(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

[Hemingway's Ghost]

I'm reading the Count of Monte Cristo now. Love it, even if the Count is even more far-sighted and masterfully manipulative than the Rove of DU's nightmares.

'Tis my favorite novel of all time, that. A 1,000+ page page-turner.

[Borges]

Come on now which ones do you think are overrated? That's what this thread is for. :-)

[Knitting A Conundrum]

Ullysses sucks. It's a classic example of the "all about me" attitude that started with modernism and came to marvelous fruition in postmodernism.

But if you want to read about the mental masturbation of a middleaged guy who can't get his act together, really, then read it.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

Have another drink, you. On the house.

And then I'll be ready to fight everyone!

[MotleyGirl70]

2. War and Peace - Tolstoy

Elaine: (to the phone)Yeah. Oh! What? He is! Oh! this is so fantastic! I'm so excited! Yes I'm excited, OK I'll be in soon! OK, OK, I'm coming, yeah, yeah I'm coming, I'm coming! (Elaine jumps up and dances around) Yuri Testikov, the Russian writer!

Jerry: The guy in the gulag!

Elaine: Yeah! Pendant's publishing his new book, and I'm working on it! Lippman and I are going to the airport to pick him up Thursday in a limousine!

Jerry: You wanna barrow Golden Boy!

Elaine: Oh! Don't you know what this means, it's like working with Tolstoy!

Jerry: Hey ya know what I read the most unbelievable thing about Tolstoy the other day, did you know the original title for "War and Peace" was "War--What Is It Good For?"!

Elaine: Ha ha.

Jerry: No, no.. I'm not kidding Elaine it's true, his mistress didn't like the title and insisted him change it to "War and Peace"!

Elaine: But it's a line from that song!

Jerry: That's were they got it from!

Elaine: Really?

Jerry: I'm not joking!

[Borges]

One critic said it was the ultimate culmination of the Romantic movement and its ethos of the Self. A novel that could only be understood by its writer.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

Finnegan's Wake is fun.

It's best experienced by having a small group in a room, and having a reader read short segments.

In some ways, it's like the largest literary pun ever attempted, and the fun is in the cross-referencing.

Half a page with the right reader and you feel like you've had a quick hit of scotch. Good scotch.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

I've read at least big selections of 40 or so of them.

[RMDupree]

No Lord of the Rings?

Bah!

[Knitting A Conundrum]

Just call me Ishmael....(Ishmael knitting? That's an interesting picture....)

[Knitting A Conundrum]

I agree with your assessment. Proust was rather narcissistic

[Borges]

I think he ecluded works that are complete fantasy (Gulliver's Travels, Gargantua and Pantagruel).

[Hemingway's Ghost]

Come on now which ones do you think are overrated? That's what this thread is for. :-)

Dos Passos, while I like his work a bit, shouldn't be on this list. I think the gothics are under-represented, too. Matthew Lewis' The Monk deserves a look, and so does James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justifiable Sinner.

[ClearCase_guy]

I think it's more like haggis.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

I read Magic Mountain one Christmas break when I had a nasty bronchitis...Interesting experience...

[Cagey]

Speaking of books, this is in my top five.

BOOKMAN: Well, let me tell you something, funny boy. Y'know that little stamp, the one that says "New York Public Library"? Well that may not mean anything to you, but that means a lot to me. One whole hell of a lot. Sure, go ahead, laugh if you want to. I've seen your type before: Flashy, making the scene, flaunting convention. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. What's this guy making such a big stink about old library books? Well, let me give you a hint, junior. Maybe we can live without libraries, people like you and me. Maybe. Sure, we're too old to change the world, but what about that kid, sitting down, opening a book, right now, in a branch at the local library and finding drawings of pee-pees and wee-wees on the Cat in the Hat and the Five Chinese Brothers? Doesn't HE deserve better? Look. If you think this is about overdue fines and missing books, you'd better think again. This is about that kid's right to read a book without getting his mind warped! Or: maybe that turns you on, Seinfeld; maybe that's how y'get your kicks. You and your good-time buddies. Well I got a flash for ya, joy-boy: Party time is over. Y'got seven days, Seinfeld. That is one week!

[Knitting A Conundrum]

Romantics did get rather self-centered.

I do like Joyce's use of language. I just disliked his characters enough to decide it isn't worth it in Ullysses.

[GSWarrior]

Buddenbrooks is a much better novel, IMO.

[WyCoKsRepublican]

50 YARDS TO THE OUTHOUSE - by Willie Makeit
BROKEBACK IRISHMEN - by Michael Fitzpatrick and Patrick Fitzmichael
I'M AN AMERICAN, I'M SORRY - by Jimmy Carter

[Knitting A Conundrum]

Only the Clouds? One MUST read Lysistrata. One should read the Frogs. One must read Aristophanes with Euripides or else you miss why he picked on him so often.

But I have a sneaking, slightly wicked fondness for the Thesmophoriazusae (In the Penguin editions called the Poet and the Women.) I have a certain fondness for the Wasps as well.