Greatest books
Commenter “huxley” linked this website purporting to list the greatest books. It uses an algorithm based on a a group of 130 other lists, and comes up with some obvious choices as well as some curious ones.
Even some of the obvious ones are books I’ve never been keen on. For example, I just can’t get through Jane Austen at all – despite many tries because it seems it would be the sort of thing I would like. But I just don’t, and that’s that. A big yawn for me.
Then there’s the almost universally praised The Great Gatsby (#5), which I’ve actually read several times but to no avail. Another snooze, although I do think the Gatsby character is an interesting portrait in how a person can live a lie (I recently discovered a relative of mine by marriage had a Gatsby-esque invented persona, and it was quite a shock to know that). For One Hundred Years of Solitude (#4!), I read the first chapter about ten times and then gave up. The “woke” selections on the list, such as Beloved – I couldn’t get through it. On the other hand, I liked I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings which is a memoir rather than fiction (and is #33 on their nonfiction list). I read that book when it first came out and was fresh and new.
High and proud on the list are many of my favorites: Moby Dick (#6), Catch 22 (#23), all those Russian novels, Borges, Orwell, Huxley (the one with the upper case, not the lower), the Brontes, and Lewis Carroll. But squeezed way down on the list are many of my other favorites, which apparently have fallen out of favor: Cry the Beloved Country (a beautiful and heartrending book that only reached spot #280), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (a travesty to place it way way down there at number 629), the brilliant Pale Horse Pale Rider with the ignominious placement of #1595, and the enormously moving Tell Me a Riddle weighs in not all that much better at #833.
I would argue that the two greatest novels ever written were published only a dozen years apart (Madame Bovary, followed by War and Peace). Amongst the greatest of twentieth-century novels (and perhaps insufficiently appreciated) are three superb works of historical fiction, Waddell’s Peter Abelard and Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Two of the very finest modern British novels (Brideshead Revisited and 1984) also appeared within a few years of each other.
I spent a summer (their winter) in SA as a medical student many years ago at a mission hospital, and would have emigrated except for the demographics: less than 2 million Whites (Africaans and Brits) versus >30 million blacks in about 5 tribes, Zulu, Xhosa, etc., and each tribe hated the others.
Virtue-signaling Americans started the anti-Apartheid movement, and apartheid was born of the Mau-Mau riots in Kenya, in which thousands of British farmers, wives, and children were slaughtered in their beds. The leader there, Jomo Kenyatta, subsequently became Kenya’s first president.
Apartheid was originally intended to prevent a recurrence of the Kenya slaughter. Separate the races! We are outnumbered 15 to 1.
Now the identically-thinking Left applies the moniker to the Palestinian-Israel situation, but everyone conveniently forgets the Palestinians are where they are because they fled there after failing to kill the Jews in 1948. Like the SA blacks, they do not amount to much, and corruption is their way of life.
BTW, the SA constitution was amended recently to allow for state seizure of white-owned farms with no recompense. None.
I did not “cry the beloved country” after I got back, though I’d read it before going. It was a place of doom. And time has proved me right. It’s Africa, and it will not change.
Anybody run into The Bible anywhere in those lists? If it happens not, just what fresh hell is this we’ve come to today?
I’ve always felt that Jane Austen is best appreciated when read aloud. I highly recommend that you listen to them – the actress Juliet Stevenson reads Austen wonderfully well. There is so much humor and pointed commentary within the conventions of the novels. “Emma” and “Persuasion” are my favorites.
sdferr–
If the Bible is missing, it’s probably because it is not a single book (except in phrases like “the Good Book”)– it’s a collection of 66 different writings by different authors living in different time periods. Moreover, the books included in the Bible do not represent a single genre: some are history, some are biography, some are poetry, some are letters, some belong to what is called wisdom literature, and some are best described as visionary. People who read the Bible now as well as those who read it in the past disagree(d) widely about their favorites within the canon.
O for f’s sake.
sdferr:
There is no category for it. “Fiction” or “Non-fiction”? Plus, “old” or “new” or both? It’s often on “most-read” lists, though.
I liked “100 Years of Solitude” a lot, but #4? Likewise “The Great Gatsby” at #5.
Seeing Proust at #1 encourages me (someday) to read the first volume anyway.
Aside from a few woke clunkers the list works pretty well for me. I even find decent genre representation of science fiction and mystery in the 100s-200s.
I’m sorry. In my ignorant simplicity I foolishly imagined attempting to explain (not bothering to persuade) to the likes of Michel de Montaigne, Dante Algieri, St. Augustine, Herman Melville, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Nicolo Machiavelli, James Joyce, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Blaise Pascal, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, et alia, that their wondrous books belong on lists of greatest books, but that The Bible doesn’t, because . . . it doesn’t fit, isn’t “a” book, or whatever other absurd sophism is on offer today. My mistake.
sdferr:
FWIW, the Bible is #381 on this list. See:
https://thegreatestbooks.org/authors/5468
https://thegreatestbooks.org/items/1156
“The Song of Songs” is #958.
i’m on a evelyn waugh kick, started with brideshead, working through the sword of honor, they are available on gutenberg as well as audiobook,
I’ve never been much of a fiction reader and it shows by this list. Guess I’m invincibly ignorant or have very bad taste in literature or both.
I agree about The Great Gatsby, not just as a book but as a story because even the movie adaptations put me to sleep.
Re: Evelyn Waugh / Brideshead Revisited
I was mesmerized by the Jeremy Irons TV series of Brideshead. When I got around to reading the novel, I was astonished by the beauty of Waugh’s prose. I had hints from Irons’ narration, but I didn’t expect the whole book to be written at that level.
