ANOTHER LIST! [my 50 favorite novels]

[B. Laumness]

Mortalterror and Lord Macbeth, you cheat.

[JCamilo]

Listing is cheating.

[OrphanPip]

Stlukes kinda cheated too, Autobiography of Red is a verse-novel, so it's kind of sketchy how much that differs from a long multi-part narrative poem. I think it's quite good as well, though.

I kinda started writing a list, then I ran out of ideas around 30ish books, and I didn't want to repeat any authors so I gave up. I've read more than 50 novels, but I'm not sure I've read 50 good novels.

[JCamilo]

Novels and romance do not imply prose, but ok, Stlukes cheated

[arrytus]

30.Danton's Death by Buchner
31.The Poems of Leopardi

Yea for these two.

[Babak Movahed]

50 books! What en extensive list, but here it goes.

1. Crime and Punishment
2. Lolita
3. The Stranger
4. Madame Bovary
5. The Blind Owl
6. The Sun Also Rises
7. A Clockwork Orange
8. Go Tell it on the Mountain
9. The Plague
10. Siddhartha
11. Ulysses
12. To the Lighthouse
13. Bonjour Tristesse
14. The Picture of Dorian Grey
15. Fathers and Sons
16. Beloved
17. Invisible Man (Ellison's)
18. Notes from the Underground
19. The Great Gatsby
20. A Light in August
21. Garden of Eden
22. Anna Karenina
23. The Doctor is Sick
24. Giovanni's Room
25. Dracula
26. Nausea
27. The Idiot
28. V for Vendetta
29. Watt
30. The Defense
31. Breakfast of Champions
32. 1984
33. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
34. Watt
35. Another Country
36. Things Fall Apart
37. Frankenstein
38. Mrs. Dalloway
39. The Sorrows of Young Werther
40. Utopia
41. The Fur Hat
42. Black Boy
43. Moll Flanders
44. The Quiet American
45. The Gambler
46. Despair
47. The Wanting Seed
48. Gulliver's Travels
49. Oroonoko
50. The Time Machine

[Lord Macbeth]

Mortalterror and Lord Macbeth, you cheat.

How so? The last I checked plays still counted as literature, as do philosohical novels...I have two or three purely philosophical treatises on there, but really:

David Hume?
John Stuart Mill?
Friedrich Nietzsche?
Plato?

Those aren't credible enough?

About my only "cheat" is that nearly 2/5 of my list is either Greek or Shakespeare, but that's more a bias and a preference than a "cheat," I LOVE epics, grand tragedies, and philosophy, so who better than Shakespeare and the Greeks?

[arrytus]

How so?

About my only "cheat" ....

His comment, I believe, is directed towards my introductory criteria of not including novellas, plays, or non-fiction, [or complete works], etc. and is not a criticism of your tastes. But I may be wrong...

[stlukesguild]

Yes... I must admit that if I were to include plays, poems, non-fiction, essays, etc... my list would be drastically different... indeed, I doubt that more than 10 of the 50 would survive... if that.

[Babak Movahed]

Man! Had I known that everyone was going to disregard the initial question, and include plays, poem, and everything in between then my list would've been much different! Bummer

[mortalterror]

Mortalterror and Lord Macbeth, you cheat.

I'm a cheater.

[Lord Macbeth]

His comment, I believe, is directed towards my introductory criteria of not including novellas, plays, or non-fiction, [or complete works], etc. and is not a criticism of your tastes. But I may be wrong...

Well, if that IS the case...

Well, sorry, but a play or a novella or philosophical text seems just as "valid" in the literary canon to me and I think most and, well...

Yeah, I happen to generally prefer those to long novels, and actually not even due to length but more often than not due to style; a LOT of the longer texts are written by those authors who are quite often very Hawthorne-esque or Faulknerian in their sentence composition and use of description (not all longer texts are like this, mind you, again, I'm thinking of books like Nostromo and authors like Conrad here) and that's just not my literary preference.

When if comes to philosophical texts I generally want it very enumerated and systematized a la Hume or Spinoza or else very flowing and playing more with the ideas, being more tangental...the Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean style, really, and Sartre and other existentialists and phenomenologists certainly picked up on that theme.

