, but those I have read seem to be suitably ranked. I may have put Salinger a bit lower in favour of Eco or Marquez, but otherwise, great list!
Very interesting question :thumbs_up
Well, when I was in high school, we use to call him just Dante, although I knew and all the others probably knew his surname was Aligheri. Why was that like that - I don't know. Same is with Michelangelo, although I am not sure many people do know that Bounarotti is his surname :D
So they live in our memories and culture like just Dante and just Michelangelo. A bit unfair; probably.
And they're not the only ones. History plays tricks with names like that. Often, when asked the first name of Caesar, people will say Julius, while it was Gaius, of course. The painter Caravaggio was in fact called Michelangelo and only became known as Caravaggio (his place of birth) when he moved to Rome, where his namesake had a far bigger reputation. There's Dante and the Michelangelo, of course. Rembrandt is another artist who is known by his first name (his full name being Rembrandt van Rijn). Then there are the numerous artists who created under a pseudonym.
In the case of Dante, my uneducated guess is that Dante simply has a nice, clear ring to it, where Alighieri is just another Italian surname. Like Kafka and (in my opinion) Sartre, it's just a pleasant name to say. Alighieri less so. I'd be interested in hearing an educated guess/theory though!
(on a slightly related note, the bias is definitely there, since my spelling checker knows "Dante", but not "Alighieri")
I've always found Sartre is a horrible name to say. Doesn't roll off the tongue at all. Lucky for me, I don't have to say it very often :)
Well, maybe you have the pronunciation wrong. I pronounced his name Sarter for a while before my philosophy teacher corrected me and said that the correct pronunciation is Sart, which is much easier to say.
I'm still getting used to calling Camus Caemoo rather than Caemus.
It's more like Sar-tre pronounced very quickly together, but Sart is a close approximation for English speakers because they usually stumble over the two rolled Rs.
A name I've heard pronounced innumerable different ways is Nietzsche, I'm still not entirely sure of the proper pronunciation.
Edit: I made a little 30 second recording of the pronunciation of Sartre and Camus in my embarrassingly nasal voice:
http://www.zshare.net/download/716575822b61d6c3/
you can also hear my bird singing in the background haha :p
I'm going to pretend that the Lewis on the list is Sinclair and not C.S.
Sinclair Lewis is one of the top 10 American authors of all time
Why is Joyce so low?
Same with the top 100 books list, there is no way in hell that Ulysses is number 42.
I'm glad Murakami got on :)