(Somebody's) List of Best novels of all time

[Borges]

This one from a 2004 book called 'The Novel 100' A rankling of the 100 best novels of all time...

1. Don Quixote - Cervantes
2. War and Peace - Tolstoy
3. Ulysses - Joyce
4. In Search of Lost Time - Proust
5. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
6. Moby Dick - Melville
7. Madame Bovay - Flaubert
8 Middlemarch - George Eliot
9. The Magic Mountain - Mann
10. The Tale of Genji - Lady Murasaki
11. Emma - Austen
12. Bleak house - Dickens
13. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain
15. Tom Jones - Fielding
16. Great Expectations - Dickens
17. Absolom, Absolom - Faulkner
18. The Ambassadors - HenryJames
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Marquez
20. The GReat Gatsby- Fitzgerald
21. To the Lighthouse - Woolf
22. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
23. The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
24. Vanity Fair - Thackeray
25. Invisble Man - Ellison
26. Finnegan's Wake - Joyce
27. The Man Without Qulaities - Musil
28. Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
29. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
30. Women in Love - Lawrence
31. The Red and the Black - Stendahl
32. Tristram Shandy - Sterne
33. Dead Souls - Gogol
34. Tess of the D'Urbevilles - Hardy
35. Buddenbrooks - Hardy
36. Le Pere Goirot - Balzac
37. A Portrait of the Artitst as a Young Man - Joyce
38. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
39. The Tin Drum - Grass
40. Molloy Malone Dies, The Unnameable - Beckett
41. Pride and Prejudice - Austen
42. The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
43. Fathers and Sons - Turgenev
44. Nostromo - Conrad
45. Beloved - Morrison
46. An American TRagedy - Dreiser
47. Lolita - Nabokov
48. The Golden Notebook - Lessing
49. Clarrissa - Richardson
50. Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin
51. The Trial - Kafka
52. Jane Erye - Charlotte Bronte
53. The Red Badge of Courage - Crane
54. The GRapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
55. Petersburg - Bely
56. Things Fall apart - Achebe
57. The Princess of cleves - Lafayette
58. The Stranger - Camus
59. My Antonia - Cather
60. The coutnerfeiters - Gide
61. The Age of Innocence - Wharton
62. The Good Soldier - Ford
63. The Awakening - Chopin
64. A Passage to India - Forster
65. Herzog - Bellow
66. Germinal - Zola
67. Call it Sleep - Henry Roth
68. U.S.A. Trilogy - Dos Passos
69. Hunger - Hamsun
70. Berlin Alexanderplatz- Doblin
71. Cities of Salt - Munif
72. The Death of Artemio Cruz - Fuentes
73. A Farwell to Arms - Hemmingway
74. Brideshead Revisited - Waugh
75. The LAst chronicle of Barset - Trollope
76. The Pickwick Papers - Dickens
77. Robinson Crusoe - Defoe
78. The sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe
79. Candide - Voltaire
80. Native Son - Wright
81. Under the Volcano - Lowry
82. Oblomov - Goncharov
83. Their eyes Were Watching God - Hurston
84. Waverly - Scott
85. Snow country - Kawabata
86. 1984 - Orwell
87. The Betrothed - Manzoni
88. The Last of the Mohicans - Cooper
89. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Stowe
90. Les Miserables - Hugo
91. On the Road - Kerouac
92. Frankenstien - Shelley
93. The Leopard - Lampedusa
94. The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
95. The Woman in the White - Collins
96. The Good Soldier Svejk - Hasek
97. Dracula - Stoker
98. The Three Musketeers - Dumas
99. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Doyle
100.Gone with the Wind - Mitchell

[justshutupandtakeit]

Dickens is unsurpassed when it comes to creation of characters and the Tale has memorable ones. Who can forget the scene where the disbarred lawyer, Sidney Carlton, is sitting doing the work for the law firm he is the brains of with wet towels on his head to cool it off because all that thinking makes his head hot. And the theme of giving one's life for another is timeless.

One could have put just about every Dickens work on this list as far as I am concerned.

[najida]

I guess it's desire....
I just counted, and I've actually read about 40 or so of the list.

War and Peace again? No way. Uh huh. I read for enjoyment, not to slog through pages of detailed misery.

Please, it's a great book, but no, snow, death, freezing, war....hmrpt. No.

Anything by Austen, yes, I'd re-read. Same with books like Jane Eyre, Three Muskateers, etc.

But many of the classics just annoyed the bejeebers out of me....
Scarlet Letter, while great, the unfairness was grating.
Lolita made me squirm as a young girl reading it.
Grapes of Wrath, great, but a slog through misery.
Clarissa!?! Dear lord in heaven, let me just jump off the roof and be done with it.