What I DON'T like to see is the Wittgensteinian approach, namely, "write a short, SHORT text with sentences that are vague and NOT enumerated at length but rather at best build perilously on all previous notions and at worst just complicates the issue and doesn't really solve the questions at hand" as demonstrated in the anti-Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which remains my least-favorite philosophical text and really the first time I truly felt, whether I agreed with a philosopher's opinion or not, that their position was poorly argued through and through, a GREAT disappointment for me, and needless to say I hate that philosophical viewpoint as well as the text that tried to represent it. About the only thing in there I agreed with was the idea of symbols in language, music, science, and so on serving as a signifyer for an idea itself, ie, that a musical note written is the same as a note sung in that its the same expressed idea, just in a different format, and from this the logical notion that all expression requires both signifyers and rests between these.

(To digress, this is why I LOATHE and wholly RAIL AGAINST the view that says John Cage's "4:33" is a "musical piece" or song" when it is 4 minutes and 33 seconds--literally--of silence, the only sounds being those around YOU, ambient--and therefore NOT INTENTIONAL and therefore NOT SIGNIFIED BY CAGE OR THE "WORK"--sounds which Cage is NOT responsible for and therefore CANNOT take credit for. I have had not one but TWO lengthy debates on this issue, one with a few friends over some tea and the other a week-long discussion of the very nature of art itself and this work NOT being a musical piece in my view...if anyone wants to view that argument I'll be more than happy to post a link, a lot of great discussion and even those I wholly disagreed with, for the most part, were pretty eloquent in defense of their position. Another quick note--from that second debate someone raised the point that there are musical rests, and so argued "4:33" is simply all rests but still contains intented notation and therefore is a musical piece; my response to THAT, then, is that a musical rest is just that--a rest, a break BETWEEN the notation of actual musical notes, or at least the notation of some sort of sound, just as commas and periods denote breaks and pauses in sentence structure; by that same line of reasoning then, just as it would be absurd of us to suggest a sentence with ONLY PUNCTUATION, only pauses between and after words without the words themselves, it is therefore just
as absurd, likewise, to consider an "all-rests" work a musical piece.)

Anyway, back on track...

So in philsophy I prefer longer, or at least more explained--either analytically or literarily--texts.

In literature, I'm of the opposite mind--I will ALWAYS prefer Hemmingway to Faulkner, not because Faulkner's bad, but I just really enjoy Hemmingway's straight, short, rapid-fire style more.

Twain, Dickens, and Steinbeck are all on that list of mine, and they have longer novels, but I also prefer a faster pace--again, as a once and future theatre person on and offstage, that's just my bias and preference--so their length doesn't really bother me because their works don't FEEL long, whereas Faulkner, Conrad, and Hawthorne all seem to drag for me; I suppose I'll ahve to see whether Dostoyevsky and Melville are more like the former or latter group for me this spring...I WILL say if Dostoyevsky's style is anything like Pushkin's I think I'll be quite happy reading his works.

Shakespeare's on there a lot, of course, and yes, his plays are certainly long, they're some of the lengthiest plays in the theatre world, Hamlet and King Lear in particular, off the top of my head. But these are still shorter than those epic 19th century tomes and, what's more, their pacing is just FAR better, in my opinion, striking a near-perfect balance quite often...as a result I can watch Kenneth Branagh's four-hour, full version of Hamlet and never once feel bored or that the film or paly is dragging, but I could never say the same for a four-hour version of a Hawthorne story, I'd possibly be out cold by Hour Two.

Dante...see Shakespeare and below.

Homer's works ARE long...well, yes, they ARE called "epics," aren't they? But Homer's meter actually really helps here, as that meter really keeps the tempo and pace up, so that even in the slower parts of The Iliad I'm never bored, that meter keeps me churning along and turning those pages, and really the slower parts, then, feel more artistic to me, almost like softening music by Tchaikovsky after one of his more bellicose moments.

Tchaikovsky--my favorite composer overall, my other two favorites being Mozart and Puccini...and on the Puccini note may I just say the one thing that ALWAYS got me in deep with my theatre friends...for all of those who have seen it and know what I am talking about, do ANY of you agree that RENT was an appalling ripoff of Puccini's masterpiece La Boheme!!!!!!!!!! Most things may be said to be paying homage to this or that, but RENT was a straight ripoff--and a really poor one--of the Master Maestro's opus, one of the greatest operas ever and one of my personal favorites next to his Madama Butterfly, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and, of course, Bizet's Carmen...RENT had HORIBLE MUSIC, HORRIBLE AND REDUNDANT MUSICAL SCORES AND ACHINGLY SIMPLISITC AND PANDERING COMPOSITIONAL "STLYE," IT CATERS TO THE LOWEST DEMONINATOR IT CAN AND PASSES ITSELF OFF AS BEING "REBELLIOUS" AND "FRESH" AND "RELEVANT" WHEN IT'S CHEAP, TRITE, ITS PLOT ENTIRELY STOLEN ALMOST BIT FOR BIT FROM PUCCINI'S MASTERPIECE, AND EVEN THEN IT CAN'T DO SO MUCH AS TO BE FRESH WITH WHAT IT'S STEALING, IT TRADES IN ONE OF THE RICHEST AND MOST COMPLEX OPERATIC LIBRETTOS AND COMPOSITIONS EVER FOR A CHEAP ROCK OPERA THAT CANNOT EVEN SUCCEED ON THAT LEVEL, LYRICS THAT REPEAT IN AN ATTEMPT TO BECOME CATCHY BUT THEIR REPETITION ONLY SERVES TO REMIND ONE OF HOW REPETITIVE AND TRITE THIS HACKJOB IS, AND TO TOP IT ALL OFF IT CHANGES THE ENDING COMPLETELY AND CHEAPLY AND SHOEHORNS THE AIDS BIT IN THEIR SO SHAMELESSLY AS AN ATTEMPT TO SEEM DEEP AND RLEEVANT WITHOUT ACTUALLY EXAMINING THE AIDS ISSUE AND THEN, OF COURSE, ESCHEWS ONE OF THE GREAT TRAGIC ENDINGS IN OPERA FOR A HAPPIER, MORE TEEN-FRIENDLY ENDING.......AND HAS THE AUDACITY TO PASS ITSELF OFF AS "ART" RATHER THAN WHAT IT REALLY IS, A MONEY-MAKING PLOY TO EXPLOIT THE YOUTH OF THE POOR SAP TEENAGERS WHO FALL PRAY TPO ITS SIREN SONG...WHICH IS BEING TO GENEROUS AS NO CREATION OF HOMER'S DESERVES TO BE LUMPED IN WITH THIS ABOMINATION UNTO THE ART WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!

...

OK, rant over. We apologize for the preceding inconvience and would like to at this point remind the audience that this is a free show and therefore you cannot demand a refund for such a poor display.

So, my point?

My preference is towards quicker pacing and that often means plays and shorter, Hemmingway-esque works, and...

I LOATHE RENT WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING...I DESPISE YOU, CURSE YOU, RENT! EVEN A PARODY OF YOUR WORK ABOMINABLE...WITH MY LAST BREATH, I SPIT AT THEE...FROM HELL'S HEART, I STAB AT THEE!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-Aun00r0F8

[kelby_lake]

Melville, Conrad, Faulkner, and Hawthorne are four BIG authors missing from that list, and as I DETEST the pacing of a good deal of their work, and as a great advocate of theatre--in case you couldn't tell from the plays outnumbering all else on my list--the pacing of a work really matters to me;

I love the fact that you included plays

[stlukesguild]

Well, sorry, but a play or a novella or philosophical text seems just as "valid" in the literary canon to me and I think most and, well...

The OP did not in any way suggest that forms other than the novel were "invalid". It was simply a focus upon a single literary genre. I would not feel the need to include novels if the question were to name my 50 favorite poets, and ff he had asked for me to name my 50 favorite paintings, I wouldn't feel the need to include sculpture, architecture, stained glass, and ceramics... although I might admittedly include such if the question were to name my 50 favorite art works.

Just play the damn game!!!

[kelby_lake]

Great selection, Babak.