ANOTHER LIST! [my 50 favorite novels]

[arrytus]

After reading the LitNet top 100 I was compelled to compile my own list of favorites, although this is vapidly prosaic to the majority of persons on this forum. This is not a 'best' list, as there are books noticeably elided which would make my top 10 best novels [e.g. Brothers Karamazov]. And of course nor is it objective. Additionally there are literally hundreds of novels which I hope to read, and likely hundreds more of which I have not yet been informed. [authors whom by I've read no more than a single book: Zola, Henry James, DH Lawrence, VS Naipaul, John Barth, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy.]

Also I am delimiting the list entirely to novels, thus NO NOVELLAS [I added an extemporaneous list of 20 below; should really include more Balzac however], and no nonfiction [no Upanishads, no Herodotus; also I consider Kerouac's germane work to be of this category and Melville's 'Typee'] and NO POETRY [so no Faust, no Decameron, Buechner, and all of Shakespeare and Homer...]

Also I would like to point out that the duration which has since passed when I read a book has likely noticeably cooled my enthusiasm of it- and ergo some works suffered as a result- while others which I reread in highschool are likely disproportionally well regarded due to their impact at the time and not my current tastes [for example, McCarthy is much more recent than Balzac, hence...; and Edward Abbey vs. any number of elided books]

Strangely I left off a lot of Faulkner and Balzac and Dostoevsky whom I consider, in terms of breadth and content, the greatest novelists and also my favorite. I simply could not pick one book before another save usually a single exception.

I tried not to get too hung up on the order save the first 5, but thought more in clusters. The reason I limited it to 50 is after I can't even be so tepidly decisive as this grouping...

voila.


1-Sartor Resartus- Carlyle
2-War and Peace- Tolstoy
3-The Alexandria Quartet- Durrell [I'm counting this as a single novel but if pressed on that I would still have Justine in my top 5]
4-The Counterfeiters- Gide
5-Lost Illusions- Balzac

6-20: clustered rather than in any valorized order

ISOLT- Proust [I am including this even though I've only read the first volume
(the first four 'books')]

Blood Meridian- McCarthy
Lord Jim- Conrad
Crime and Punishment-Dostoevsky

A Frolic of His Own- Gaddis
Infinite Jest- DFW
V.- Pynchon

Herzog- Bellow
To the Lighthouse- Woolf
Ada- Nabokov

Les Miserables- Hugo
Anna Karinena- Tolstoy
Sentimental Education- Flaubert

100 years of Solitude- Marquez
Midnight's Children- Rushdie

21-30

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest- Kesey
Generation X- Coupland
Huckleberry Finn- Twain

Don Quixote- Cervantes
Ulysses- Joyce
Sense and Sensibility- Austen

Red and the Black- Stendhal
Dead Souls- Gogol
Nausea- Sartre
Penguin Island- Anatole France

31-40

The Orchard Keeper- McCarthy
Suttree- McCarthy

The Hamlet- Faulkner
Intruder in the Dust-Faulkner
Sound and the Fury-Faulkner
The Unvanquished- Faulkner

The Castle- Kafka
JR- Gaddis
White Noise- DeLillo
Songs of Solomon- Morrison
41-50

Pride and Prejuidice- Austen
Pere Goriot- Balzac
Lolita-Nabokov
For Whom the Bell Tolls- Hemingway
Main Street- Sinclair Lewis

the Monkey Wrench Gang- Abbey
Confederacy of Dunces- Toole
The Pickwick Papers- Dickens
The Confessions of Felix Krull-Mann
Pnin- Nabokov

---------------------------------------------------------------------

extemporaneous list of 20 novellas I excluded from this list:

The Immoralist- Gide
Louis Lambert- Balzac
The Fall- Camus
The Burrow- Kafka
Leaf Storm- GG Marquez

Ward No. 6- Chekov
Hero of Our Time- Lermontov
Typhoon- Conrad
Notes from the Underground- Dostoevsky
Tonio Kroeger- Mann

Billy Budd- Melville
Benito Cereno- Melville
Bartleby the Scrivener- Melville
Chronicle of Death Foretold- GG Marquez
Daisy Miller-Henry James

Sorrows of Young Werther- Goethe
Raise High the Roofbeams- Salinger
Death of Ivan Ilyich- Tolstoy
Father and Sons- Tugenev
Heart of Darkness- Conrad

[B. Laumness]

Mine:

Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal
Rabelais, Pantagruel
Rabelais, Gargantua,
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves
Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
Diderot, La Religieuse
Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Balzac, La Peau de chagrin
Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir
Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme
Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi
Musset, La Confession d'un enfant du siècle
Melville, Moby Dick
Dickens, Oliver Twist
Hugo, Les Misérables
Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris
Flaubert, Madame Bovay
Flaubert, L'Education sentimentale
Flaubert, Salammbô
Zola, Germinal
Tolstoy, War and Peace
Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky, The Demons
Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Conrad, Nostromo
Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
Kafka, Der Prozess
Kafka, Das Schloss
Mann, Der Zauberberg
Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel
Canetti, Die Blendung
Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit
Sartre, La Nausée
Camus, L'Etranger
Giono, Le Hussard sur le toit
Lawrence, Lady Chatterley
Nabokov, Lolita
Faulkner, Absalon, Absalon!
Lowry, Under the Volcano
Sabato, Sobre héroes y tumbas
Capote, In Cold Blood
Selby, The Demon
McCarthy, Suttree
McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Egolf, Lord of the Barnyard

[arrytus]

Mine:

Rabelais, Pantagruel
Rabelais, Gargantua,
Diderot, La Religieuse
Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme

Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Mann, Der Zauberberg



I've read 30 of the books on your list and liked nearly all of them. Hesse, even though I've read about a dozen of his books, doesn't move me. Haven't read the ones I highlighted and I never finished the last two although of course I intend to someday... start again. Don't know why I didn't finish Mann because I tend to love his work and it wasn't that I didn't like it. I think it was simply because sometimes I don't feel up to the task of long dense works.

[B. Laumness]

Having read half the books on your list and considering most of them are good, albeit I think that Gide is a second-rate writer, that Marquez, Rushdie, and Toole are tedious, and that The Orchard Keeper is the weakest work of his author, you give me interesting suggestions for the new year. I’m curious to read Carlyle and Durell. I've never heard of:



A Frolic of His Own- Gaddis
Infinite Jest- DFW
JR- Gaddis
the Monkey Wrench Gang- Abbey

[arrytus]

Having read half the books on your list and considering most of them are good, albeit I think that Gide is a second-rate writer, that Marquez, Rushdie, and Toole are tedious, and that The Orchard Keeper is the weakest work of his author, you give me interesting suggestions for the new year. I’m curious to read Carlyle and Durell. I've never heard of:

I tend to think the Orchard Keeper is the best written of his books, in terms of his prose and not the content. But rating Gide as second tier astounds me; to me he's better than Sartre and Camus save for the latter's much neglected plays. Edward Abbey's the Monkey Wrench Gang is not a serious venture; it might be fun but you aren't going to be challenged or learn anything. It was a book I enjoyed in highschool and of which I have fond memories. Gaddis on the other hand is a must read and once more another curiously overlooked author. the two works I've read by him are hilarious and frenetic and are like 700 page long plays in that they are 90 percent dialogue without punctuation. they are dense and hard but genius.

[Alexander III]

Daam, to be honest I have not read fifty novels, and even amongst all the novels I have read I found most to be tolerable at best. Ahhh, I should read more.

Also when you say Novella, what do you mean, I mean what do you consider to be a novella?

Is Of Mice and Men a novella, is The sorrows of young Werther a novella, Is the great Gatsby a Novella ?

[arrytus]

Daam, to be honest I have not read fifty novels, and even amongst all the novels I have read I found most to be tolerable at best. Ahhh, I should read more.

Also when you say Novella, what do you mean, I mean what do you consider to be a novella?

Is Of Mice and Men a novella, is The sorrows of young Werther a novella, Is the great Gatsby a Novella ?

My criterion for novella is nothing explicit other than length, that it must be longer than about 55 thousand words. Demian, Siddhartha, Mice and Men, As I lay Dying, etc, are to me novellas.

[B. Laumness]

I tend to think the Orchard Keeper is the best written of his books, in terms of his prose and not the content.

I can’t properly judge his style since I read a translation. It gave me such an impression that today I’ve totally forgotten the story, contrary to Child of God, whereas I’ve read both two years ago.


But rating Gide as second tier astounds me; to me he's better than Sartre and Camus save for the latter's much neglected plays.

