(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

[Sam Hill]

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

Nah. Not even close. "Canterbury Tales" and "Decameron." Those were short story collections. There have been many many before Poe.

No, Poe invented the MODERN short story. He defined it in terms that Chekov also followed, wittingly or not.

Even Wikipedia agrees, and they know everything:

Short story - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Modern short stories

Modern short stories emerged as their own genre in the early 19th century. Early examples of short story collections include the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales (1824-1826), Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales (1842), Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1836), and Guy de Maupassant's La Maison Tellier (1881). In the later part of the 19th century, the growth of print magazines and journals created a strong market demand for short fiction between 3,000 and 15,000 words in length. Among the famous short stories to come out of this time period was Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_story#Modern_short_stories

[Borges]

There should be a distinction made between the short story and the 'sketch'. Technically there were what you could call short stories in Classical Greece. Boccaccio and Chaucer were following up on that tradition as was someone like Washington Irving. The Checkovian short story probably has its roots in Maupassant more the in Poe.

[justshutupandtakeit]

I have been looking at DD for a couple of years and will start after finishing the Idiot.

[justshutupandtakeit]

The story was the whole thing and the characters. Great tale.
Since I never read Bestsellers I avoided it until after I saw the movie which is my favorite of all. Then I was pleasantly surprised.

[JCEccles]

Try Finnegan's Wake at 27. Jarringly unreadable and impossibly opaque. I think Joyce wrote it as a practical joke.

Portrait of the Artist is accessible, as is Joyce's book of short stories, Dubliners. I personally have no use for his later works.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Sorry, I missed it. It's perfect for throwing at a cat.

[veronica]

IMO no list is complete without A Tale of Two Cities/Dickens.

[Borges]

It's regarded as one of his worst novels.

[veronica]

By whom?

[Borges]

Dickens scholars and Literary critics in general. The reaosn its taught in High schools so often is because its one of his shortest.

[veronica]

A Tale of Two Cities | Introduction

snip-"Modern critical opinion, however, has given the novel an important place among Dickens's most mature works of fiction."-

[Borges]

I don't who kney mean but certainly not Clifton Fadiman or even my old Victorianist Professor. If you read Dickens you read him for the fantastical London he created...not historical novels. He only wrote two, the other, Barnaby Rudge, may be his single least read. But the humorless ATOTC feels like ersatz Dickens.