As it happens, last night I watched “The Secret Garden” (1949) based on the 1911 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, in which an orphan girl finds a secret door to a secret garden. I remembered a particularly haunting passage from Brideshead:
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But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.
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I remembered that quote and wondered if Waugh got the image from “The Secret Garden.”
I did some google-fu. Most attribute the line to the “Alice Door” at Oxford, where Waugh (and the Irons character) was a student. The “Alice Door” is so-called because it may have inspired Lewis Carroll in creating his Alice stories.
https://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/blog/alice-day
I suppose that’s likely the case. But Burnett’s “Secret Garden” was about love and healing, so it was more in the ballpark of Brideshead than a fanciful White Rabbit.
I watched “The Secret Garden” because it was a children’s book my mother kept as an adult. I tried to read it a few times, but it was too slow for my adolescent taste.
The movie turned out far stranger than I expected, more adult and even frightening at times.
I read Gatsby in 10th grade English lit class. I really enjoyed reading it and my teacher did a great job illuminating it. I gathered that most of my classmates did not enjoy it as much as me. I chose Catch 22 as my final paper/exam in 11th grade lit. A truly fun read, but on reflection I can’t say I really got all that much out of it other than it being an entertaining absurdity. What did I miss?
I felt that Moby Dick, which I read for the first time in my thirties, truly illuminated what life was like in the day and as a whale hunter. It felt real and alive and remains a top favorite. I had a similar reaction to Iliad and Odyssey. I started the Iliad about 10 times before I finally was able to break into it, and went out to buy the Odyssey immediately after finishing it. Fantastic stuff and the characters jumped off the page. I could go on, but I won’t.
j.e. – Madame Bovary is one of my very favorites. The writing, even in translation, was beautiful and simply a pleasure to read.
PS: Evelyn Waugh is also a favorite. Read many of his books.
Huh. Burnett’s “The Secret Garden” makes it to #1701 on the list.
I would put “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in the first place.
And here is my own list of the best books which are my favorite 🙂
The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
Theatre by William Somerset Maugham
Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
King Lear by William Shakespeare
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
The Nun by Denis Diderot
The Crime of Father Amaro by Eça de Queirós
Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
Martin Eden by Jack London
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Il Piacere by Gabriele D’Annunzio
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Possession by A. S. Byatt
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Anderson
I went through the first 400 or so of the “Greatest Nonfiction Books” and was amazed to see not a few that haven’t stood up to the test of time or whose influence has been malign.
The list was produced by an algorithm, and it reads like that. Pointless to quarrel with such a beast. I’m watching a football game, and there’s a lightning delay, so I took the time to browse all the way up to 1000 before stopping.
A few reactions:
The list is a good reminder to re-read old favorites like Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.
The list is an unfortunate reminder of embarrassing adolescent enthusiasms. For example, I read at least four of Hermann Hesse’s novels. I didn’t like any of them; but, at that age, I wanted something important, and people kept saying these were it. What a waste. Watching TV sitcoms would have been more enlightening.
The list has once again convinced me that crime novels are an under-rated form, but genre fiction always ends up as a matter of taste.
Re: Hesse
Cornflour:
Your mileage may vary. In the past several years I’ve reread “Demian” and “Steppenwolf” and still loved them, though I understood them differently. “The Glass Bead Game” was kind of a slog, so I didn’t finish.
I was pleased that Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett made it to the list < 300.
I started the Iliad about 10 times before I finally was able to break into it, and went out to buy the Odyssey immediately after finishing it. Fantastic stuff and the characters jumped off the page.
T-Rex:
I’ve been rereading Joyce’s “Ulysses” off and on this past year. As you may know, “Ulysses” is so-called because it uses “The Odyssey” as a template for the novel. That’s helpful to know in following the book.
However, I always wondered why “The Odyssey”? Recently I learned that as a boy Joyce had a wonderful illustrated children’s book of “The Odyssey,” which quite fascinated him.
This doesn’t fully answer the question of why base a novel on three ordinary characters in Dublin during a single day on “The Odyssey.” But it does humanize Joyce and clarify his relationship to “The Odyssey.”
(Ulysses is the Latin variant of Odysseus.)
I loved the Great Gatsby and also Moby Dick. I liked the film and tv adaptations too. No love for One Hundred Years of Solitude. Magic realism left me cold. I liked the abridged audiobook of Remembrance of Things Past, but had real problems getting through the unabridged first volume.
Ulysses was okay on audiobook, but I didn’t get that much out of it. I loved Hesse, also Salinger, when I was young, but don’t think rereading them would be as satisfying as the first time. Hurrah for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, but I’m not the reader I once was, or aspired to be.
For anyone who missed the first round of discussions, here’s where huxley got the ball rolling:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/09/15/open-thread-9-15-22/#comment-2642914
One’s favorite novels are usually read in one’s formative years. So perhaps it’s worth noting when a novel makes a spectacular impression late in life. That happened to me with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. On my short list for greatest novels ever. Similar with War and Peace (no question Tolstoy was a genius) but I liked The Magic Mountain better.
Fitzgerald is to be appreciated, in my opinion, for the beauty of the written word, not the story telling. I have no idea why people keep trying to turn Gatsby into a movie. But even Fitzgerald pales in comparison to Joyce in that regard. Greatest writer in the English language since Shakespeare as far as I’m concerned. Read The Dead and see if you agree.
I skipped brideshead originally in college i wrote papers on faust both of them othello and other goytisolo was an interesting one among modern spanish writers
I think most version of gatsby was miscast although the journal framing explanation for carroway was interesting
One thing very clear in the comments is that people who have some books “likes” in common can still have huge variations in their “dislikes,” and vice versa.
