I just finished The Adolescent and while I wouldn't consider it Dostoevsky's greatest work or anything, I rather enjoyed it. I even liked it better than Brothers Karamozov.Quote:
Originally Posted by Adolescent09
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I just finished The Adolescent and while I wouldn't consider it Dostoevsky's greatest work or anything, I rather enjoyed it. I even liked it better than Brothers Karamozov.Quote:
Originally Posted by Adolescent09
What would you consider Dostoevsky's greatest work? Crime and Punishment?
Well, that's a tough one. First of all, it would just be a personal opinion, I'm not making any sort of professional-type critique, I like what I like and that's about as technical as I get. :p Secondly, I know which ones I would omit, The Adolescent and Brothers Karamazov but that leaves Crime and Punishment, Demons and The Idiot all of which I loved, although I don't know if I could really say I loved the The Idiot, I'm not sure you can love something that completely devastates you but it was an incredibly powerful book unlike anything I've ever read. It's such a close race between those 3, they are each brilliant for their own reasons and evoke such different but equally as strong emotional responses....I don't know which I would choose, do I have to answer that question? :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Adolescent09
You do have a valid point and I have yet to read The Idiot and Demons (I never even knew he had written a book by the name of Demons) but if by your standards they exceed Brothers Karamazov then they must be exceptionally good, because to me Brothers Karamazov is one of the most powerful books I've ever read.
Demons goes by a couple different names, The Posessed and Devils so if you go looking for it, be warned that it comes in different guises.Quote:
Originally Posted by Adolescent09
And I didn't really care for Brothers Karamazov and I know that puts me in a very significant minority. There were aspects to the story that I found fascinating, there were characters that I liked, particularly Ivan, but overall, it didn't really impact me on the same level as Dostoevsky's other novels so my standards are not going to be the same as yours. You may read the others and decide I'm out of my mind not to put Brothers at the top. :p
How dare you forget "Noets From the Underground"? It's short, simple and brilliant. I'd definitely stick it in with the other three you mentioned.
I didn't really care for that one either. :lol: I have some of the same issues with that one as I do with Brothers but as I was careful to point out, this is a personal list, not some kind of definitive ranking of books for the masses. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark F.
1. Lord of the Rings
2. Swan Song, Robert MacCammon
3. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
4. The Time Machine, HG Wells
5. Dark Tower series, Stephen King
6. Once An Eagle, Anton Myrer
7. Bone Collector, Jeffrey Deaver
8. From the Corner of his Eye, Dean Koontz
9. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
10. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Not necessarily in that order though.
1. Lord of the Rings: Tolkien
2. Crime & Punishment: Dostoesvskii
3. The Castle: Kafka
4. Brothers Karamazov: Dostoevskii
5. 100 Years of Solitute: Marquez
6. History: Morante
7. Hunger: Hamsun
8. Master & Margarita: Bulgakov
9. Don Quixote: Cervantes
10. Pride and Prejudice: Austen
Other novels which came close to top 10 were-"Red and the Black" by Stendahl, "Madame Bovary" by Flaubert, "Lolita" by Nabakov, "The Silmarillion" by Tolkien and "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Marquez.
1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. The Illiad by Homer
3. A Tale of Two Cities
4. Julius Caeser by Shakespeare
5. Le Morte de Arthur
6. Dracula
7. Jane Eyre
8. The Count of Monte Cristo
9. The Mabinogion
10. The House of Mirth
1. Paradise Lost
2. Wuthering Heights
3. Marabu Stork Nightmares - Irvine Welsh
4. 1984
5. Emma - Austen
6. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg
7. The House with the Green Shutters - George douglas Brown
8. Lanark - Alasdair Gray
9. Consider the Lilies - Iain Chrichton Smith
10. The Restraint of Beasts - Magnus Mills
This to not be a definitive list, merely what I decided on while looked round at my bookshelf and thought, omg I loved that book... I cant usually decide. Given enough time I think my list would end up twenty pages long.
I LOVE the Golden Compass. Really wonderful book. The rest of the series is great, too.