All I'm saying is the 'pull' isn't in these books. You don't walk by and say to yourself "Wow, I know it read it last week, but I want to read it again!"

Can't see it with Moby Dick, that's for sure.

[justshutupandtakeit]

So the deepest novelist of all time, Doestoevsky, went after "low hanging fruit"? Hilarious.

And the creator of the greatest satirical novel of all time, Pride and Prejudice, is "trivial"? Even funnier.
Austen created a whole new style of writing and that novel is screamingly funny even today. I was so happy to hear than my oldest boy read it while on his first mission on the newly renovated Ohio.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

Sounds of choking/dying/barfing.

I think Gatsby is very much highly overrated, myself. It tells the sordid soap-operaish story about the rich and pampered in a rather weird time of American history.

You might as well have picked Babbit.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Dickens is considered low brow by most of the critics and Tale is not his most important work but it is one of the most accessible and fascinating clearly demonstrating the contradictions of the Revolution and its mixed impact. Sidney Carton is one of his most memorible characters and of course the book has some of the most well known phrases of any novel. There should be a new movie made of it since it would be perfect for the big screen and highly exciting as well.

[Borges]

Moby Dick is hysterically funny. It's a comic novel to be sure. And Lolita is fantastic but I don't know why you read it as a 'young girl'. Just because the subject matter is adverse doesn't make the novel depressing. A great tragedy is upflifting.

[Borges]

Lewis doesn't have anywhere near the lyricism of TGG.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

I think Gatsby is very much highly overrated, myself. It tells the sordid soap-operaish story about the rich and pampered in a rather weird time of American history.

That's only because it's 2006, and because of imitation and proliferation, the story and style has become trite and hackneyed by now.

[justshutupandtakeit]

I just read Middlemarch a few months ago and did enjoy it but found it annoying too. The characters where just too annoying for me to place it high up. Too predictable and the heroine drove me crazy.

I thought the Hamlet trilogy much more interesting than The Sound.

The Possessed more clearly showed Russia's fate than F&S which was ok but a bit too simple.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

Can't see it with Moby Dick, that's for sure.

I'm actually re-reading it right now, and I've got to say, Melville's description of a New Bedford church and a sermon given therein, in chapters 7, 8, and 9 (The Chapel, The Pulpit, and The Sermon), are downright chilling they're so spot-on and good.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Any comments madame?

[najida]

I read Lolita in high school I believe (or early college). With my history, it was NOT a good choice. It was twisted and Nabakov didn't have a clue of how a young female mind worked (the jerk).

I think the 'great tragedy is uplifting' is a matter of taste and personal makeup. For me, reading a tragedy makes me angry at wasting that chunk of time and being made sad when I wasn't before. Maybe some folks don't have enough misery or exposure to suffering so they need to find it in books.

I do, have and continue to do, so books are my relief from reality.

Some folks are just more sensitive I guess. Again, I find that the realm of what is labeled 'great' literature is pretty much a one size fits all attitude and it ain't my size. But if I say so, its a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. "What! Why didn't you like _________!" Saying it was a bore, too sad, I hated the characters, I wanted the damn thing to be over just makes folks look at me.....well, puzzled.

Even worse, is when I say "It didn't give me what I wanted, it left me unsatisfied. All this writing and time was spent on Y when I really wanted to know more about X! And Z!"

So, I just sit there saying "I like trash! I read it and I may even write a bit from time to time.... Thank you very much! And those authors and publishing houses will get my pennies until the day I die!"

And Moby Dick...the whole whale harpooning thing just made me cringe. I was rooting for Moby (wish he'd bitten off more of Ahab to begin with and we wouldn't have had to endure the book).

[Senator Bedfellow]

Billy Budd was better than Moby Dick, IMO. Then again, nobody's asked me for my list of great novels ;)

[Borges]

As a native Russian speaker I prefer the literal translation 'Demons' to The Possesed. But that's a great, great novel indeed. But again 'Fathers and Children' (another direct translation) predates it by almost a decade (and evern Notes from Underground by a few years.)

[najida]

I guess all I'm saying is I don't care about anyone in Moby Dick....

Except for the Whale :)

[Borges]

Nabokov didn't try to portray a young female mind. It was only Humbert's delusions about what Lo was really thinking that we're privy to. And my statement about tragedy is good old Aristotle.

[Borges]

Billy Budd was better than Moby Dick

Apples and Oranges.

[Borges]

PING

[Hemingway's Ghost]

Billy Budd was better than Moby Dick, IMO.

I've never read it, but it's on my list. Thanks for the heads up.

[najida]

Again,
I'm not Aristotle. I'm just me, and I know what I like.

And I won't fake liking something because I'm told it's great, or important, or brilliant when I find it a miserable bore hun ;)