That’s true in my own family, and we have a LOT of commonality in our reading preferences.
@ Mike Plaiss > “One’s favorite novels are usually read in one’s formative years. So perhaps it’s worth noting when a novel makes a spectacular impression late in life.”
Good point, although not always true. A rough guess of my own preferences would be about half formative (through college) and half more mature (including new discoveries even in my current elder years).
And, as you also noted “making an impression” is not synonymous with “becoming a favorite.”
“That happened to me with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. On my short list for greatest novels ever. Similar with War and Peace (no question Tolstoy was a genius) but I liked The Magic Mountain better.”
I have wondered about these “best books” lists how many of the classics, or current best-sellers, are there because the contributors genuinely liked them (by either the impression or the favorite criterion), and how many because the compiler just thought they ought to be listed.
FWIW, a lot of the science fiction (and some quasi-fantasy) novels that are my favorites compare very well with the Main Stream Literature that abounds on these lists, by any of the usual writing criteria used in judging merit.
I was glad to see that a few Dostoevsky’s made it up high on the list and surprised to see Du Maurier’s “Rebecca” at 98 I think. I’ve never read any of her works, but I’ve read that most of her material is this strange, not quite supernatural genre.
I watched “The Birds” (Du Maurier) for the nth time not long ago, and while it is plain to see from the first viewing, there is this odd and impossible connection or correlation between the mother’s anxiety over her husband death and the possibility of losing her son to the attractive blonde, and the flocking and attacking of the birds. Because it is impossible, the viewer’s tendency is to dismiss it. But there it is like some Star Trek episode where a person’s feelings are turned into reality.
I was playing around with the search function and discovered something interesting.
I wanted to see if the list included one classic that definitely made an impression on me when I finally got around to reading it about five years ago.
But, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” didn’t show up!
However, a search for “Stowe” did produce it, and also a biography of Harriet.
Then I used the custom filter, and put in 1850-1860, based on its publication date (1852).
It did show up in that sub-list, so either there is a serious glitch in the search function or there is a censoring algorithm at work in the most obvious tool.
I found “Ulysses” and “The Great Gatsby” with no trouble, and quite a few others, even from the last page.
More useful tools:
The sub-lists are numbered independently, so you have to get the over-all ranking another way.
I clicked on the title of U.T.C. and got the full information about its placement on the master list, and on each of the contributing lists.
FWIW, “The Princess Bride” is The 1032nd greatest fiction book of all time
This book is on the following lists: – 8th on The Ideal Library (Book)
And there are 37 books from Before the Common Era through Year 0.
Why, yes, I am an OCD bibliophile who has no problem spending hours perusing book-related websites.
What makes you ask?
Twilight by Stephanie Meyers The 644th greatest fiction book of all time
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins The 521st greatest fiction book of all time
Well, there’s no accounting for taste.
I think there is a high loading factor for recent best-sellers.
At least “The Bridges of Madison County” is not on the list.
More tidbits:
Search for just part of a title: “cabin” did find Uncle Tom and 2 other titles containing that word.
The search is a wild card algorithm: looking for “heyer” (Georgette, 1 book, fiction) also returned “Thor Heyerdahl” (2 books, non-fiction).
Search for the author’s name and you also get books about that person.
This could go on forever.
In modernish spanish language i have in search of klingsor its a history of the nuclear bomb thaf has a romantic triangle at the heart of it thats jorge volpi a mexican writer also the secret history of costaguana mashes up nostromo and another conrad with the conceit that he stole the story from thd writer who is a zelig type in the history of colombia
Whatever scams and cons may have come to rule his later life, Jay Gatsby was a US Army infantry officer in the Great War.
C.S. Lewis: Prophet?
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2022/09/18/that-hideous-strength-a-prophecy-for-our-times/
(Or merely “pre-channeling” Orwell…?)
Leaving classical masterpieces apart ( Proust, Balzac, Flaubert…) I mostly enjoyed some great 20th century novels written in Spanish: Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral (my favourite), Márquez’ Love in the time of cholera. Manuel Puig wrote good and not so good stuff but in my opinion he is underrated: I find Boquitas pintadas (Little painted lips) a perfect achievement. In addition let me add Somerset Maugham’s Short stories, a handful of jewels turned into a book.
Read many, lots long ago
Dostoevsky is one I am sure never read and should some day.
Didn’t see anything in history, my main reading
Any body else up for a newneo great books club?
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the strangest book I’ve ever read. I don’t know what kept me reading; it seemed boring and peculiar, and I don’t usually persist if I don’t like a book. But I was glad I did: at the very end, a lot of things become very clear. For that reason alone, I would call it great. But I don’t think I would go around recommending it!
Fiction is so subjective, I think these lists are pretty silly. This one really does read like it was generated by an algorithm.
For me it depends a lot on when I read something. I enjoyed Catcher in the Rye when I was in high school. Then I read it as a young adult and thought it was highly over-rated. Then I read it again recently, and I like it. Much more sad than I remembered. It’s not a book for kids.
To The Lighthouse is one of my favorite books. I love Virginia Woolf. But I could not get into her work at all when I was young.
I recently re-read Brideshead Revisited, and I agree that the language is very, very beautiful. But I was astonished at how different my recent reading was from the first one, a few decades ago. The first time I read it, as with when I saw the wonderful TV production, I found it lots of fun and I was rooting for the characters to get what they wanted; I found the ending, and some of the plot developments, disappointing. Now that I have more life experience, and more sympathy for religion, I understand what the book is really about. Given how easy it is to misinterpret, I’m not sure I would call it a total literary success. Even though it is great in many ways.
