Ah Ennison. Having your reading directed by the beauty of a bint! IsN't that written by a folk singer? I think we should have a list of 100 books excluding novels just to make a change
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Ah Ennison. Having your reading directed by the beauty of a bint! IsN't that written by a folk singer? I think we should have a list of 100 books excluding novels just to make a change
Let's what I've read from this list...
2. Hamlet
4. The Great Gatsby
15. Lolita
23. Heart of Darkness
29. Jane Eyre
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
43. The Canterbury Tales (well parts of it)
47. A Christmas Carol
56. The Hobbit
58. Waiting for Godot
65. Othello
70. Wuthering Heights
77. 1984
81. Of Mice and Men
Fourteen books in total. That's not a lot, but a lot of them are on my to-read list. Seems like a good list anyway! Gatsby at 4 is really high though it seems to me. It's a good book, but that's very extreme.
Great list. I've read:
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
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
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
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
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
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
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
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
I was comparing this list to other lists, including American critics like Harold Bloom and Clifford Fadiman, not just to my own list based on the novels I've read. Can you name one major critic who would put Gatsby ahead of Dickens' major novels?
Ah now my autistic side needs a list of "major" critics and their works. Not that I'd feel any requirement to read them. There is however a lot of pleasure to be had from reading the likes of Rexroth or Massie (arch-unionist) on other writers. Maybe I should check out if they thought Gatsby was "ahead of" Victorian Spitting Images!
Interesting, fun list. Thanks for putting it together. To nitpick, I agree with Corona, and I'd put Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, and a few other Shakespeare plays high up on the list, certainly above the Great Gatsby. I've read around 54 of these. I'm surprised Manfred by Lord Byron is on the list, but I didn't see Don Juan. I'm glad Don Quixote isn't in the top 5. I think the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann should be on the list. I don't think Ayn Rand should be on the list, personally, but I understand she's been influential; I'd rather see Virginia Woolf or Willa Cather or even the short stories of Lorrie Moore. I think Euripedes should be listed above Arthur Miller.
I think the Aeneid should be on the list. As for Dickens, I think Great Expectations or Bleak House should be on the list, and above Tale of Two Cities.
Here Ennison that bint who directed you to Macintyre must know a thing or two: he's just won the Festival First Book Award.
Guess the arty-farties would vote for it but I found it pretty awful. One thing I cannot abide is anachronism and that text has it. I'm not fond of gratuitous foulness either but that text fits in with the modern muck of Scotland purdy damned well. So I ain't too surprised it has been given a pat by the prat brigade. It is not without imagination. He comes of a creative pedigree: grandad a caelidh poet; uncle an avante-gardish scribbler. It figures I guess and one should never be too graceless in saying ok it deserves some acknowledgement. Howzat for a damning by faint praise! Oh and the "bint" knows a thing or three.
Amazingly, I've read about a quarter of these. I must be better read than I thought I was. As you said though, Everywhereguy, it's not what we've read but what we've taken from it. Which means I probably know jack sh*t, having the memory of a goldfish.
Some interesting choices. A Christmas Carol getting in above a Tale of Two Cities? And when it comes to Patrick White, I'm team Vivisector all the way. Glad to see Heart of Darkness placing so high. According to Wikipedia (that tome of accurate knowledge), it's quite unfashionable to rate it nowadays. Sure, it's been on the curriculum since nineteen-canteen, but is it actually good? Apparently Conrad didn't think much of it either. Gutted, as it's one of my favourite books.
Still, Tchaikovsky hated The Nutcracker, so what does he know...
Heart of Darkness is a tremendous book. Too subtle for some readers. It isn't like Nostromo of course which is magnificent. But my favourite Conrad is still The Arrow of Gold - that could be down to the age I was when I read it. White, who is little known by many on this forum, is one of the great writers.
I've read 33 of them.
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (not all of them, but enough that I felt like including it)
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
77. 1984 by George Orwell
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
Maybe I missed them, but the lack of Ovid, Macbeth, Animal Farm, and Brave New World is surprising.
A little surprised to see Les Miserables but no Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The fellow who collated this list did the site a service but he seems to have left us some time ago? Did this list replace an earlier one? The Bible is an anthology and perhaps he should have said folk should identify a favorite book from within it. But that might have registered the first five or six books on the list as being Biblical. I think I've read about twenty books from this list. It seems a bit skewed towards the serious stuff. But that's to be expected. So how did Agatha sneak in there I wonder.
A Dance to the Music of Time is not one but many books.
It is an interesting and mixed bag. I wouldn't pay much attention to the order. There were probably young people voting who had read only a couple of handfuls of books. That would account for presence of Tolkien and Martin. There is poetry (Manfred / Wife of Bath and pals) philosophy and fiction. What it mainly suggests to me is at least at the time it was drawn up there were very varied readers on the site.
Twenty-five, not bad, but there is rather a gap between 4 and 15 in which I show my philistinism.
1. The Bible
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell