Ten Favorite Novels

My ten "favorite" :)

1. The French Lieutenant's Woman, J. Fowles
2. The Magus, J. Fowles
3. Invisible Man, R.Ellison
4. Catch-22, J. Heller
5. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, J. Joyce
6. Nostromo, J. Conrad
7. Slaughterhouse Five, K. Vonnegut
8. Jude the Obscure, T. Hardy
9. Midnight's Children, S. Rushdie
10. The Great Gatsby, F. S. Fitzgerald

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Originally Posted by rmd

I see that my Ten Favorite Novels thread has gotten folded into the Ten Must-Read Books, which seems different to me. Maybe the number of threads has gotten out of hand?

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:lol: :lol: No, I doubt it's out of hand!
You're right, it's different, but they only wanted to help; it's very often that someone new don't look in other similar threads before opening new one! :lol:

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Originally Posted by bazarov

I second to that!

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And I third it ;)

My list is:
1- The Brothers Karmazov by Dostoyevsky.
2- Don Quixote by Cervantes.
3- Les Mesirebales by Victor Hugo.
4- Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.
5- War and Peace by Tosltoy.
6- 100 years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez.
7- The Silent Don.
8- David Cooperfield by Charles Dickens.
9- "don't laugh at this please lol" Stephen King's The Running Man.
10- The Davinci Code by Dan Brown.

Do they have to be strictly novels? Most of my favourite works are not.

In no particular order, at this moment, my favourite works - novels and other - would be:

Alighieri, D. - La Divina Commedia
Selimović, M. - The Death and the Dervish
Milton, J. - Paradise Lost
Calderón de la Barca, P. - Life is a dream
Shakespeare, W. - Hamlet
Goethe, J. W. - Faust
Gundulić, I. - Osman
Dostoevsky, F. M. - The Brothers Karamazov
Mann, Th. - Doktor Faustus
Hesse, H. - The Glass Bead Game

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Originally Posted by Anastasija

Alighieri, D. - La Divina Commedia
Selimović, M. - The Death and the Dervish
Milton, J. - Paradise Lost
Calderón de la Barca, P. - Life is a dream
Shakespeare, W. - Hamlet
Goethe, J. W. - Faust
Gundulić, I. - Osman
Dostoevsky, F. M. - The Brothers Karamazov
Mann, Th. - Doktor Faustus
Hesse, H. - The Glass Bead Game

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I couldn't find Derviš i Smrt nowhere on Interliber but I really want to read it. Život je san, a san su i sami snovi - De La Barca ?:D

1. The Catcher in the Rye
2. To Kill a Mocking bird
3. 1984
4. A Passage to India
5. Lord of the rings

These are in no special order I love them all

Here goes (no order)

1984
Crime and punishment
A farewell to arms
Silmarillion
A tale of two cities
The silent Don

Anybody notice that a lot of the material being quoted are not even novels but poems and plays such as les miserables and paradise lost. i move to propose that the list be kept solely to novels and hence a greater range of names will appear instead of simply the literary canon that has been taught in schools across the western world this past 20/30 years.

For my part, my ten ould be (in no specific order)
1. Catch 22
2. Great Expectations
3. A Farewell To Arms
4. 1984
5. The Lord of The Rings
6. Gulliver's Travels
7. Frankenstein
8. Jane Eyre
9. In A Glass Darkly
10. Pudd'nhead Wilson

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Originally Posted by IrishMark

Anybody notice that a lot of the material being quoted are not even novels but poems and plays such as les miserables and paradise lost. i move to propose that the list be kept solely to novels and hence a greater range of names will appear instead of simply the literary canon that has been taught in schools across the western world this past 20/30 years.

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Les Miserables is a play?!?!?!?:bawling: :bawling: :bawling: :bawling:

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Originally Posted by bazarov

Les Miserables is a play?!?!?!?:bawling: :bawling: :bawling: :bawling:

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One could argue that Paradise Lost is somewhat a novel in verse too... although I'm not very scholarly in literature theory... (at least I know that Les Misérables is a novel though...)

lol, sorry, my mistake, i meant to say hamlet lol- apologies...

Well, top 10. The first 5 always remain the same. The last 5 tend to jump around or get knocked off the list by something else based on my mood. So these are my current choices....

1) Jane Eyre - Bronte
2) Persuasion - Austen
3) The Phantom of the Opera - Leroux
4) A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens
5) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - Lewis
6) Maurice - Forster
7) The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Dickens
8) Gone With The Wind - Mitchell
9) Nicholas Nickleby - Dickens
10) A Long Fatal Love Chase - Alcott

Honorable mention: The "Little House" series by Laura Ingalls Wilder :)

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Originally Posted by LadyWentworth

Well, top 10. The first 5 always remain the same. The last 5 tend to jump around or get knocked off the list by something else based on my mood. So these are my current choices....