I liked Moby Dick for its morality play, but had to skip many chapters on the details of the whale and whaling that I found incredibly tedious and boring. The book could have been half the page count.
Luis or Miguel,
I’ve been looking for a book for 25+ years. Spanish author (I read in English). It’s about a priest who has lost his faith but soldiers on in his profession anyway, naturally leading to some internal conflict. It was one on my professor’s favorite books (he was from Spain). It made quite an impression on me and I would love to re-read, but have never been able to remember the title or the author. It’s short. Maybe a novela. Let me know if that rings any bells. Thanks.
I’ve been looking for a book for 25+ years. Spanish author (I read in English). It’s about a priest who has lost his faith but soldiers on in his profession anyway, naturally leading to some internal conflict. It was one on my professor’s favorite books (he was from Spain). It made quite an impression on me and I would love to re-read, but have never been able to remember the title or the author. It’s short. Maybe a novela. Let me know if that rings any bells. Thanks.
I have read some of the highly rated books and I like Jane Austin but my tastes run to military fiction and nonfiction. Biography and history are also favorites. The Secret Garden was a childhood favorite along with “Needle” by Hal Clement, the only science fiction I can recall liking.
the second one by unamuno
https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2020/04/24/troubling-tale-priest-who-loses-his-faith
That may be it! Even the name Unamuno rings a bell. Thanks!
Mike Plaiss: could it be Saint Manuel Bueno, martyr, by Miguel de Unamuno?
The Secret Garden was a childhood favorite along with “Needle” by Hal Clement, the only science fiction I can recall liking.
Mike K:
I loved “Needle” as a teen! I happened to run across it in a paperback reprint, but that was all the Clement that came my way.
According to wiki, Clement was an interesting guy — Harvard grad with degrees in astronomy, education and chemistry. His heyday as an SF writer was mostly in the 40s-50s. “Needle” was serialized in “Astounding.”
Quite a lot of the old pulp magazines — Astounding, Galaxy, Fantasy and Science Fiction — can be found at the Internet Archive, e.g.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=astounding
Sometimes late at night I enjoy browsing through them. The covers too were so great.
100 years of solitude…possibly the worst book of all time. Best thing about it was only that I finished it, so no one can tell me that “it got better, you should have hung in there”. I loved Secret Garden as a kid, L’Morte de Arthur by Malory,-there was also a Greek Mythology book I reread many times. As an adult I would have to add amongst others, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Dante’s Inferno, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Discourses on Livy, Les Miserables (but could only read once-too depressing), and I do love to read Jane Austen and watch the various movies.
This is definitely the right book. Thanks to you both! I remember very well my reaction to it/ interpretation of it. Looking forward to seeing if that has changed with age and experience.
Moby Dick – I have tried three times to “get into” this and simply cannot. It starts out great with the promise of an adventure; but, then delves into the Ahab vs the whale thing and it becomes very boring for me.
Another book that I would like to read is Uncle Tom’s Cabin; not because it is great literature, but, because it, according to many historians, had a profound impact on the American public leading up to the civil war. But, because of the “stiff” language of the 1800s that it is written in I find it very hard to read.
Both, along with a few others are on my bucket list that I hope to read when I retire.
Thank goodness for the local library – and one of the best uses of state tax dollars (to me anyway) is that all the libraries in central New Jersey share resources. I can go to my library and order a book they do not have but another library does. They will then send it to my library for me to pick up.
GoodLord! What about Hemingway “A Farewell to Arms”, Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities”. These ‘100 Best’ lists are so subjective that I believe they are next to useless.
I love you, Neo, but how could you not like Jane Austen?
Youre welcome
The clash of ahab and the whale is the least interesting part of the story
Fiction is so subjective, I think these lists are pretty silly. This one really does read like it was generated by an algorithm.
Sarah Rolph:
Yes, all art is quite subjective. Its excellence is not objectively measured with a tape like the high jump.
I like lists to see what other people like and get ideas for things to check out. I can tell this list maker tuned his algo for “good enough”. There’s no overarching sensibility. One can certainly argue with Gatsby placed over Hamlet. But overall, I’d say, in the realm of “greatest lists,” this list is not bad.
But I was astonished at how different my recent reading [of Brideshead] was from the first one, a few decades ago. The first time I read it, as with when I saw the wonderful TV production, I found it lots of fun and I was rooting for the characters to get what they wanted; I found the ending, and some of the plot developments, disappointing. Now that I have more life experience, and more sympathy for religion, I understand what the book is really about.
That was my journey too! I still wish there were an alternate Brideshead which allowed those characters to develop more organically without the heavy hand of Catholic dogma.
Well, huxley, you could always write some fan fiction!
And I agree that the lists are fun anyway, because you might learn about a new book, and because it’s fun to talk about books!
“I’ve been looking for a book for 25+ years. Spanish author (I read in English). It’s about a priest who has lost his faith but soldiers on in his profession anyway, naturally leading to some internal conflict.”
Don’t think I’ve run across it, but reminds me of a story (by George RR Martin, of Hunger Games fame) in which the faith-challenged priest is a galactic inquisitor. The whole thing is online here:
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-way-of-cross-and-dragon/
…echoes of Dostoevsky.
GoodLord! What about Hemingway “A Farewell to Arms”, Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities”. These ‘100 Best’ lists are so subjective that I believe they are next to useless.
–Don Zimmer
“A Farewell to Arms” didn’t make it to the top 50, but did the top 100. Overall, for scoring in the top 150, Hemingway takes the prize. However, I would put “Farewell” over “The Old Man in the Sea.”
