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.