Note I haven’t said Gide is a bad writer. A few years years ago, I would have praised him. I read his complete works, even his diary. But now I perceive well his efforts towards a very well written style; I feel his desire to be in the French tradition, heir of a classic ideal; I know his ambition is to be a master of the prose as Flaubert. The problem is that it lacks something… something new, a new vision of the world, an anchorage in his era and meanwhile the faculty to be ahead of his time. Gide is talented, but he has no genius. He was on the good way, as he proved it with his best achievement Les Faux-monnayeurs, precisely because that’s rather innovative in the art of novel. I also liked La Porte étroite for his psychological penetration and his moving story. And I remember his first book I read, Les Nourritures terrestres, when I was a teen: I found it very refreshing, in the garden, in the summer…

Sartre was an exceptional thinker, and I prefer him as philosopher, not as playwright and novelist, although La Nausée is an excellent novel. I couldn’t say bad things about Camus since I don’t see in him real flaws, literally speaking.


My criterion for novella is nothing explicit other than length, that it must be longer than about 55 thousand words. Demian, Siddhartha, Mice and Men, As I lay Dying, etc, are to me novellas.

I'd say novella differs from novel not by the length (number of pages), but by the duration (that of the story), and by the number of characters and events (less large). Do you make a distinction between novella and short story in English, or is it actually the same thing? In that case, my definition may be invalid. In French, there are two notions: nouvelle and roman (novel).

[arrytus]

I can’t properly judge his style since I read a translation. It gave me such an impression that today I’ve totally forgotten the story, contrary to Child of God, whereas I’ve read both two years ago.



Note I haven’t said Gide is a bad writer. A few years years ago, I would have praised him. I read his complete works, even his diary. But now I perceive well his efforts towards a very well written style; I feel his desire to be in the French tradition, heir of a classic ideal; I know his ambition is to be a master of the prose as Flaubert. The problem is that it lacks something… something new, a new vision of the world, an anchorage in his era and meanwhile the faculty to be ahead of his time. Gide is talented, but he has no genius. He was on the good way, as he proved it with his best achievement Les Faux-monnayeurs, precisely because that’s rather innovative in the art of novel. I also liked La Porte étroite for his psychological penetration and his moving story. And I remember his first book I read, Les Nourritures terrestres, when I was a teen: I found it very refreshing, in the garden, in the summer…

Sartre was an exceptional thinker, and I prefer him as philosopher, not as playwright and novelist, although La Nausée is an excellent novel. I couldn’t say bad things about Camus since I don’t see in him real flaws, literally speaking.



I'd say novella differs from novel not by the length (number of pages), but by the duration (that of the story), and by the number of characters and events (less large). Do you make a distinction between novella and short story in English, or is it actually the same thing? In that case, my definition may be invalid. In French, there are two notions: nouvelle and roman (novel).

As to the first paragraph I felt similarly since the situation is of course reversed.

And I should also like to point out that I find Sartre and Camus pleasing, but I find their philosophical works more exceptional than their literature. Le Etre et Le Neant and Le Homme Revolte both were considerably influential to me. I've yet to read Sartre's Critique however, mainly because it is quite long and I felt that I have a decent understanding of his oeuvre considering I've read about a dozen of his works.

Gide I believe to be an overlooked author whose influence was more considerable than is perhaps realized. Comparing L'Immoraliste to L'Etranger or Nausee one finds more than considerable persaging of both those later works. the Countefeiters is such a complex work that in its era only Ulysses compares, and seems a brilliant conception of the Post modern novel.

As for the Novella/Novel 'debate' I differentiate novella as well from a short story. For example Camus' Exile and the Kingdom is composed of short stories whereas La Chute and L' Etranger are novellas and La Peste is a novel.

[arrytus]

Daam, to be honest I have not read fifty novels, and even amongst all the novels I have read I found most to be tolerable at best. Ahhh, I should read more.


This got me thinking about how many novels I've read. Off the top of my head I got to about 115, a quick check of my bookshelf got me over 150. And off the top of my head I counted about 75 novellas [this was simple; a dozen names got me there and Balzac counted for 25]. I didn't count plays too exactly but stopped when I got to 50, and simply looking at my collections got about two dozen collections of short stories [which is harder to do since collections come in different sizes, say I've got several books of Kafka and Chekov and Maupassant, but things like Woolf, and Mansfield and O. Henry are simply complete works]. I stopped at 75 philosophy books but I'm confident that that number is twice that. And I didn't even attempt non-fiction [orwell, twain, capote, kerouac, et al], science/history, or poetry.

Reviewing this it still seems much too small- even if I do take a sort of pride in how diverse my reading has been- but this is likely due to the fact that much of my reading occurred prior to my purchasing books and was through libraries ergo I can't simply look at my bookshelf. I'm confident that it's closer to the high end of what I estimate from these rough figures and around 800 books. Nowhere near McCarthy or Bakhtin or Benjamin's claims of having read 10 thousand books!