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44 . The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
57 . The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
60 . For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
61 . Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
84 . A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
137 . Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway
https://thegreatestbooks.org/authors/4714
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Dickens does quite well too:
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27 . Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
45 . David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
116 . Bleak House by Charles Dickens
190 . The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
231 . A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
https://thegreatestbooks.org/authors/4737
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Of course, one may argue about placement, but Dickens is well-represented in this list. There are so many writers, even more books, while there are only so many slots in the top 50 or 100.
I was curious about the difficult, though talented Mr. Pynchon. Here’s his top 3:
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242 . Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
509 . The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
567 . V by Thomas Pynchon
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That strikes me as about right.
There’s no getting around Pynchon’s savant-like ability to boldly go with words, images, characters, plots and ideas where no writer has gone before.* But I do wonder at times, when reading him, whether the game is worth the candle.
Nonetheless, there is a category of reader, who loves a good challenge and desires to be amazed by a writer, and I am such a reader on Mondays and Thursdays, but the rest of the time I’d just as soon curl up with a regular meat-and-potatoes story.
*Joyce was a savant too, but had other territory to cover.
I scrolled through the first hundred. I’d say this list is about as good as most such things. There are some definite yeses, some definite nos, and a lot of maybes. In some cases the verdict applies to their position in the list, some to their being included at all. I suspect that a lot of the questionable ones are tied up with their relationship to current political and cultural concerns. To Kill A Mockingbird, for instance, is not a great novel, but is hugely important to a lot of people for its relevance to American racial problems.
Possibly the biggest surprise to me is #1. I would not have expected Proust to be in that position. Not that I think he doesn’t deserve it, just would not have expected his popularity (this is basically a kind of popularity contest) to be that high. I’ve never read him but in the past couple of years have really been wanting to, and bought the first volume, but still haven’t started it.
…whether the game is worth the candle.
When I reached into my bag of word tricks and pulled that expression out, I was pretty sure I was using it properly, but I realized I didn’t understand how it made sense.
Voila:
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This expression, which began as a translation of a term used by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne in 1580, alludes to gambling by candlelight, which involved the expense of illumination. If the winnings were not sufficient, they did not warrant the expense. Used figuratively, it was a proverb within a century.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/the-game-is-not-worth-the-candle
__________________________
It’s a classic from a Great Book!
Which is On The List. #1 in fact for Nonfiction.
https://thegreatestbooks.org/nonfiction
huxley: re Pynchon, I really liked Lot 49 a lot but am not sure why. I’ve read GR and was kind of fascinated, but not at all sure that it was in the end very *good* in the same sense that, for instance, Dostoevsky is. Still, when I look at my shelves with the intention of getting rid of books that I know I’ll never re-read (or in some cases read at all), GR survives. There’s something kind of haunting about it….
Interesting that V is lowest in position of the three on this list. Several people told me that it’s the one to read if you don’t read any other Pynchon. But I haven’t read it.
I actively hated Jane Eyrehead.
Crime and Punishment
Anna Karenina
The Mouse and the Motorcycle
I suspect that a lot of the questionable ones are tied up with their relationship to current political and cultural concerns. To Kill A Mockingbird, for instance, is not a great novel, but is hugely important to a lot of people for its relevance to American racial problems.
Mac:
Just so.
I’d go farther and add that high school reading lists affect rankings too. “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Catcher in the Rye” come to mind as perennials on those lists, though “Catcher” is dated now and I’m not sure it would make sense to today’s teens.
TKAM is dated too and is under woke attack as a “White Savior” narrative.
My guess is that Gatsby’s high ranking (#5) on this list is due in part to the Gatsby boomlet in the 2000s when just about all high schools were assigning it for some reason. Perhaps because Hemingway was too sexist and Faulkner used the N-Word.
Interesting that V is lowest in position of the three on this list. Several people told me that it’s the one to read if you don’t read any other Pynchon.
Mac:
I’ve heard that too. I’ve read GR and Lot49, but only 100 pages of V.
I’d say V is easier going than the other two. GR is monumental and Lot is short, but jam-packed dense. I mean to get back to V. There’s also a downloadable audio file that one can search out.
These two gems enjoy places of special honor in my literary pantheon.
The Lost Steps, by Alejo Carpentier
Perfume, The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Suskind
I didn’t have trouble reading Jane Austen back in the day, but I couldn’t do it now. While people — or at least me — are reading less and less, we are more and more saturated in Austenism, Austen adaptations and Austen imitations. They don’t have the irony and sharp moral perspective of Austen’s novels, but they may make us groan when we come across romantic entanglements in Regency era English country houses.
I liked all the whaling stuff in Moby Dick. It gave the story texture and seemed more filling than mere filler. It made the book more like a panorama or an epic than just a story. That may also be true of the political background in Nostromo. Sometimes writers can get away with it, and sometimes they can’t.
I look at how primitive the 1960s British television adaptations of British classics appear today. Then they got better. Now they’ve fallen off again. The recent television A Room With a View was pointless and unnecessary after the 1990s film. The recent television Brideshead Revisited missed the point entirely. You needed all those hours of the 1970s series to bring out what the novel was about and to make the story seem real. Take out the religion and a lot is lost.
Are any novels by the last few generations of American and British writers (those born after WWII, say) going to last? I thought A Fine Balance by the Indian-born writer Rohinton Mistry was very good. I can’t think of others.
Anne in LA: “Jane Eyrehead”: I like the novel but that is very funny.
huxley, you’re surely right about the effect of high school reading lists. I hadn’t thought of that.
Re Catcher in the Rye: I loved it as an alienated teenager but have figured that those who have dismissed it probably had a point, at least. However, from what I remember of it, I suspect I would still find a lot to like in it. I’ll have to read it again and see. I mean, what I recall about Holden’s wish expressed in the title–what’s wrong with that?
Tried a few of these years ago. Couldn’t get going. Maybe it’s because, to be interesting, some characters have to be doing ‘interesting” stuff. And since there’s so much of that in real life, to it in fiction means doing stuff they wouldn’t do if they thought about it, or couldn’t stop themselves. That’s where I check out. People doing competent things when circumstances turn upside down are more interesting.
Catcher in The Rye is interesting if you want to hear the tale of a kid who ends up in a rubber room. Sad. But it was promoted as a coming-of-age novel when I was half a century younger. No thanks.
All Quiet… War is hell…… Okay.
TKAM is cool, even more so since the woke don’t like it. But for all his brilliance, Gregory Peck lost the case.
Rosemary Sutcliff got the good stuff out of Homer without endless “rosy-fingered dawn” and “aegis-bearing Zeus”.
Liked the whale hunting in Moby. Ahab’s nuts…. World’s full of them.
So I prefer history and related writing, and hist-fic where people are usually doing competent stuff in which circumstances themselves are the issue. Some alt-hist, too. The late Dave Duncan’s “Merlin Redux” had me reaching for the history books frequently. Felt bad I couldn’t figure out which was alt and it took me a while to find out how he got the barons to “lumber up to Runnymede”.
Did like “Star Fox” for its immediacy.
Richard,
Try The Alienist by Caleb Carr. A well-written novel by an historian who goes to great lengths to get the history right. Fun, fast paced read, set in 1890s New York. Theodore Roosevelt is the chief of police. Which he was. It’s great.
The Great Gatsby remains one of my favorite novels. In my mind, it’s deserving of the distinction of “the Great American Novel.”
Book lists, for whatever reason, make me want to go out and see the live performing arts (i.e. plays, musicals, ballet, opera, orchestra), spend hours in museums and city libraries. Tv and film, no matter their proposed sophistication, are the lowest forms of entertainment there is that is deemed an art form, though some projects are redeemable and worthy of the layman’s attention where most aren’t.
Are any novels by the last few generations of American and British writers (those born after WWII, say) going to last?
M Smith:
I haven’t had much luck following lit of the past 30-40 years.
David Foster Wallace (b. 1962) seems to be the most prominent candidate of recent American writers. I didn’t get far with “Infinite Jest” — it seemed too clever by half. However, his cleverness worked just fine in his book of essays, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (1997).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I'll_Never_Do_Again
“The Year of the French” is an outstanding historical novel. Ralph Peters, the writer and Army officer, called it “the finest historical novel written in English, at least in the twentieth century,” going on to say “except for ‘The Leopard,’ I know of no historical novel that so richly and convincingly captures the ambience of a bygone world.”
The title refers to the year 1798, when the French revolutionary government landed 1000 troops in County Mayo to support indigenous Irish rebels, with the objective of overthrowing British rule in Ireland. I reviewed the book here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/67359.html
Mike. Thanks. I’ll give it a shot.
Gravitys rainbow seems a little too clever with itself could probably lose 200 pages and not lose the plot
I can appreciate that Jane Austen is one of those writers who you either love or you don’t (well, most writers are!), but there is a reason why she has a “corner” on the literature of her era.
Many years ago, I read in a biography of another well-known writer about a time in her life when she was at loose ends for an extended period (summer break at university, or some bed-rest type illness).
(Dorothy L. Sayers IIRC, so sometime in the early 20th c.)
She had often wondered why Jane was the only British author from the end of the 18th century still with any following, and decided to read some of the books by her contemporaries. Having access to the college library, she went to the stacks for that era, and more or less “started at the upper left hand corner of the first set of shelves and read through to the end.”
Her conclusion was that Austen was, indeed, the only writer still worth reading!
Personally, I like Austen’s books for her wit and well-turned phraseology more than the plots, and she had a shrewd sense for character and personality. Plus, I much prefer reading about an historical era via books written by those who lived there, rather than later re-enactors (although there are some of those who are a cut well above the typical historical drama).
As a side-note, Sayers’ time is now so far removed from our own, that her detective novels — contemporary fiction when published — are now historical dramas in their own right.
Gravitys rainbow seems a little too clever with itself could probably lose 200 pages and not lose the plot
Gravity’s Rainbow has a plot? Who knew.
Sure, it has lots of characters and episodes and, like, stuff happens, but “plot” seems a bit too strong a word.
It’s been years but when I read GR as a naive young thing, I thought Tyrone Slothrop was the protagonist and the plot was figuring out why the German V-2 rockets were landing where Slothrop has had a hard-on. (No kidding.)
But then the book explodes into subplots and craziness all over the world. One hundred pages before the end of the book Slothrop literally disappears down a toilet and is never seen again and we don’t learn what happened to him.
Some plot. Anti-plot seems more accurate and it seems to be a feature, not a bug, of the book.
Slothrops journey of self discovery (you want me to diagram it)
There apparently was sort of a film adaptation impolex in 2011
Interesting for discussing tomorrow
https://www.dailywire.com/news/leading-pollster-gop-voters-will-be-virtually-impossible-to-poll-after-bidens-maga-republicans-attacks
Sarah Rolph on September 18, 2022 at 9:09 am:
[skipping a head to comment as I scan thru this thread]
Your comment suggested to me that perhaps people should read a book when they are the same age as when the author wrote it. Then their life experiences might be similar enough to have increased appreciation or understanding. Clearly this idea has limits, with some authors being more talented at presenting age related feeling even before they have reached that age themselves.
Similarly for some actor’s portrayals of the person they are representing.
Mockingbird isnt about the plot its willing to follow through on your principles despite overwhelming pressure
Yes moby dick is about the dangers of obsession to everyone in ahabs orbit
I had to check and they had a book that I thought was garbage, the Stranger. You know it’s bad when the “instructor” for my class, who was French, openly admitted the book has no plot.
Neo’s blogroll includes NormGeras (died Oct 9, 2013), whom was a socialist I respected for his honesty, and his daughter kept his blog up:
https://normblog.typepad.com/
His list of 100 books is unique, and is one of my favorites, plus it has a great explantion:
“Now, in all my experience of such book lists, this one has a unique feature. Which is that I’ve read all the books on it. Yup, every single one – 100%. That’s because I compiled the list from… the books I’ve read (choosing titles, as well, that I liked enough that I’m happy to recommend them). Why should I let other people make lists to browbeat me with? If I make the list myself, I get to have read everything on it. Enough bullying is what I say. You, too, can make your own list and rebel against the tyranny of the book-dictators. I suggest you do it. ”
Enough bullying is what he says, and I agree.
I see that Lord of the Rings is included in the algo list, but not Norm’s. I loved it, and have read it all a few times. At least 3 times in college, taking a weekend:
Friday night for Fellowship; nap Sat morning & then Two Towers evening; nap Sunday morn & then Return of the King before Sunday dinner.
I do like books which I can devour in one sitting, tho I’m trying to get more balanced.
I don’t believe George RR Martin will finish Game of Thrones, so don’t expect it to keep up its popularity. JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series was fantastic, even tho #7 was the weakest book (I’d argue). Starting with book #4 I’d buy it in English and read it all night, finishing in the morning. Then get it a few months later in Slovak and read it again. Reading in Slovak remains work, so I’ve mostly given it up – so it’s not getting easier, either.
Detective novels remain under rated – fun to read, semi-realistic, semi-fantasy. I love Jack Reacher (the Lee Child books, not little Tom Cruise acting), but I also like super hero types and comics and Sci-Fi. Rowling aka Robert Galbraith has written fine Cormoran Strike novels WITH character development – now being mini-serialized as “Strike”. My son’s Slovak wife just returned book #5 after reading it (in English, helping her). They recommend the mini-series, it’s on my list “to see”.
Books should be interesting, fun, and maybe thought provoking – especially about ideas yet also about human action under uncertainty with respect to Good and Bad, or sometimes Evil.
I’ve only read half of the top 10, so not Ulysses nor Proust.
“Can we truly know the one we love? In this painfully candid book Marcel Proust looks straight into the green eye of every lover’s jealous struggle.”
Is In Search of Lost Time really worth 7 volumes in English? Rather than the many other increasingly interesting blogs (mostly on substack!), or learning more karaoke songs?
I very much did like Don Quixote, and while only a quarter or so was required college reading as part of one of the Western Civ type courses that are no longer required of students, naturally I read the whole thing. As well as all of all the required books, which didn’t include Moby Dick, either.
My 17 yo son just finished Catcher in the Rye, and thought it was still relevant, tho also a bit dated. He’s now reading Mine Were Of Trouble, an English fighter in the Spanish Civil War. Fighting for Franco against the communists, one of the only English language books from that angle. I’ll read it after he’s done – and it’s quite less literary but also with a different emphasis than Hemmingway.
Best book for readers to read? … non-fiction now: The Goodness Paradox.
by Robert Wrangham fine review (on substack …)
https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/the-distinctiveness-of-human-aggression
It’s increasingly interesting to talk with my 3 adult kids, all quite different, and they’re interested in Truth, mostly. So, more non-fiction.
And maybe a bit more wine. In vino veritas!, or at least beer.
[Substack comments do NOT allow italics tho.]
For those of you who like Joseph Conrad, especially Heart of Darkness, I highly recommend V.S. Naipul’s A Bend in the River. I might be biased on this: I lived on that river (Congo) for 3 years, and on one of it’s tributaries (Ubangui) for 4. Both writers capture the darkness of life there.
I read incessantly as a kid but not many highbrow classics. I practically memorized the Sherlock Holmes books and stories. Lots of westerns, which I think are a good way to get boys reading. More recently, military novels and non-fiction. Right now, I am reading a series of novels by P. T. Deutermann, who spent 26 years in the Navy and whose father was an admiral. I also like Andrew Wareham, who writes historical novels, many about the Industrial Revolution in England. Both of those authors get the details right, which is an obsession of mine. Not a lot of highbrow classics. Lots of Civil War history and WWI history.
Hello. R2L on September 18, 2022 at 11:05 pm mentioned the interesting idea of reading a given book when one is around the age of the writer at the time that he/she set it down. I wonder, though, if, supposing that were rigorously adhered to, one might not end up reading rather little in one’s old age, at least stuff that one hasn’t before seen, since I suppose that most writers produce most of their work in their younger to middle years. But is that really the case? Maybe I’m mistaken.
With some of us debating Gatsby on this thread, I’d point out that I inadvertently executed a variation on R2L’s idea: I read Gatsby when I was the age of the story’s narrator. Nick Carroway was thirty in the book when he met Gatsby and all that happened, and I happened to be thirty at the time. In part for that reason, Gatsby has always stuck with me.
Of course, there is one huge problem with building such a reading plan: there would have to be some risk of spoilers in knowing the age of the protagonist or narrator of a story before one has ever read it. And I suppose there are other possible problems arising if said protagonist were much older than the norm, say a character who by one means or another has lived an abnormally long lifespan.
I remember reading in high school, I also read the sun also rises, it wasn’t as appealing, I was on a russian kick, around 2008, tolstoy lermontov, and a few others, chandler around 2006, or so,
Is In Search of Lost Time really worth 7 volumes in English?
