Posted on 06/25/2002 7:02:06 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
Okay, so far this evening we've had threads about the Worst War Movie Ever Made and about the Best War Movie Ever Made. Now I will ratchet up the discussions a notch with the BEST Novel Ever Written. Remember this is novel which means FICTION. I exclude science fiction from this category. In my opinion novel writing reached a peak in the late 40s and early 50s. Since then we've had some very good novels but not of the quality of that era.
So my nomination for the BEST novel ever written is an easy one: From Here To Eternity by James Jones. If you haven't read it, then READ IT. It is incredible beyond belief. In fact it was so good, that when Norman Mailer read it, he declared it to be better than his own The Naked And The Dead which is quite an admission for a novelist as egotistical as Norman Mailer to make.
One secret for the quality of From Here To Eternity (in addition to it's outstanding writing) is that James Jones based most of the characters on real people (including himself if you look closely). When I read From Here To Eternity I was stunned by the high quality of the writing. It was the only book I have ever read where I slowed down my reading rate because I didn't want to get to the end. I wanted it to go on and on.
Yes, the movie version was great (although the idea that soldiers would pay Donna Reed just for the privelege of chatting with her in private seemed ridiculous) but after you read the novel, it pales in comparison.
Not in the class of writing of From Here To Eternity.
Great book but also the most MISUNDERSTOOD book of all time. It is NOT really about television screens invading our privacy, computers, etc. And, in a way, it isn't even a book about the future (although it is set there). It is actually a SATIRE about the PAST, specifically about the Bolshevik revolution and the society that followed it. Read that book carefully and you will see not only that Big Brother was modelled on Stalin but you can even see the characters based on Kamenev and Zinoviev. And, of course, Goldstein was definitely based on Trotsky.
I used to wonder why Orwell's fascination with Newspeak until I realized that when you control the language, you can control how people think.
Oh, and Oceana suddenly switching allies is based on the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
Moby Dick (Melville)
For Whom The Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
Watership Down (Adams)
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
A Study in Scarlet (Conan Doyle)
The Turn of the Screw (James)
The Yearling (Rawlings)
Brave New World (Huxley)
1984 (Orwell)
Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)
USA Trilogy (Dos Pasos)
Lord of the Flies (Golding)
The Age of Innocence (Wharton)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Scoop (Waugh)
The Jungle Book (Kipling)
The Man Who Would Be King (Kipling)
The Call of the Wild (London)
The French Lieutenant's Woman (Fowles)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (McCullers)
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Bradbury)
I, Claudius (Graves)
Q.B. VII (Uris)
NOTE: This list is by no means exhaustive, and I might be able to think for awhile longer and come up with more. Some I might like better than others, and then next day come back and rearrange the order all over again.
Guess it comes from being "attention deficit," but really, this is a choice the kind of which I can never make.
Uhm, pardon me for asking... but why are you excluding SF?
I thought this was for us to tell you our favorite novels! LoTR may not be yours, but I think it is a matter of preference, not class...
Different sort of genre than regular novels. Perhaps you should post another thread about Best Science Fiction Book ever written. Even libraries have separate sci-fi sections from fiction novels.
Lord of the Rings for best story ever told.
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