[Lord Macbeth]

I'll include plays, epic poems, and philosophical texts, so for me:

*1. Shakespeare, Hamlet
2. Shakespeare, Macbeth
3. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
4. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
5. Homer, The Iliad
6. Plato, The Republic
7. Beckett, Waiting For Godot
**8. Shaw, Man and Superman
9. Hemmingway, A Farewell To Arms
10. Sophocles, Antigone
***11. Mallory+Pearl Poet, Le Morte d'Arthur+Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
12. Homer, The Odyssey
13. Hugo, Les Miserables
****14. Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
*****15. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
16. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
17. Dante, The Divine Comedy
18. Ibsen, A Doll's House
19. Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
20. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
21. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
22. T. Williams, The Glass Menagerie
23. T. Williams, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof
24. Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
25. Unknown Mesopotamian, The Epic of Gilgamesh
26. Camus, The Fall
27. Shaw, Pygmalion
28. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
29. Dickens, Great Expectations
30. Plato, The Trial and Death Of Socrates
31. Swift, Gulliver's Travels
32. Euripides, The Bakkhai
33. Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
34. Shakespeare, Othello
35. Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
36. Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
37. Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
38. Aristophanes, Lysistrata
39. Euripides, Medea
40. Mill, Utilitarianism
******41. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
*******42. Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
43. Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
********44. Puskin, Eugene Onegin
45. Shakespeare, King Lear
46. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
47. Ibsen, The Wild Duck
48. Shaw, Saint Joan
*********49. Munday, The Downfal+The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingtington
***********50. Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

Notes:

*Yes, this is my absolute favorite text PERIOD, from poetry to novels to plays to philosophical treatises and everything else, this is IT, the work I adore above all others...back in high school I played Polonius in a 15-minute version of this that served as a prologue to R+G, I have and will forever extoll the virtues of the Kenneth Branagh, uncut, 4-hour version as THE best version on film--though to my slight surprise the new David Tennant version was pretty good as well, not wuite there but I'd actually rank it ahead of the heralded Sir Laurence Olivier version--and I quote and pull from from this play more than any other single text...not a bad one to do that with, though... ;)

**I actually just a wekk ago heard this for the first time in a complete radio version of the play, which was AMAZING...and the play itself has STILL left me in somewhat of a state of awe and incredulity a week later, it's THAT GREAT, if you've never read or seen or heard this work, YOU MUST! http://www.archive.org/details/Man_and_Superman It's already made my Top 10 All-Time list in just a week of hearing it, it's THAT RICH, the pacing and density and sheer breadth and daring of the work, touching on so many ideas and themes, the ENTIRE THIRD ACT literally going straight to Hell in a bit of pre-Absurdist Theatre Absurdist Theatre, and the fact that I really DO almost completely identify with the character of Jack Tanner--it was almost scary, actually, as literally some of the things he was arguing against about men and women adn marriage I had just a day or so before had very much said to my friends--and it's simply incredible, I always liked Shaw before, but this play really elevates him to an entirely new level of brilliance in my eyes that to say I have newfound respect for him would be a severe understatement

***I decided to group these together since that's how I was introduced to King Arthur's legend, with Mallory's work plus Gawain's tale, which I think is the best representation of the canon of Arthur, as Mallory's tale without "Green Knight" can paint an imcomplete picture of Gawain, and with the most appearances of any knight in Arthurian legend that's a bit unfair, and obviously "Green Knight" is a long, brilliant poem but only really gives Gawain, out of the Round Table and Court, a chance to shine, so here they are together

****I have a bit of a bias here as I was, again, IN a production of this with my family of friends way back when, and we WON the title for our production of this, so yes, I do view this play through some rose-colored lenses...but regardless, it's still a great play

*****Another bias, as I AM Jewish, so to see Shakespeare adress some issues--I'm of the school of thought that sees the play as not painting Shylock as perfectly good or perfectly bad but complex and certainly harmed and wronged by others, and there's some good portrayals and commentary, as such, on class strife, and from THERE we get the strife between Shylock as a Jew and an outcast of society vs. the corrupt-but-"Christian" Venetians--that are nearer to home to me makes it more of a favorite for me than perhaps it would be for others

******I just finished it today, great work and expression of Kierkegaard's ideals, though how much I agree with them is another matter

*******My first exposure to this was the original radio dramas...but as those were the original pieces, I think that's fair

