There is "Emma" by Jane Austen here but not "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens.
It is a lovely list though :)
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There is "Emma" by Jane Austen here but not "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens.
It is a lovely list though :)
The list looks quite reasonable, except some of the american writers. It would never have occurred to me to put them there. I just wonder has anyone who's not american voted for Scott Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurty?
Well I voted for one of these anyway - but what would being American have to do with it. I doubt if many Americans read after leaving school.
This is a really interesting list. I don't agree with some of it and have recently developed an actual hatred for F. Scott Fitzgerald and don't understand what got him into 4th place.
I would have had Solzhenitsyn there somewhere and agree with someone earlier who would have included A fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. Perhaps The Fountainhead rather than Atlas Shrugged.
I'm keeping a copy of this list for future reading. My thanks to the person who compiled it.
How did Watership Down get that many votes? I really want to know.
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
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
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
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
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
77. 1984 by George Orwell
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
spike---I love watership down! one of the few fiction books ive read twice, and id be willing to read a third time.
moby dick is one of the all-time worst books and i'll fight anyone who says otherwise! laughs...
or at least be willing to listen to someone who can convince me its the "great American novel."
war and peace was torturous and i don't think that belongs on any lists of top 100 books.
same with vanity fair, one of an unfortunately increasing amount of books i tried to read but just couldn't get through. im going along saying to myself, what the heck am i reading here?
i sometimes wonder how much pretension goes into such lists.
Hah! Don't worry that I'm stalking you. Just looking at the threads I looked at last time was here. :)
I don't hate Moby Dick but you don't have to fight me. I'm not American but have read quite a few books that probably capture the American soul better than that one.
I would probably come to fisticuffs over Vanity Fair, though. Look at it from the viewpoint of wry humour and it might appeal more. Thackeray is downright sarcastic and his people are real with human foibles that he probes almost surgically and then we forgive them because we understand, to some extent.
In a related issue (and I'm pleased to see it wasn't on the list) A Confederacy Of Dunces seems to divide the world. I have friends who rave about it, but I want returned the time I spent persevering with it.
Can you, or anyone, explain the attraction?
I remember being in 10th grade spike, and that probably being our first exposure to Shakespeare, almost totally lost and heavily dependent on the teacher being able to tell us what the heck it was we were reading.
in one particular class in grad school we had to read a pretty heady work by kant. I was at least a little out of my element so I cant speak for my peers here, but the writing was very difficult, and I was amazed at the prof's ability to say in plainer English what the heck we were reading.
if Thackeray's writing was indeed full of wry humor and sarcasm, id have to be reading it under the auspices of someone lots more insightful than me to tell me and show me what the heck it is I am reading!
I have dunces but I haven't read it yet. I just last night started a big fat elvis Presley biography but I don't like to just read non-fiction. i'm going to be finished soon with gone with the wind and will be looking for something else to read.
I'm in 2 minds.
I would like the opinion of someone I respect on that book, but pure friendship and just human consideration says I should advise you to Run! and burn the book. :)
laughs...okay, I'll go, at least temporarily, with your latter position.