1. Sir Gawain & the Green Knight
2. Hamlet
3. King Lear
4. The Sound & the Fury
5. Mere Christianity
6. Crime & Punishment
7. The Grapes of Wrath
8. The Great Gatsby
9. Moby Dick
10. The Nicomachean Ethics
Why lots of you enjoy 1984? I think it's hardly called a classic,it's a boring book anyway.
1. The Iliad, Homer
2. Paradise Lost, John Milton
3. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
4. Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin
5. The Aeneid, Virgil
6. The Divine Comedy, Dante
7. The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
8. Dracula, Bram Stoker
9. The Time-Traveller's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
10. Sleepyhead, Mark Billingham
A somewhat eclectic mix, and by no means definitive, but still a little glimpse into my reading-psyche all the same :D P.S. I didn't think that 1984 was great, but I didn't think it was boring. Profoundly depressing, maybe.
[QUOTE][/Why lots of you enjoy 1984? I think it's hardly called a classic,it's a boring book anyway.QUOTE]
It is perhaps the most important political novel of the 20th century!
1. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
2. Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
3. Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
4. Notre Dame of Paris by Victor Hugo
5. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
6. The Complete Works of HG Wells
7. The Complete Works of Jules Verne
8. Inherit the Wind by Robert E. Lee and someone else
9. The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
10. The Metamorphosis by kafka
1.-The pillars of the earth (Ken Follett)
2.-1984 (George Orswell)
3.-Alice in wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
4.-Don Quixote (Cervantes)
5.-I, Robot (Isaac Asimov)
6.-Dune (Frank Herbert)
7.-Edgar Alan Poe's tales and poems
8.-Papillon (Henri Charriere)
9.-Lord of the rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
10.-The hound of the varkervilles (Arthur Conan Doyle)
The top ten books I've read are...
The Lord of the Rings (we'll count that as one ;-) by J.R.R.Tolkien
The Silmarillian by Tolkien
The Hobbit by Tolkien
The Chronicles of Narnia (we'll call that one too :-D) by C.S.Lewis
The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff
The Eagle of the Ninth by Sutcliff
The Lantern Bearers by Sutcliff
The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Here are a few books which I don't think that I have mentioned elsewhere. I am not making claims for them as great literature (although some are) but they are major reading experiences and alter how you look at other novels afterwards. I have stuck to novels.
'Hermanos' by William Herrick. He was a cantankerous but likeable American radical. 'Hermanos' is based on his Spanish Civil War experiences.
'The Fox in The Attic' by Richard Hughes. This was the first in a trilogy but he only completed two. A mixture of roman a clef and clever psychological analysis.
'The Green Isle of The Great Deep' by Neil Gunn. This is a novel about totalitarianism thinly disguised as a fairy tale-like odyssey in a Celtic otherworld.
'A Kind of Loving' by Stan Barstow. He described himself as a fourth rate writer and I can forgive a man so self deprecating a great deal. This is from the social realist school and every page rings true.
'Pincher Martin' One of Golding's odder books but worth reading just to see the range of what literature can try to do.
'Life and Fate' A massive multi dimensional novel by a journalist who followed The Red Army in their pursuit of Hitler's legions.
'August 1914' Not my personal favourite amongst his work but the start of a sequence which as far as I know he has not yet concluded - perhaps never will. But it is a novel wide in scope and understanding.
'The Tomorrow File' by Lawrence Sanders. Just one of those iconoclastic novel which is highly disturbing and once read is not likely to be forgotten.
'The Tin Drum'. One of Grass' responses to the cataclysmic period in which he was young. A tremendous imaginative response to militant nationalism.
'The Unforgotten Prisoner' by R C Hutchinson. Now this is a really great piece of literature. Although there are chronological infelicities it is a profound and moving book - a pivotal reading experience
'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' by Robert Tressel. Although this is spoiled by a gullible acceptance of socialism as a panacea for the woes of the workers it is probably the best book in English (Patrick MacGill not excepted) of the proletarian experience.
'Gormenghast' Mervyn Peake. Fantastic story-telling gifts and imagination.
‘The Power and The Glory’ Graham Greene .The quintessential Catholic writer and his exploration of the battle between atheism and faith during the so-called Mexican revolution.
