(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

[Knitting A Conundrum]

LOL!

[nopardons]

I've read, or tried to read about 70 of these books. I've never heard of a few of them and didn't read a few others.

Which books do I question? "BELOVED" ( it was terrible! ) and "ON THE ROAD" ; but many others, too, because they aren't the best representation of the authors' work. "THE GREAT GATSBY" and 'SOME CALL IT SLEEP" are stinkeroonies; much over praised. The list looks like an affirmative action course, combined with one made by literary snobs, who know the titles, but haven't really read the books.

Have you ever read "GOODBY COLUMBUS" ? If so, remember the girl at the pool, who carries around "WAR AND PEACE", all summer, but never reads it? LOL

[Borges]

I'm not fond of Beloved. As for TGG, I don't know how you can dislike something so lyrical. People are intimdated by 'War and Peace' because of the length and the hard to pronounced names. Once they actually start reading it, it flows quite smoothly.

[PioneerDrive]

ping

[nopardons]

Plenty of them. LOL

Many thanks for the ping! :-)

[nopardons]

"OLIVER TWIST" was by far, the most accurate look at the under classes, that Dickens ever wrote. He used Mayhew's two volume set as reference material and if your read Mayhew, you can see and hear the parts that Charlie used. And it is one of Dickens' less flowery/soap opera/cliff hangers. It also doesn't contain any of his overt mooning of his own "innocent girl" lost love/what might have been scenario.

If the list contains TPP because it was THE FIRST of a genre and the start of something "different", then I can think of a whole LOT of other books, that should have been included and weren't.

[nopardons]

That doesn't mean that I have to like his work. LOL

[nopardons]

How right you are!

[nopardons]

LOL !

[Knitting A Conundrum]

I had the most excellent seminar on Faulkner back about 87. My professor came from the same part of Mississippi that Faulkner's people did...one of his ancestors had served with one of Faulkner's ancestors during the Civil War. He also went to the same high school as Elvis had although they weren't in the same grade.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

"A Classic: A book which everyone praises but no one reads." S. L. Clemens.

[nopardons]

Trust me, it is VERY easy to dislike TGG. It's drivel, it's pompous, it's junk. It really doesn't "capture the age", as it's so often stated. Many other writers did a much better job of "capturing the age"; "MAIN STREET", "SANCTUARY", "BABBIT", "ELMER GANTRY", and "DODSWORTH", for example. Heck, even "THE SUN ALSO RISES" and "SO BIG" are better.

Hard to pronounce names never throws me off, neither does the length of a book. Perhaps it's the fact that I read/tried to read the Russian authors at the hight of the COLD WAR and my utter hatred for the USSR and Russian.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Cripes, I'm no English major, but it's Madame Bova[r]y and the author of Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann, not Hardy. How may other laffers (sic) on that list?

[nopardons]

I haven't read Faulkner in many decades, but I LOVED his books and I read all of them in one fell swoop.

[nopardons]

That's pretty close. LOL

[PJ-Comix]

"From Here To Eternity" by James Jones is easily the BEST American novel ever written yet it's NOT on that list.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

I was reading him for fun before I took the seminar...which is why I took it...and it was fun. I wish I had all my books again...I would really like to read them again.

[Aliska]

I've only read about 12 of them, in addition to the above most of Thomas Hardy, George Eliot (except Daniel Deronda), the Bronte sisters, Leon Uris, Herman Wouk, John Steinbeck, Jack London, Camus but not the one listed. I read L'Etranger (not sure) and Moliere in French. So many are missing, but then I missed so many of those on the list.

Catcher of the Rye was banned at home because of the profanity.

[nopardons]

I had to read him in school, loved him, so just read through all of his books.

I bet that that seminar was fun.

[ml1954]

Crime and Punishment

An unsurpassed 'inside the mind' narrative.