Posted on 01/31/2012 8:21:59 AM PST by C19fan
"Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work," Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers' success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity's greatest British and American writers—including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates—"to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time- novels, story collections, plays, or poems." Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list—so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I was pulling for at least one Bronte on the list.
Were 100 of the top 125 writers polled Russian??? hee hee
Ping.
I’m inserting a “Nay” for William Faulkner before scanning the list.
Moby Dick is a good story but a bad book.
The way you feel about Bovery, I feel about Gatsby.
James Joyce??
Perhaps some learned Freeper can explain the supposed greatness of this virtually unreadable author to me. I don’t get it and I have tried. The stream of consciousness business just makes for labored reading for me. Apparently not for others. In fact I have an Irish acquaintance who claims to read Joyce every night. But to me the Joyce mystique remains a mystery.
Now Jane Austin is a different story. She should top the list. Readable over and over.
No John Grisham. I call BS.
No Tolkein? No LOTR?
One Hundred Years of Solitude is just awful beyond description. I will never get those hours back. That said, I’m not surprised it made their list. Madame Bovary over Brothers Karamazov? I guess there were already too many Russians. The Brontes got robbed.
Re: “virtually unreadable author”
That’s exactly how I perceived, “Sanctuary,” and “Requiem for a Nun.”
I with you on that one. I received nothing from the effort I put into Joyce (admittedly, not very much).
The consensus is that the intellectuals can take a long walk off a short pier.
English class turned me off of literature, and i was never impressed by any novel, until I read “The Brothers Karamazov.” Everything else pales in comparison.
I actually appreciated One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was going to say “enjoyed”, but it wasn’t really enjoyable as it was interesting, memorable, whatever.
No Sidney Sheldon??
Ridiculous.
Authors chosen by The Atlantic have a bit of narrow-mindedness.
Greatest books of all time? And they eliminate
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Aeneid
Oedypus Rex
The Divine Comedy
Not to speak of The Bible.
Or, in modern times:
The Lord of the Rings
Brideshead Revisited
I just couldn’t get into it. Parts were interesting, certain themes were intriguing, but it was an overall drag for me.
I really don’t care for Joyce’s later stuff (as in, completely incomprehensible to me!) but “The Dead,” one of his earlier works, is excellent. Well worth a read.
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