[monkey]

Tolstoi is the best and most important novelist - War and Peace is unmatched. Dostoevsky is also good but went for low-hanging apples. Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is superb.

Re: this list, Austen and Elliot are trivial, good to see Moby Dick so high (too high) - it is the great american novel, Proust, Joyce and The Great Gatsby are always overrated on these things.

[Borges]

Austen was the first to treat marriage as a complex set of social negotiaions with economic and moral factors taken into account. Nothing trivial about it. And Eliot brought a genunine intellectual rigor to the English novel. Unless you just think the everday is trival. George Eliot is something of the English Tolsoty actually.

[justshutupandtakeit]

So the deepest novelist of all time, Doestoevsky, went after "low hanging fruit"? Hilarious.

And the creator of the greatest satirical novel of all time, Pride and Prejudice, is "trivial"? Even funnier.
Austen created a whole new style of writing and that novel is screamingly funny even today. I was so happy to hear than my oldest boy read it while on his first mission on the newly renovated Ohio.