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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 ...
Monkeys at their keyboards: eventually they’ll type everything LOL~!
Well, at least Shakespeare, though none of his works, got a mention...
Good call on those last two for the 20th Century list. The intellectuals loathe LOTR.
Fools Die - Mario Puzo
My List (and I am a lit. teacher)
1. The Bible (no other work is so often alluded to)
2. The Iliad/Odyssey
3. MacBeth
4. Sound and the Fury (narrative experimentation)
5. Hamlet
6. Scarlet Letter
7. Huck Finn
8. Nichomachean Ethics
9. Mere Christianity
10. Walden/Civil Disobedience
I’ll take THE ILLIAD, ODESSEY, THE AENEID any day along with the works of Kipling and the short stories of John Russell(THE LOST GOD), Don Quixote, and some of the works of Ernest Hemingway.
Most of the so-called “great novels” are extremely boring, and in my youth I read hundreds of good novels.
Amen!
Although it's been quite a long time, this is pretty much my recollection of the hours that I wasted on perhaps 100 pages of this book.
The intellectuals - - the same people who declare 'The English Patient' and 'Shakespeare in Love' to be "Best Picture" of the year.
They always leave off “Homer Price and his donut machine”.
What were they thinking?
The list is of best fiction, that is why the Bible is excluded.
The Atlantic? No.....come on.....The Atlantic? Their idea of great literature is “Any Curious George book”.
“Brave New World”
People forget it was written in the early part of the last century, long before socialistic governments had become the norm.
“1984” presents a vision of the future where citizens are kept in line by governmental brute force. “Brave New World” though, presents a vision where citizens are controlled by government paternalism, which results in a voluntary self-enslavement to the government.
Every modern story of a dystopian future has its roots in “Brave New World.”
And, it’s easy to see “Brave New World’s” vision of the future slowly coming to pass.
Good list.
Except for “Scarlet Letter.” Terrible, terrible book.
I wasn’t too keen on Hamlet. I saw the Branagh movie in high school and it was much more enjoyable than reading it. MacBeth seemed to be just as good either way to me.
I’m just glad it wasn’t ‘The Audacity of Hope” or something by Alynski.
There’s a book by Anthony Burgess (of Clockwork Orange fame) called “1985” in which Islam and unions take over Britain.
It is almost IMPOSSIBLE to find, but VERY ACCURATE.
This list is CRAP!
No Tolkien, Lewis, Hawthorne, or Steinbeck.
No Dumas, Dante, or Heinlein.
But the Marxists just LOOOOOVE the Russians...
>>Except for “Scarlet Letter.” Terrible, terrible book.
People hate “Scarlet Letter,” but like “Sound and the Fury” it has so many layers to peel back. I teach it to a bunch of bored regular ed kids in public school and a lot of them love it.
There is no greater explanation other than it is a very convoluted diorama of many different aspects of the “human heart in conflict with itself”.
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