‘The Informer’ by Liam O Flaherty. Sardonic. Barbaric occasionally poetic. A writer who was best on the small scale canvas but this though definitely not great literature could only have been written from the point of view of an ex-British army/IRA point of view. It punches well above its weight..
‘The Taste of Too Much’ by Cliff Hanley A minor comic Scottish masterpiece.
‘The Islander’ by A C Maclean. This is a masterpiece too but sadly out-of-print. If any Scottish publisher reads this, then take it as a plea to get this wonderful novel back into bookshops.
‘The Road’ Cormac McCarthy. There aren’t many American writers better than this fellow on form. Set in a post nuclear holocaust USA.
‘The Channering Worm’ J P McConndach. Morbid Calvinistic Gothic. You would either love it or hate it. More of a linguistic tour de force than a straightforward novel.
OOps forgot to mention that Grossman was the author of 'Life and Fate'
Just noticed that 'Enemy At The Gates' was on television yesterday. It's not a very good film but it is based on real events - the sniper that Jude Law plays was a real person. Grossman's novel deals with similar things but on a huge canvas.... what the best Russian writers have always seemed good at. The best Stalingrad text I've read though was Nekrasov's and he was there as a front line soldier. No novel or film can do anything but give a tiny impression of what massive cruel battles like these really involved. Grossman tries to deal with the big issues and that's why I feel his novel is both ambitious and worth reading. He was one of the most accurate and best of the Soviet era journalists during the war that Stalin and his cronies found necessary to call The Great Patriotic War, acknowledging that the Russians were not fighting for the vision of Marxist atheism that the Bolsheviks had imposed.
PS I should have said that 'The Islander' is the best of Macleans books. He was a highly successful childrens author. He wrote fairly dense traditional adventure stories. He described himself as a 'scribbler'. 'The Islander' is an adult book but any literate teenager would like it. I am always irritated when I discover good books are out-of-print.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which is on quite a few lists. Read this book years and years ago and it still stays with me.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, a book I hound everyone to read.
Practical Solitary Magic by Nancy B. Watson, on self-empowerment.
The Pagan Bible by M. Gorham, a book my son found at his college library. I could kiss him a thousand times for checking it out for me.
Just about anything by Taylor Caldwell and Pearl Buck, who know human nature beyond anyone I've ever read.
Fire From Heaven and The Persian Boy by Mary Renault, novels of Alexander the Great.
Ishmael, My Ishmael, Beyond Civilization, and The Story of B by Daniel Quinn, more referals from my son. (kissy, kissy)
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, (and a fantastic movie) about the "prison" of poverty.
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, extremely interesting story of the written word.
The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall
The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light by Tom Harpur, based on the writings of Alvin Boyd Kuhn.
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls and The Voice of Bugle Ann by MacKinlay Kantor, two adolescent books I still remember after many long years.
1. Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
2. Clockwork Orange by Burgess
3. Beowulf
4. To Kill A Mockingbird by Lee
5. Pride and Prejudice by Austen
6. Jane Eyre by Bronte
7. Hamlet
8. The Odyssey
9. "Nature and other essays" by Emerson
10. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne
Some others that didnt make my top ten: The Bell Jar, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Wuthering Heights, The Rise of Silas Lapham, LOTR, and many more:bawling:
Takes all sorts i guess!
Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
The Gunslinger, King
Salinger, The Catcher In the Rye
Ulysses, Joyce
The Illiad, Homer
The Satanic Verses, Rushdie
Midnight's Children, Rushdie
The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie
These are the extraordinary books i've read. Going to be cheeky and sneak in an autobiography, Lucky Man by Micheal J Fox:blush:
I surprised no one has Ken Kessey's beautiful One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on their list :(
There are a few with that novel on their list. I like it, but sometimes feel it was "overtaken" by the movie?