********This admittedly gets a boost because of the fact that I LOVE Tchaikovsky's operatic treatment of the work, its very true to Puskin's story and the music is INCREDIBLE, and the Polonaise from that work is probably the closest I've ever felt that a musical score really FIT ME PERFECTLY...two great Russian artists HAVE to equate to a spot on this list

*********These two plays, dealing with the rise, fall, and death of Robin Hood--also known as the Earl of Huntington--are generally grouped together, so I did the same

**********My favorite book as a child, had to put it on there

Extra notes:

-I have YET TO READ Dyostoyevsky or Tolstoy, the biggest authors I've yet to read, which I regret, but intend to make my way towards them soon...four English classes and philosophy reading in my spare time leaves less time for such epic Russian writers, but they must be read, I'm sure, and I look foward to it

-I have a basic knowledge of Orwell's works and have read some, but not enough to really justify my putting him up there as someone I really know...soon, though...

-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; Hawthorne I simply can't stand, Conrad's use of imagery and symbolism is more to my tastes but again, his paicing kills it, Nostromo was perhaps the most sluggish read of my life, and not due to difficulty, just slogging through endless pages of description overdid it for me, Faulkner I didn't like at all in The Sound and the Fury, really, but a few parts of Go Down, Moses were really striking, so I'm starting to re-evaluate him, but he's still far from making a "Favorite" list of mine, and Melville I'll be able to judge more in full when I really analyze Moby Dick for this coming semester for one of those four college English classes--and I SINCERELY HOPE Mr. Melville's tome will live up to its legend and not disappoint me

-With 8 of the 50 choices, Shakespeare leads--commandingly--on the list; after him, Shaw and Ibsen both have 3, and Plato, Tennessee Williams, Homer, Nietzsche, Sophocles, and Euripides all have 2

-America, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Russia, and Greece are all represented on the list

[arrytus]

I'll include plays, epic poems, and philosophical texts, so for me:



******I just finished it today, great work and expression of Kierkegaard's ideals, though how much I agree with them is another matter


Melville I'll be able to judge more in full when I really analyze Moby Dick for this coming semester for one of those four college English classes--and I SINCERELY HOPE Mr. Melville's tome will live up to its legend and not disappoint me

suffice it to say my top 50 list would look much different if it included plays and poetry and nonfiction; novels would be hard pressed to make such a list in fact.

hamlet i read about every other week in highschool haven't read it for years now, but for a while i didn't need to since i knew it all by heart.

i like melville's short works than his novels. benito cereno and bartleby are two of my favorite works.

as for orwell his fiction is tripe. read his nonfiction which is engrossing and really the only things which hold up. I read 1984 at 19 and it seemed like something I should've read before I was a teenager to be worthwhile.

[stlukesguild]

50 Novels? This is something of challenge considering that I really haven't read many novels at all over the past number of years. My reading tends to focus far more upon poetry, short-fiction, plays, and non-fiction. Nevertheless, I'll give a try at my top 50:

1. Cervantes- Don Quixote
2. Tolstoy- War and Peace
3. Dostoevsky- The Brothers Karamazov
4. Proust- In Search of Lost Time
5. Hugo- Les Miserables
6. Melville- Moby Dick
7. Lawrence Sterne- Tristam Shandy
8. Swift- Gulliver's Travels
9. Flaubert- Madame Bovary
10. Dickens- A Tale of Two Cities
11. Dickens- David Copperfield
12. Goethe- The Sorrows of Young Werther
13. McCarthy- Blood Meridian
14. Faulkner- As I Lay Dying
15 Faulkner- The Sound and the Fury
16. Grass- The Tin Drum
17. Hesse- The Glass Bead Game
18. Hesse- Steppenwolf
19. Kafka- The Trial
20. Kafka- The Castle
21. Rabelais- Gargantua and Pantagruel
22. Twain- Huckleberry Finn
23. Mann- Doctor Faustus
24. Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities
25. Italo Calvino- The Baron in the Trees
26. Carroll- Alice in Wonderland
27. Carroll- Through the Looking-glass
28. Gabriel Garcia-Marquez- Love in the Time of Cholera
29. Machado de Assis- The Posthumous Diaries of Bras Cubas
30. Gore Vidal- Myra Breckenridge
31. Rilke- The Nootbooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
32. Bulgakov- The Master and Margeurita
33. Kazantzakis- The Last Temptation of Christ
34. Nabokov- Lolita
35. Woolf- Orlando
36. DeFoe- Robinson Carusoe
37. Mario Vargas LLosa- In Praise of the Stepmother
38. Fowles- The Collector
39. Joyce- Ulysses
40. Zola- Nana
41. Anthony Burgess- Nothing Like the Sun
42. Camus- The Stranger
43. Wilde- The Picture of Dorian Gray
44. Gautier- Mademoiselle de Maupin
45. Comte de Lautréamont- Maldoror
46. Jan Nepomucen Potocki- The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
47. John Kennedy Toole- Confederacy of Dunces
48. Pynchon- Mason and Dixon
49. Austen- Sense and Sensibility
50. Anne Carson- Autobiography of Red

In no particular order and all open to change... with the exception of perhaps the first 10.

[JCamilo]

When we are bored we make lists, which is a novelty... Among my favorite novels or novellas (As I define any long narrative with more than one frame, as Cortazar separated Short stories): I could think of Dom Quixote (Cervantes), Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Notes from Underground (Dostoievisky), Grandes Sertões Veredas (Guimarães Rosa), Orlando (Virginia Woolf), Finnegans Wake, Ulysses (Joyce), Sound and Fury(Faulkner), Bovard and Pecuchet, Madame Bovary(Flaubert), Encarnação (José de Alencar), Pedro Paramo(Juan Rulfo), Lolita(Nabokov), A tale of two cities (Dickens), Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte), Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, Moby Dick (Melville), Anna Karenina, A morte de Ivan Ilytch (Tolstoy), Gulliver Travels (Swift), America, The Castle, The process(Kafka), The man in the high castle (Philip K.Dick), La Invencion del Morel (Adolfo Bioy Casares), The three Mouskeeters (Dumas), Dom Casmurro (Machado de Assis), As Reinações de Narizinho(Monteiro Lobato), Alice in the Wonderlands and Looking glass (Lewis Carroll), The man who was Thursday (Chesterton), Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann), Vathek (William Beckford), Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury), Candido, Zadig (Voltaire), Heart of Darkness (Conrad), Hospotch(Cortazar), Invisible Man (H.G.Wells), The Moorgate of Ballantre( Robert Louis Stevenson), A cidade e as serras (Eça de Queiroz)… I am leaving out more older stuff who are novellas… but I got lazy and all lists must be wrong.

[mortalterror]

This is really more in chronological order than favorite:
1.The Bible
2.The Iliad by Homer
3.The Plays of Sophocles
4.The Plays of Aeschylus
5.The Plays of Euripides
6.The Plays of Aristophanes
7.The Republic by Plato
8.The Complete Works of Ovid
9.The Plays of Seneca
10.Pharsalia by Lucan
11.The Thebaid by Statius
12.Satyricon by Petronius
13.The Bhagavad Gita
14.300 Tang Poems by Various
15.The Book of Kings by Firdawsi
15.The Poems of Rumi
16.Gita Govinda by Jayadeva
17.The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
18.The Divine Comedy by Dante
19.Essays by Montaigne
20.Jerusalem Delivered by Tasso
21.The Plays of Shakespeare
22.Fuente Ovejuna by Lope De Vega
23.The Plays of Calderon
24.The Plays of Racine
25.The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld
26.The Farce of Sodom by John Wilmot
27.The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon
28.The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge
29.Walden by Thoreau
30.Danton's Death by Buchner
31.The Poems of Leopardi
32.Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire
33.Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Carroll
34.The Three Musketeers by Dumas
35.Moby Dick by Melville
36.Madame Bovary by Flaubert
37.The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne
38.Les Miserables by Hugo
39.The Short Stories of De Maupassant
40.The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn by Twain
41.Heart of Darkness by Conrad
42.The Poems of Eliot
43.Steppenwolf by Hesse
44.Of Human Bondage by Maugham
45.Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf
46.The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
46.The Complete Works of Hemingway
47.Short Novels of Steinbeck
48.Journey to the End of the Night by Celine
49.Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by West
50.The Works of Orwell
51.Waiting For Godot by Beckett
52.Lolita by Nabokov
53.The Dwarf by Lagerkvist
54.The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger
55.On The Road by Kerouac
56.Catch-22 by Heller
57.Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut
58.Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Thompson

[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 :D

[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!!!!!!!!!!! :mad5::mad5::mad5::mad5:

...

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. :p

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!!!! :mad5::mad5::mad5::mad5::mad5::mad5::mad5::mad5:

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!!!:hand:

[kelby_lake]

Great selection, Babak.