1) Jane Eyre - Bronte
2) Persuasion - Austen
3) The Phantom of the Opera - Leroux
4) A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens
5) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - Lewis
6) Maurice - Forster
7) The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Dickens
8) Gone With The Wind - Mitchell
9) Nicholas Nickleby - Dickens
10) A Long Fatal Love Chase - Alcott

Honorable mention: The "Little House" series by Laura Ingalls Wilder :)

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yes the lion the witch and the wardrobe is a brilliant book- first captured my imagination in primary school and has never let go...hopefully it never will...

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Originally Posted by bazarov

I couldn't find Derviš i Smrt nowhere on Interliber but I really want to read it. Život je san, a san su i sami snovi - De La Barca ?:D

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There is a DiVič edition of Derviš i smrt (Zagreb, 2001.), and my own copy is of that edition, and most of the copies I have been coming across in Croatian libraries over the years had either that edition, or Svjetlost edition (Sarajevo, year depending on edition). I could not find DiVič on web, but you might wish to attempt to contact them, probably there is only some address or some way to get to them if you really wish.

And yes, those are Calderón's verses. I remember from school, it was something like:
... O, malen je dar nam dan, Jer sav život - to je san, A san su i sami snovi...
God I love that work.:D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by IrishMark

Anybody notice that a lot of the material being quoted are not even novels but poems and plays such as les miserables and paradise lost. i move to propose that the list be kept solely to novels and hence a greater range of names will appear instead of simply the literary canon that has been taught in schools across the western world this past 20/30 years.

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I feel alluded to - though, unlike some, I clearly warned that I was not making a list of 10 favourite novels since most of my literary favourites happen not to be novels :) - since my post was relatively recent at the time you replied, so alright, let me modify the post of my "top 10" according more to the form and less to the content.

If we insist on the form of novel, then:
Selimović, M. - The Death and the Dervish
Dostoevsky, F. M. - The Brothers Karamazov
Mann, Th. - Doktor Faustus
Hesse, H. - The Glass Bead Game (these four remain from my old response, if I exlude the non-novels off the list)

And, in addition to those, right now if I had to compose a list of another six, they would be:
Kundera, M. - Life is Elsewhere
Zweig, S. - The World of Yesterday (strictly speaking, that is also not a novel, it is sort of mixture of his memoirs?)
Lermontov, M. Ju. - A Hero of Our Time (though again, strictly speaking, one could argue this is not a novel in full sense)
Yourcenar, M. - Alexis
Pushkin, A. S. - Evgenij Onegin (we defined it as "novel in verse" at school when studied, so... :D)
and, say, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.

Equally predictable and "school"-ish list as the one I had before, except that these are novels, and that I tried not to have the same author twice (otherwise I could have composed an addition to the list out of Kundera and Dostoevsky only) ... :lol:
I had a hard time composing it, though. I really prefer other types of works, so this was a nice challenge.

1 The Devil to Pay in the Backlands - Guimarães Rosa
2 1984 - George Orwell
3 Budapeste - Chico Buarque
4 Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
5 A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
6 Dom Casmurro - Machado de Assis
7 The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
8 São Bernardo - Graciliano Ramos
9 High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
10 The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Anastasija

I feel alluded to - though, unlike some, I clearly warned that I was not making a list of 10 favourite novels since most of my literary favourites happen not to be novels :) - since my post was relatively recent at the time you replied, so alright, let me modify the post of my "top 10" according more to the form and less to the content.

If we insist on the form of novel, then:
Selimović, M. - The Death and the Dervish
Dostoevsky, F. M. - The Brothers Karamazov
Mann, Th. - Doktor Faustus
Hesse, H. - The Glass Bead Game (these four remain from my old response, if I exlude the non-novels off the list)

And, in addition to those, right now if I had to compose a list of another six, they would be:
Kundera, M. - Life is Elsewhere
Zweig, S. - The World of Yesterday (strictly speaking, that is also not a novel, it is sort of mixture of his memoirs?)
Lermontov, M. Ju. - A Hero of Our Time (though again, strictly speaking, one could argue this is not a novel in full sense)
Yourcenar, M. - Alexis
Pushkin, A. S. - Evgenij Onegin (we defined it as "novel in verse" at school when studied, so... :D)
and, say, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.

Equally predictable and "school"-ish list as the one I had before, except that these are novels, and that I tried not to have the same author twice (otherwise I could have composed an addition to the list out of Kundera and Dostoevsky only) ... :lol:
I had a hard time composing it, though. I really prefer other types of works, so this was a nice challenge.

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im sorry if i gave you this impression, as I was actually looking through the pages and I seen several people doing it so no I shall not blame you lol...

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Originally Posted by Etienne

A Tale of Two Cities ;)

And out of curiosity, what exactly did you like in The Alchemist? I read it because some people told me they really liked it, but I really, really hated that book. I think it's probably the worst book I've ever read honestly.

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That's what i meant-im the kind of person who thinks of something else why they're talking (in this case typing), and so i sometimes say (or think) of what im thinking-not what i really mean

I love the alchemist- its a universal book that gives universal lessons, and its a story about a boy on a journey-and that's what life is-a journey...

i first thought it was awful because i was forced to read it in school (any book i'm forced to read is a terrible book for me at the time)-but then i read it again and saw the beauty of a book like that :) )

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Originally Posted by packersfan

i first thought it was awful because i was forced to read it in school (any book i'm forced to read is a terrible book for me at the time)-but then i read it again and saw the beauty of a book like that :) )

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Now I'm really curious. Could you please say where are you from? I'm really surprised, especially because here in Brazil the only time I 'have to' read Coelho was when my Literary Theory teacher asked us to read "in order to understand why people love so much Coelho's works".

There is a The Alchemist discussion thread if anyone is interested :)

http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=27870

Great selections by everyone on this thread --- obviously the forum is blessed with participants who are exceptionally knowledgeable. I see that the selections have been broadened to include poems and literature that are not novels. And, to me, that's a good idea.

Here are books I would include among my top ten:


Aesop Fables

Confucius Analects

Khayyam Rubiyat

Cervantes Don Quixote

Erasmus In Praise of Folly

Hugo Les Miserables

Melville Moby Dick

Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment

Santayana The Last Puritan

Orwell 1984

Milan Kundera - The Joke

Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita

Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray

Herman Hesse - Demian

Albert Camus - The stranger

Bernhard Schlink - The Reader

G. G. Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment

Antoine de Saint-Exupery - Le Petit Prince

Ten is too little....Here's my list;

Mysteries and Victoria by Knut Hamsun
The Lake and A Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
The Razor's Edge and Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham
Death on the Installment Plan and Journey to the End of the Night by Celine
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Web and the Rock by Thomas Wolfe
L'Assomir by Emile Zola
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
No Longer Human and The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
The Abortion;A Historical Romance by Richard Brautigan
The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki
My Autobiography by Maxim Gorky
Wait Until Spring Bandini by John Fante
Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis
Independent People by Halldor Laxness
Howards End by EM Forster
The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

1984-George Orwell
Ender's Gamie-Orson Scott Card
Crime and Punishment-Dostoyevski
Don Quixote-Cervantes
Brave New World-Aldous Huxley
Dracula-Bram Stoker
The Count of Monte Cristo- I can't remember
Farenheit 451-Ray Bradbury
The Chrysalids-John Wyndham
If-Rudyard Kipling (actually a poem but with enough depth to be a novel, also one of my favourite pieces of literature ever)

There are so many great novels, but these are probably my favorite...

The Great Gatsby
Ulysses
The Catcher in the Rye
Gravity's Rainbow
Brave New World
War and Peace
Whisper of Death
Emma
The Sound and the Fury
The Odyssey

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, Guimarães Rosa
The Toilers of the Sea, Victor Hugo
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Machado de Assis
Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Edgar Allan Poe's Tales
Sherlock Holmen's canon, Conan Doyle
Ben Hur, Lew Wallace
The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leon Tolstoy

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Originally Posted by ajoe

It's actually a quintet. In 1985, ajoe was born.

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LMAOROFL

God that hit the spot for some reason

1. Melville's MOBY DICK
2. Faulkner's GO DOWN MOSES
3. Joyce's ULYSSES
4. Dostoevsky's THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
5. Traven's THE DEATH SHIP
6. Dostoevsky's THE IDIOT
7. Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS
8. Nietzche's ANTI-CHRIST
9. Plato's THE REPUBLIC
10. McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN

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Originally Posted by WaffenOates

7. Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS

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Have you read the Philosophical Investigations? I'd expect one would rather enjoy it than the Tractatus. However the Tractatus is very interesting as well and also has some great quotes :p

Also, I haven't read the Anti-Christ by Nietzsche, what form did he give to this book?

1. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
2. Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
4. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
5. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
6. Arabian Nights
7. Stories and Drama by Anton Chekhov
8. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
9. The Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
10. A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

In no particular order~

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Candide by Voltaire
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Sign of the Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1984 by George Orwell
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

I was wondering which novel occured the most in the this thread? Doesn't matter which order just the fact it's in the posters top ten list. I saw Don Quixote few times in few pages but I am too lazy to look for the entire thread so if anyone knows please tell I am really interested to see what's the forum visitors have in common.

My top ten in disorder:

The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man-James Joyce
1984-George Orwell
Jane Eyre-Charlote Brontë
Pere Goriot-Balzac
Novels-Tolstoy
Don Quixote-Servantes
The Picture of Dorian Gray-Oscar Wilde
Blindness-Jose Saramago
Brave New World-Aldous Huxely
Arabian Nights

This is what I can recall right now,I might find something else later.

My Personal Top Ten

1. David Copperfield-Charles Dickens
2. Swann's Way- Marcel Proust
3. Mrs. Dalloway- Virginia Woolf
4. The Secret Agent- Joseph Conrad
5. Antony and Cleopatra- Shakespeare
6. To the Lighthouse- Virginia Woolf (again)
7. Bleak House- Charles Dickens (again)
8. Moby Dick- Herman Melville
9. Lolita - Nabokov
10. The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot

Just rethinking,here is another Top Ten.The thing is,I cannot make myself prefere some books upon others.

Novels-Stephan Zweig
Joseph Fouche-Stephan Zweig
Great Expectations-Charles Dickens
Jacob's Room-Virginia Woolf
Year '93-Victor Hugo
The House of Mirth-Edith Wharton
Dubliners-James Joyce
Les Sorcieres de Salem-Arthur Miller(actually a play and I haven't read it in English,so I don't know the original title)
Huckelberry Fin-Mark Twain

* War&Peace
* Mason and Dixon
* Moby Dick
* Absalom Absalom
* Pale Fire
* Lolita
* Sot Weed Factor
* Grapes Of Wrath
* Scarlet Letter
* Huckfinn

Dear Members,

My selection is as under.

1)War & Peace

2)Crime & Punishment

3)Razor's Edge.

4)My Cousin Rachel

5)David Copperfield.

6) Grapes Of Wrath.

7)Wuthering Heights.

8)The Mayor Of Castor Bridge.

9)Gone With The wind.

10)The Mill On The Floss.

Well you want my opinion of ten classics that everyone should read. (Only from what I've read so far, 10 is a limited number)
This is what I started out with when I began to get into literature. There isnt one I'd pick over the other and there are alot more that should be on there but I only had a choice of ten. I wanted a kind of broad introduction when I started out...you know the novels that have been made into movies and plays or mentioned in little tv side jokes. Alot of these you can find mentioned in other literature also.


-Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
-Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
-A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
-Hamlet by Shakespeare
-Don Quixote by Cervantes
-Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn by Mark Twain
-Beowulf by Unknown
-The Scarlett Letter by Hawthorne
-Dracula by Bram Stoker

(in no particular order)

The Dark Tower Series - Stephen King
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wlde
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
1984 - George Owell
The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells
The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
"Youth" - Joseph Conrad (a short story, but I love it too much not to put it up)

Pre-twentieth Cntury
1- The Brothers Karamazov- Fyodor Dostoevsky
2- The Idiot- Fyodor Dostoevsky
3- Crime and Punishment- Fyodor Dostoevsky
4- Notes from the Underground- Fyodor Dostoevsky
5- War and Peace- Leo Tolstoy
6- Madame Bovary- Gustav Flaubert
7- The Mill on the Floss- George Eliot
8- Tess of the d'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy
9- Fathers and Sons- Ivan Turgenev
10-A hero of Our Time- Mikail Lermontov

The 20th Century
1- The Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable)- Samuel Beckett
2- Ulysses- Jame Joyce
3- The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man- James Joyce
4- Watt- Samuel Beckett
5- Murphy- Samuel Beckett
6- A Farewell to Arms- Ernest Hemingway
7- The Moviegoer- Walker Percy
8- A Confederacy of Dunces- John Kennedy Toole
9- The Name of the Rose- Umberto Eco
10-Post Office- Charles Bukowski

Dostoevsky and Samuel Beckett, the two hemispheres of my imaginative world! I could add people like Reverte and Zafon, Rushdie, DM Thomas etc but these writers have yet to pass the test of time. They are too contemporary to be labeled classics. Eco's novel made into my list, just could not keep that one book out.