My favorites
The Once and Future King by TH White,
The Brother's Karamazov by Dostoevsky,
Crime and Punishment, also by Dostoevsky,
Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory,
Candide, by Voltaire,
Light in August, by William Faulkner
Hi, my name is Dave and I'm new here(registered 5 minutes ago). I'm 28(yesterday) and I'm a student living in Michigan. The reason for my post is that I have a project for school that I need a little help with. I won't bore you with all the details but the idea is to poll several hundred people and come up with a list of the top 100 novels ever written. My approach is to ask as many people as possible for their favorite 10 novels and to score 1-2 with 3 points, 3-5 with 2 points, and 6-10 with 1 point. Then I plan to simply add up the points of every book and put them in order. The problem I've found is that when walking around a college campus, more often than not, people can't even name 10 books. Thats why I've decided to take my quest to the internet. At least I know people here have read 10 books lol. When my study is complete I will surely post the results here if anyone is interested in seeing them. And if this post is inappropriate I apologize. Mods feel free to delete/modify/or move to a more appropriate forum if needed. Thanks everyone. Here is a sample list of my favorites thus far.
1. The Count Of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
2. Ulysses - James Joyce
3. War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy
4. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
5. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Lord Of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
8. The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
9. Watership Down - Richard Adams
10. Angels And Demons - Dan Brown
Thanks in advance for your help
-DP
1. Lord of the Rings
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
4. The Chronicles of Narnia
5. Pickwick Papers
6. Anything by Moliere
7. The Odyssey
8. Anything by Edgar Allan Poe
9. Anne of Green Gables series
10. Silmarillion
1. The Magus - J. Fowels
2. The Demons - Dostoievsky
3. Lord of the Flies - W. Golding
4. Perhaps an island - M. Houllebeque
5. Middlesex - J. Eugenides
6. The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
7.The Agony and the Ecstasy - Irving Stone
8. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
9. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
10. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I hope it helps.
Lord Of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit-J.R.R. Tolkien
1984-George Orwell
Animal farm-George Orwell
the kite runner-Khaled Hosseini
Brave New world-Aldous Huxley
Fahrenheit 451 -Ray Bradbury
The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
Dark tower-Stephen King
Robinson Crusoe-Daniel Defoe
1. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
2. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevski
3. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
4. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
5. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemmingway
6. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
7. Animal Farm - George Orwell
8. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
9. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
10. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (RIP)
Thx Scheherazade,
That is actually VERY helpful. Nice list. Its gonna take me a bit of time to get through it lol but I guess thats a good thing. Thx again.
-DP
*Note: This list includes chiefly history and science fiction. If you are interested in either, you have to read the books listed.
1. The Art of War Sun Tzu - History
2. The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck - The Tough Life
3. Time Machine H. G. Wells - Classic Science Fiction
4. Conquest of Gaul Julius Caesar - History
5. The Island of Dr. Moreau H. G. Wells - Classic Science Fiction
6. Hannibal Theodore Ayrault Dodge - History
7. Plutarch's Lives Plutarch - History
8. Alexander T A Dodge - History
9. First Men In The Moon - Classic Science Fiction
10. Outline Of History - H. G. Wells
Ok so I went through this entire thread and entered all the top 10 lists into a database. I got rid of the books that were not novels. I also polled hundreds of live people along with a partner and came up with a list. We polled ~500-600 people and came up with a top 100 novels list. Anyone who is interested the list can be found at Top 100 Novels. If linking is against the rules I apologize. Mods feel free to delete the link if it is against the rules. Thanks to everyone who listed their favorite books. This thread was a huge help in the project.
DP
Nice job. I must say I'm glad LOTR was number 2, and it was really thoughtful of you to add that other top books section.
Nice, but not objective. Actually, very nonobjective.
I Don't understand......Quote:
Originally Posted by bazarov
Personal Top Ten:
1. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
2. The Idiot by (Dostoevsky, Modern Library edition translated by Anna Brailovsky)
3. Great Expectations (Dickens)
4. White Fang (London)
5. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Mark Twain)
6. The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde)
7. The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
8. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey)
9. Butterfield 8 (O'Hara)
10. Treasure Island (Stevenson); or any other adventure novels will do, Three Musketeers (Dumas), The Scarlet Pimpernel (Orcszy), etc
1. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
2. The Lord of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
4. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
5. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
6. The Count of Monte Christo - Alexander Dumas
7. The Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
8. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
9. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis (one of the best stories for children)
10. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell