(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

[Larry Lucido]

LOL!

[Hemingway's Ghost]

I like his writing...but no doubt he's pc incorrect for his man-woman viewpoints as much as anything.

Pretty anti-Semitic, too: I'm thinking of just the first part of The Sun Also Rises and his description of Robert Cohn. Then again, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about Huckleberry's guilt over not "doing the right thing" by returning a human being back to his "owner," and that book's pretty high up on this list.

[gate2wire]

Love to read. At least one novel a week. Guess I just like more contemporary 'stuff'.

[Mrs. Darla Ruth Schwerin]

"That is perhaps the best Bad Novel of all time. Highly enjoyable."

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I do not share that view...

[dfwgator]

Pan Tadeusz needs to be on the list. (Wajda made an excellent movie version)

[Knitting A Conundrum]

Antigone is good - very good.

I also like Elektra.

(The story about Agamemnon and Clytemnestra is one of my favorite family sagas. I used to tease one of my co-workers about writing it up as a soap opera - you could do it, but oh, what a tragedy.)

I bet that got them reading the Satyricon. But the piece that will stick in my mind forever is the dinner scene. Oh what gorgeous nouveau riche excess....even by Roman standards!

[Borges]

It's not held in high regard by Dickens scholars either. When I read Dickens I want to read about the London demimonde. But Historical novels about the French Revolution? Interestingly enough his only other Historical novel, Barnaby Rudge, is the least read and regarded of them all. Not a single film version exists.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

I know people that think Huck Finn is the very best novel written in the US. And these are serious academicians.

I don't know who I'd put in that slot.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

I don't know who I'd put in that slot.

Off the top of my head, I'd say the title for best American novel goes to Mr. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In my opinion, that novel says more about what it is to be an American than any other I've read. I reserve the right to change my mind later on, though.

[najida]

I wonder what the top 100 "Books That People Actually Read Because They Wanted to Read Them, and Liked Them So Much, They Excitedly Passed Them on to Their Friends" would be.

Not many on the list is my bet. ;)

[Borges]

Most people think that. And I wouldn't disagree too vehemently. It's the American Odyssey.

[Borges]

All the books on there that I've read (31) have been quite enjoyable. Do you just assume anything old is dull?

[Billthedrill]

Hmph. Naughty Nurses In Bondage doesn't make the cut again. What was this list-maker thinking?

My guess is that factors other than sheer literary quality went into this one. Tale of Genji, for example, may have been the first novel, period, and written in an environment that made literary creativity, especially by a woman, nearly impossible. That said, the book's a yawner.

War And Peace was truly a sweeping, magisterial read, but some of the most important plot arcs (IMHO) weren't resolved until the second or third afterword. That simply isn't great construction, but it was a great read. Huckleberry Finn was the Great American Novel and indispensable to the understanding of the United States, especially the Western United States, and especially its males. "Lit out for the Territories" is an entire cultural dissertation in a single phrase.

I have a couple of unorthodox nominees. One is King's Salem's Lot, a marvel of concision and pacing that he hasn't really equaled since. William Gibson's Neuromancer is one I'd suggest. These are two "first" novels, meaning that their respective authors polished them relentlessly, far more than a professional could normally afford to do and that neither man appears to have done with subsequent novels.

Proust I don't get and I'm afraid I'm too impatient for Pynchon. Joyce I enjoy as an intellectual challenge but if you have to work that hard at grasping allusions it seems to cost in terms of emotional involvement. I adored The Tin Drum but haven't been able to get behind anything else Grass wrote. I didn't see Sense and Sensibility on the list - liked it better than Pride and Prejudice.

But no pr0n. Sheesh.

[najida]

I've read about 20 or so of the list too....
But I have no urge to read them again. The issue isn't dull, its lack of connection.

That's what I'm saying. There are the books you read and you say "Great writer, classic story" and you never read that book again. They sit like unapproachable monuments. Important landmarks, but you have no desire to sit with them.

Then there are the books you keep you your shelves and reread for years until they are in tatters. You lend them out to friends in excitement. You chat about them on line with all kinds of "what ifs and if onlys".

Funny, but I sincerely believe the list of those books would have almost nothing in common with the first list.

[justshutupandtakeit]

You want overrated? Ok... The Sound and the Fury, Middlemarch, Gravity's Rainbow, Tess..., The Tin Drum, Fathers and Sons, The Trial, Call It Sleep,

Missing: Catch 22, Simplicimus Simplicissimus by Grimmelshausen, Studs Lonigan, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, The Man With the Golden Arm, First Circle, Gulliver's Travels, Heart of Darkness, Naked Lunch, The Mayor of Casterbridge.

[Borges]

Why be intimidated by reputation. I can't imagine reading something like War and Peace or Moby Dick just once. I don't know how many times I've read re-read Dickens with equal enjoyment.

[Borges]

I love TSATF, Middlemarch and Tess. The latter is the great English prose tragedy. And how can something as majestic as Middlemarch be overrated. Faulkner and Pynchon are obviously an acquired taste. I think the Turgenev is there because it accurately described the sort of personality who take over Russia over 50 years later.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

It is definitely right up there...an important must read.

There are books that I think are important because of their literary merits. Others because they capture a moment in time (One for me the The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, not fiction, I know, but still) or earned place in history because of their immediate influence (like Uncle Tom's Cabin). A few works manage to do all three. They are very rare. Off the top of my head without thinking deeply, Young Werther by Goethe is one that might qualify. Some might call Ulysses one of those. I'm not sure.

[Blackirish]

Mine too.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Read Madame Bovary this year.

It rocked - it's short, easy to read, and just kickass great writing. It's a "great book" that's actually worth reading and fun.