I don't think I could pick just 10 candidates for a revision, though. Maybe...
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I don't think I could pick just 10 candidates for a revision, though. Maybe...
We had to submit a top 25. You just list down whatever comes to your mind.
I thought we did a top ten where order mattered?
Oh my bad, yes the voting was on this thread: http://www.online-literature.com/for...ooks-Revisited
Anyway if we should do another list, I feel that a top 25 would be more ideal. The film discussion forum (mubi.com) used to have polls where users submitted a list of 25 films, and it turned out that there was more representation for personal choices rather than what you get from a standard canon.
Furthermore, I tend to be more interested in the individual lists than the final list.
Well, I for one am ready for another list. 25 choices sounds good to me.
I agree, a top 25 would allow for greater diversity in the final "canon."
Too bad I didn't participate in this one. This list is a good one. But perhaps it would be a little bit more interesting to create a top 25 books that were written/started/pubublished in 21st century. Because I have a feeling that if we would create top 25 of all times we would end up with well-known and already read books.
My Top Ten of the excluded novels:
1. Middlemarch by George Eliot (no-brainer)
2. Beloved by Toni Morrison
3. Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
4. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
5. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
6. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
7. The Ambassadors by Henry James
8. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
9. Neuromancer by William Gibson
10. New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
Ten more excluded and deserving:
1. Underworld by Don DeLillo
2. White Noise by Don DeLillo
3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
4. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
5. Ubik by Philip K. Dick
6. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
7. Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
8. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
9. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
10. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
I like that selection PB though I do not know the last two, don't care for Woolf and was very disappointed by Bulgakov - much preferring his other work.
Snow Crash is a brilliant Pynchon-esque Cyberpunk novel about a hilarious, yet frightening, near future and the fascinating virtual reality world within it. Austerlitz is an elegant novel about memory and the Holocaust's lingering residual effects.
You are tempting me PB to abandon my distaste for the stranger shores to try Snow Crash. Ok I give in. I will. But no promises that I won't be scathing
Ok Ennison. Money where the mouth is. Did you?
Sorry to say Eiseabhal - not yet. I still have not acquired it. But I recently read Unsworth's Morality Play (very good but too short) I'm well into Kennedy's The Feast (What a terrific little book!) I've also been dipping in and out of a collection of Collier tales (beautifully written oddities) Catriona and Their Eyes were Watching God are getting near the top of the pile!
I take it that's RLS' Catriona. Kidnapped is a novel I loved when young but it ends so flat that he just had to write a sequel. Kennedy I confess to never having heard of but now that I've looked her up I reckon I should give her a go. Have you read any more of her work?
No but there is one in the pile: The Constant Nymph. It is quite far down the pile. One cannot read everything. A colleague (A very beautiful colleague!) has just given me The Letters of Ivor Punch to read and it will go to the top once Catriona is finished. Stevenson's use of dialogue in Catriona is brilliant.
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
I've read:
1. The Bible (well, about half of it)
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (did not enjoy at all)
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams (I've exchanged letters with Richard Adams.)
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Lydia Davis's 2012 translation)
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
77. 1984 by George Orwell
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
20/100. I suppose that's a decent start.
I've read:
1. The Bible (not the entire book)
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
77. 1984 by George Orwell
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
28/100.
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
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
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
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
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
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
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
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
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
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
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
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
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
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
The list borders half on the preposterous, and the other half is just indecent.
When is there going to be a revote?
Even though I am a Christian, the Bible at #1 seems a bit biased considering most people here haven't read it all let alone the other timeless religious texts (Torah, Quran, Book of the Dead, te Ching etc)... but if it is listed in accordance with sales and impact it makes sense.
I have read only 30 of the books but there is not enough non-fiction. Where is Herodotus, Plato, Thucydides, Augustine, Darwin, Euripides etc..?
The following is just my opinion:
Les Miserables is in my top 5, To Kill a Mockingbird should only be at 75+ and even that is being generous, if Slaughterhouse Five is on the list so should Elie Wiesel's 'Night'. Lolita is great but definitely overrated. Jane Eyre should be a little higher. Vanity Fair should be higher.
Crime and Punishment is definitely better than Moby-Dick. Melville's masterpiece although poetic, harrowing and visceral is absolutely no match for Dostoevsky's mental transplant of Raskolinikov's torture into the mind of the reader. The reader BECOMES Raskolinikov, in a very similar way that the reader BECOMES Prince Myshkin (why the heck isn't The Idiot on this list by the way? It's on a par with Crime and Punishment.)
If we are going by impact (as is clearly being done with the first book on the list) ironically the last book on the list along with Romeo & Juliet and King Lear should be higher up.
Oh, and The Grapes of Wrath was way better than Of Mice and Men. Of Mice and Men is foisted on reluctant high school readers along the lines of The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atlas Shrugged etc..
...and Lord of the Rings? like seriously? That's middle-school reading.
I have never actually read the Bible; I have listened to the unabridged 60+-CD set of the KJV 2+ dozen times. Narrator: American actor Alexander Scourby*, who made the recording for the American Foundation for the Blind during 4-yr period, ending in 1953. First full recording of the Bible issued on LP records. I recalled a h.s. English teacher playing parts of it for her class. Had the CD set for several years before I slipped disc 1 into the car CD player, listening on my until recently lengthy commutes.
Ditto Joyce's Ulysses. Coincidently, there's a cite early in the novel where Joyce wrote about leaving one's (grandpa's) audio legacy.
_________________
*If you want to see actor Scourby in action, he appeared as Gen. Harper in a Twilight Zone episode called The Last Flight.
[QUOTE=Adolescent09;1333015]
I have read only 30 of the books but there is not enough non-fiction. Where is Herodotus, Plato, Thucydides, Augustine, Darwin, Euripides etc..?
I've read 32, but I have the same problem, including the "etc."
"Crime and Punishment" and "Moby Dick" both belong on the list. "Atlas Shrugged" is much too long for high school readers.
I've read:
1. The Bible (well, about half of it)
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (did not enjoy at all)
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams (I've exchanged letters with Richard Adams.)
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Lydia Davis's 2012 translation)
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
17/100.
I think it was as good a list as any. Nobody would be ashamed of reading most of these and being able to think and speak about them. But it has been here a few years. Maybe it needs refreshed.
Not sure if the Bible can be ranked as one? It very rarely influences modern Christian society, is not practiced and has not had the cultural, societal and legal impact of other religious texts, in particular something like the Quran, which has a far greater historical and current impact.
I have looked down the rest of the list and found some really good choices and some that I personally disagree with...then again that is the problem with being subjective.
I do like the inclusion of "The murder of Roger Akroyd", as Christie is such an underrated writer.
So this has been my first contribution to the site :)
Hi everyone haha