Ten Favorite Novels

[johann cruyff]

My top ten books of all time...hmmm,not easy,but I'll give it a go:

The Divine Comedy - Dante
The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
The Death and the Dervish - Selimović
The Damned Yard - Andrić
The Trial & The Metamorphosis - Kafka
The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
Remembrance of Things Past - Proust
Thus Spake Zarathustra - Nietzsche
The Glass Bead Game - Hesse
Dead Souls - Gogol

My current top ten,novels only(I'm aware Zarathustra isn't exactly the classical novel).There are way too many plays and poems to take into account.

[Brasil]

Mysticim of number 3

The number 3 can represent "God" or the divine, "the unknown".

Divine Comedy:
- 3 books (hell, purgatory and heaven)

- 33 chants

- Hell, purgatory and heaven are divided in 9 (3 x 3) circles, it makes a total 27 (3 x 3 x 3).

- Verse in tercet (3 lines)

rhyme:
It is written in a technique known as the original terza rima (third rhyme)
Terza rima: the center line of each tercet control both lines of marginal following tercet: ABA, BCB, CDC, DED ....
...gives the illusion of growth to infinity


My list (it includes literature and not literature):
1- Iliad (Homer)
2- Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri)
3- Os Lusíadas - The Lusiads - (Luis de Camões)
4- Don Quijote de la Mancha (Miguel de Cervantes)
5- Fedon (Plato)
6- The Republic (Plato)
7- The Capital (Karl Marx)
8- Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas - The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas - (Machado de Assis)
9- Quincas Borbas (Machado de Assis)
10- Odissey (Homer)

[JBI]

How basic Brazil, you forgot the connections to 9 as well, and 2. There are other numerical things in it as well, and other considerations. For instance, Dante met Beatrice when he was 9 (3x3), got rejected when he was 18 (9x2, symbolizing the devil to some extent), but unfortunately she died two years too soon at 25. Scholars have found tons of other numerical things within the book itself, which are generally included in any introduction.

The Divine Comedy seems to be perhaps the 3rd or so most studied book in the Western tradition, behind Hamlet and the Bible. Dante scholarship is massive, dating back to even his contemporary times.

[amalia1985]

We have simillar taste in books. I acutally went back and forth with The Sun Also Rises, almost added to my last, glad to see someone else did.

[DapperDrake]

Ok, this isn't a definitive list and if you ask me again in 12 months it will have changed etc. but here it is:

Silas Marner - George Eliot
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Emma - Jane Austen
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

...Those are the ones I'm sure of :-/ I'll add more to bring the list up to 10 once I've decided.

Other candidates:

Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

And if plays are allowed:

Macbeth - William Shakespeare
The importance of being earnest - Oscar Wilde

[Mark F.]

A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
Notes From the Underground - Dostoevsky
The Fall - Camus
Ham on Rye - Bukowski
The Metamorphosis - Kafka
The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce
The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
Sentimental Education - Flaubert
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald

[stlukesguild]

1. The Bible
2. Homer- The Odyssey
3. Dante- The Divine Comedy
4. Shakespeare- Plays: King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and MacBeth especially
5. Cervantes- Don Quixote
6. Proust- In Search of Lost Time
7. Blake- Collected Poems
8. Kafka- Short Stories, Tales, and Parables
9. J.L. Borges- Collected Works
10. Sterne- Tristam Shandy

The first 5 are permanent fixtures but the final 5 may change tomorrow.

[Sir Bartholomew]

another one?

Mansfield Park / Emma (tie) - Austen
the Sheltering Sky - Bowles
Wide Sargasso Sea - Rhys
To the Lighthouse - Woolf
The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
An American Tragedy - Dreiser
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - McCullers
The Rainbow / Women in Love (tie) - Lawrence
The Golden Bowl - James
The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway

and many others, can't think well clearly

[Dark Muse]

Wide Sargasso Sea - Rhys

I want to read that

[Sir Bartholomew]

I want to read that

yes, do. you'll see mr rochester in a very different light.

[Drkshadow03]

I consider these more personal favorites than the best.

1) Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth

2) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

3) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

5) Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

6) A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

7) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

8) The Jewish Bible by G-D and an assortment of Hebrew writers

9) 1984 by George Orwell

10) The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

[Dark Muse]

I read Homebody by Orson Scott Card and enjoyed it. I haven't read anything else of his yet though

[aabbcc]

My current favourites:

1. Alighieri, D. - La Divina Commedia
An absolute number one for me. The other works are, in no particular order:

Goethe, J.W. - Faust
Shakespeare, W. - Hamlet
Dostoevsky, F.M. - Brothers Karamazov
Sophocles - Theban plays (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone)
Ovid - Metamorphoses
Bulgakov, M. - Master and Margarita
Selimović, M. - Death and the Dervish
Homer - The Odyssey

[Cadi]

This was much harder than it seemed
Bible
Pride & Prejudice
Persuasion
Crime & Punishment
War & Peace
East of Eden
The Great Gatsby
The Age of Innocence
To Kill a Mockingbird
Gone With the Wind

[_Shannon_]

I read Homebody by Orson Scott Card and enjoyed it. I haven't read anything else of his yet though

I am not a big sci fi fan---but Ender's Game was great! I really, really enjoyed it!