No mention of Dostoevsky's The Idiot anywhere on thread. Fancy that.
No mention of Dostoevsky's The Idiot anywhere on thread. Fancy that.
"Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself"
High and Low Podcast
From Snooki to Shakespeare
www.highandlowpodcast.blogspot.com
Subscribe free on iTunes
Noripcord Online Music Magazine
Music/TV/Film Reviews
www.noripcord.com
No offense to anybody but this list is absolutely ATROCIOUS compared to the last one that was up back in like 2008. In my opinion half the books are complete trash, Tolkien although a legend should not have any of his books in the top 10,000 of all time and it is patently obvious that most of you equate quantity with quality. As one poster said, The Idiot was not listed and that book buries most of the crap here with aesthetic style, ascetic characters, intriguing plot, unprecedented dialogue and climactic conclusion. That is just my view. Sorry if I offended anyone but I needed a cathartic outlet. I've been too stressed lately and this was just the lump of solid coal on top of the abysmally baked cake.
My hide hides the heart inside
Could you be specific about the "trash" and why? "Most of you"? Quantity.? "Like 2008"?
Last edited by Eiseabhal; 02-11-2013 at 08:18 PM.
Top 3 of the top 10 are just ridiculous IMO. Though the rest of the top 10 are OK for me. There are some unexpected interesting books throughout the list like Essays by Montaigne and two Borges masterpieces along with If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, Meditations and some other stuff. But many atrocious choices as well: Ayn Rand, Ferdowsi (who even knows Ferdowsi here, his book is extremely childish and barbaric), Patrick White, Tolkien?
Perhaps you do not know White yet. I would recommend you tackle him. Saying "who even knows" is an admission of ignorance not a critical judgement. I didn't know him but I assume that those who chose him must find something of value in him. But if you have found him barbaric then you have found him barbaric. Homer is barbaric. So is McCarthy. So is Shakespeare in some texts. It ain't really about being nice and civilised either in language or morality.
1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (own it)
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes (own it)
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (own it)
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (own it)
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (own it)
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (own it)
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
27. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (own it)
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (own it)
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (own it)
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka (own it)
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (own it)
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges (own it)
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
48. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus by John Fowles
50. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
51. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
52. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (own it; have read pieces here and there)
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake (own it)
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (own it)
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (own it)
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (own it; have read The Fountainhead)
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramagos
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (own it)
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino (own it)
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka (own it)
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer (own it; have read bits)
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare (own it)
Amazing how many I own but have not read!
Question: are the George R. R. Martin books really that good? I don't read a lot of popular fiction, but I see it made this list.
Some other lists I've used to guide my reading choices:
- http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100...ks_of_All_Time
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Mond...of_the_Century
I would add Virgil, Ovid, and Goethe to the list.
Last edited by chrisvia; 03-20-2013 at 03:58 PM. Reason: Didn't include the list.
"J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage."
- Rimbaud
"Il est l'heure de s'enivrer!
Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps,
enivrez-vous;
enivrez-vous sans cesse!
De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise."
- Baudelaire
Just looked up the French list there. Like all lists there is something to appeal to a male's inherent autism and often there are new considerations to feed the brain but Asterix the Gaul at number 23! I think that is carrying Francocentrism a wee bit far. I'd have put it at number 49.
"Popular fiction" sometimes gets a bad name but what exactly is unpopular fiction - to gloss Mr Shaw a bit. Some very good books don't sell well when they come out: some do. What can we say about that. Not much probably. My young fellow reads fairly widely and I recently saw a Martin novel in his room. He said he was enjoying it. Should I be worried doc?
That LeMonde list is based on a poll conducted at French reseller Fnac. I was in Lyon back in December, at a Fnac, purchasing a Houellebecq novel, when a fellow approached me and started raving about these ultimate French culture comics. He then proceeded to lead me to a section filled with Asterix books, pulling them from the shelves and giving me hyperenthusiastic discourses on the background of each and why they are so entertaining to the French people. It was quite amusing and educational!
"J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage."
- Rimbaud
"Il est l'heure de s'enivrer!
Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps,
enivrez-vous;
enivrez-vous sans cesse!
De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise."
- Baudelaire
Interesting German list of the top 100 books. I am glad to see The Jungle Books is up there.
http://www.abebooks.de/Buecher-Highl...-Buecher.shtml
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
I'm between readng Austin's Persuasin and Mansfield Park
Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. - Albert Einstein
Wunderbar Kev. Verfall und Untergang des Romischen Reiches is there but no Aufstieg und Fall des Dritten Reiches
The ones I have read:
A number of the books I've read don't belong on the list (Ayn Rand, Proust, The Stranger, among others) Some I have read major parts of (Proust, Chaucer, Dante, Decameron), but not beginning to end. I have probably read The Arrow of Gold by Conrad, since I pretty much read all of his fiction. I just don't have any particular memory of it.
Last edited by WyattGwyon; 04-27-2013 at 08:33 PM.
Wow! Very impressive mr WyattGwyon. I'm reading kids' books at the moment and reinforcing what I thought. There ain't no such thing as adult literature