(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

[Borges]

TPP is there for historical value more then anything else. The first quarter is a bit dry but it gets much better as it goes along.

[nopardons]

It appears that we belong to the same club! :-)

"THE WOMAN IN WHITE"? Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh..."THE MOONSTONE" is a far better book. TWIW, is nothing more than one of the last "Gothic" novels, which had been done to death already. La Fanu's "THE WYVERN MYSTERY" has a similar theme and is far superior to "THE WOMAN IN WHITE".

[nopardons]

It appears that we belong to the same club! :-)

"THE WOMAN IN WHITE"? Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh..."THE MOONSTONE" is a far better book. TWIW, is nothing more than one of the last "Gothic" novels, which had been done to death already. Le Fanu's "THE WYVERN MYSTERY" has a similar theme and is far superior to "THE WOMAN IN WHITE".

[Borges]

But The Moonstone has never prompted an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical so how good can it really be?? :-) /sarc

[Knitting A Conundrum]

Then you should start with Chekov's short stories.

[nopardons]

They make better movies than books, for just that reason; far too much "junk" to read through or have to skip over. That's why I don't like them.

[mware]

For an absolute howler, rad Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love

The actions of Uncle Matthew at Alconleigh, his total lack of political correctness was hysterical.

[nopardons]

Yes, I understand that, but as I said, I am REALLY a Dickens' nut and I have always HATED this book of his.

"BLEAK HOUSE" is good, but so are "HARD TIMES", "OLIVER TWIST", "THE OLD CURIOSTY SHOP", "NICHOLAS NICKLEBY" and on and on and on. Just because TPP was his first, it doesn't belong on the list; JMO.

[nopardons]

LOL...LOL...LOL

[Borges]

No film version can ever find the cinematic equivalent of Tolstoy's prose which is like Life itself is writing. In War and EPace the philosphical chapters are very clearly seperated and are easily skipped. Anna Karnin has nothing at all to skip.

[nopardons]

I was forced to read that, looooooooooooooooooong ago. I just don't like Russian author's at all. :-)

[nopardons]

Okay, I'll grant you the former, but the latter? Maybe I should reread it, now, as an adult.

[Borges]

Oliver Twist is substandard Dickens IMO. But TPP revolsutioned the publishing industry. I think that's the primary reason its there. Uncle Tom's Cabin isn't exactly a literary masterwork either. Interestingly enough, Tolstoy came to prefer it to his own novels for its high moral value.

[Borges]

Chekhov invented the modern short story (and modern drama)! Not Katherine Mansfield, not Hemmingway...but the man from Russia.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

When you take up Faulkner's work as a corpus, then you have to put the Hamlet trilogy up near the top. I have to admit, I am a sucker for people that write interconnected stories like Faulkner did, and the history of Yoknapatawpha county that comes out as you digest it all is a neat structure and frame. And he does it so well.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

And they're so good. And they are so readable. I used to have my remedial English students read at least one Chekov story a semester.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

Yep. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the right book at the right moment...but it's not great literature. Just significant.

[Senator Bedfellow]

Uncle Tom's Cabin isn't exactly a literary masterwork either.

And that's another thing. If I were to make two lists, starting with a list of novels important for their historical impact, it would be quite a different list in some respects than a list of novels selected for their literary quality. I don't think anyone can deny the historical import of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but as literature, Uncle Tom's Cabin has almost as much style and depth as my son's "Incredible Hulk" comics.

[Borges]

One could say the same thing about Les Miserables for that matter.

[Borges]

http://www.bway.net/~hunger/ch1-ulys.html