(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]

I don't know about the worst but it certainly is not one of my favorite I think even Hard Times is better.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Most welcome. Two more I left off my list are "All the Kings Men" and "The Godfather"

[justshutupandtakeit]

There is a little irony far you. Not only did he write a couple but they are still widely read and still highly enjoyable.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Someday my house will be found collapsed upon me from the weight of books within. A glorious demise to be sure.

[nopardons]

Oh, you MUST read "DANIEL DERONDA"; it's wonderful!

[nopardons]

Oh yes, HARD TIMES is better!

TPP is unreadable and I adore Dickens; even when he is being nasty about Americans...which is a bit annoying.

[nopardons]

Both good books.

[nopardons]

I may just give you a run for the money, on that. LOL

[Knitting A Conundrum]

You are right - a glorious demise indeed!

[Sam Hill]

4. In Search of Lost Time - Proust

Somebody is a subliterate. Proust's novel is a direct translation from Shakespeare.

Therefore, "Rememberance Of Things Past."

Hilarious.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

The irony goes deeper. Any list that includes Ulysses near the top but nothing from S. L. Clemens is just intellectual posturing. As Clemens himself said, "I like a thin book because it will steady a table, a leather volume because it will strop a razor, and a heavy book because it can be thrown at a cat."

[Sam Hill]

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

LOL

Don't tell Edgar Allan Poe.

[Aliska]

DANIEL DERONDA

I think I had it in paperback once, maybe will try it again. It started with gambling which is not my thing.

My book(s) of Chekhov short stories are sitting there, read one all the way through, couple out of the new one, and the timing is not right.

Now I have three books from the library about politics I'm trying to get through that I should have read around election time. Slow going but interesting.

I'm far away, but Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard" is playing in Orange County now.

[Borges]

The modern short story. Poe can be said to have invented the short story period.

[Borges]

The Puzo was really something of a hack novel. He was a greast storyteller but not a great writer. It's one of those cases where the movie improved on the book.

[Borges]

Huckleberry Finn is on there.

[Borges]

The literal translation is 'In Search of List Time'. The Shakesperian title was used upon its first English translation by Moncrfieff. It's lovely but not accurate.

[RightWhale]

Proust is required reading anyway since the book is referenced by so many. To see what is going on might be near impossible without reading the whole thing six pages a day for a few years to the end because the secret is at the end but won't mean anything without the rest. It certainly helps to read some of Proust's sources.

[Cyclopean Squid]

Well, the complete novel is sitting on my bookshelf. As I've said, maybe one day I'll undertake it again. He sure had a problem with run-on sentences, however.

[Sam Hill]

You're right. Moncrieff was in contact with Proust, and I thought Proust had approved this. (It was the third English translation, as you know.)

But apparently I misremembered and it was just the opposite, and Proust felt it missed the mark as well.

Memory is a funny thing. I need a madeleine.