Tom Grey:
I haven’t read Proust (#1 on this list), but I have read Joyce’s “Ulysses” (#2 and a difficult, time-consuming work) plus some chapters many times.
The answer to your question, as with many, is … it depends. It depends on who you are and what you want in a book.
I love Joyce and “Ulysses” but I’m not always up for reading “Ulysses” and I would never think less of a person for not reading it.
“Ulysses” is a terrible book for someone expecting a straightforward story. I enjoy the BrothersJudd website on books, but they hated “Ulysses,” called it “the greatest hoax of the century,” and graded it with an F. (They gave “Swann’s Way” a D+.)
http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/867/Ulysses.htm
I understand and sympathize in many ways.
But Joyce wasn’t writing a straightforward story. Like “Gravity’s Rainbow” “Ulysses” doesn’t really have a plot. We follow three characters in Dublin for one day, stuff happens, they think about things, two of them meet at a brothel (which is as much of a climax as the book provides) and nothing is resolved. Each chapter is based on an episode from the “Odyssey,” written in a different literary style (some quite odd and difficult), with its own thematic color, art, symbol and organ of the body.
“Ulysses” was an experimental work, pressing the limits of the novel. It’s not a story one reads from start to finish. It’s a world in which one lives and experiences, then discovers the connections and marvels at Joyce’s facility with language. It’s a masterpiece of literary modernism, which expanded the way we think about literature.
It’s not for everyone, I don’t think it should be, and that’s all right, all the way around.
I’m not sure I would ever have managed Ulysses on my own, but I had to read it for a class and it was one of the richest literary experiences of my life. That was many years ago and I’ve never read it again, but thought maybe I would in old age. The latter has arrived but I still haven’t re-read it, mainly because there are too many other great books I haven’t read at all. E.g. Proust.
Mark Helprin has but one entry on the list, “Winter’s Tale”, and that comes in at #2199. Bah!
How about Mathematics for Engineers, by Andrew Dull
The recent television Brideshead Revisited missed the point entirely. You needed all those hours of the 1970s series to bring out what the novel was about and to make the story seem real. Take out the religion and a lot is lost.
–M Smith
This topic is stale, but I just gotta get one more thing off my chest…
Likewise the 2011 film version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” over the BBC “Tinker, Tailor, etc” (1979) with Alec Guinness.
The film version was in every way, including Gary Oldman’s remarkable stoic performance as Smiley, inferior to the immortal IMO Alec Guinness version.
Granted, the film had less time than the TV mini-series to cover Le Carre’s detailed novel, but the film added gratuitous sex and violence and “heh-heh gay MI-6 boys” as well as leaving out Irina’s Christian faith as her motivation for betraying the KGB.
I could go on. Thanks for listening.
Mac:
Thanks for your comment. “Ulysses” can be an extraordinarily “[rich] literary experience” indeed.
I don’t think that experience occurs without some guidance, in class or with guide books, or via multiple close readings with a literary background.
When “Ulysses” first came out, it was often misunderstood as spontaneous stream of consciousness writing. They didn’t know Joyce was a perfectionist, who thought everything through…and through and through.
@ huxley > Thanks for the link to BrothersJudd; I will take a look at some of their other reviews.
I was amused to see the author of the featured “blurb” for Ulysses:
@ huxley > “two of them meet at a brothel (which is as much of a climax as the book provides)”
[raised eyebrow emoji]
@ Tom Grey > Alas, I have only read 21 of Norm’s 100 books.
He was a very eclectic reader, and I may consider reading some other titles on his list, since he chose only those that “I liked enough that I’m happy to recommend them.”
There is a difference between recommending a book as being well-written and important, and recommending one that is likewise and you actually enjoyed reading it.
And of course, there are the ones that aren’t well-written, or are not important, and you liked them anyway.
Which must be how this got on the Judd Brother’s list.
The Hunger Games (2008) – Suzanne Collins (1963?-) (Grade:A+)
Seriously?
Well, there’s no accounting for tastes.
AesopFan:
Yeah, I must say Uncle Aldous didn’t entirely get “Ulysses.”
I still love him.
Yeah, you got the latter point too.
Though, technically, in the Nausicaa chapter there is a climax of male kind. Plus other sauciness later.
The efforts to ban “Ulysses” as obscene weren’t entirely wrong.
https://theconversation.com/ulysses-at-100-why-it-was-banned-for-being-obscene-176086
The BrothersJudd homepage links to this article about their website, which I thought was very interesting, and probably would ring a bell or two with most of Neo’s salon. It explains the rather casual way they got started, and how things just kind of grew from there.
NOTE: The Hunger Games was “Avery Judd’s First Review” in 2008; I’m guessing that’s the child of one of the Brothers — it’s still a lousy book on lots of levels, but I can see why they would want to encourage the younger generation to read and comment on books they’ve read.
https://catholicexchange.com/the-brothers-juddthe-adventure-of-great-literature/
Re: Moby Dick
I decided, after this post, to try it yet again, but on audio. Holy Cow! The reader for the edition I got (William Hookins) has totally changed my ability to get through this. My voice for Ishmael was mostly Bob Cratchit (‘A Christmas Carol’), a genial guy down on his luck. Hootkins is reading it as a fop, deigning to sail because he was ‘bored.’
It is much funnier an peppier than I thought. My preconceived notions of a slog have been totally upended.
R2L, that’s an interesting idea!
Tom Grey, I agree that detective novels are often under-rated. I just re-read John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series and enjoyed them more than ever. I suggest reading them in order, there is a character arc and the last book is best when you know it is the end of the series.
Greatest books? Hmm.
Sacred texts (Okay, that way lies WAY to much controversy, I can see not ‘ranking’ Torah, Christian Bible (and by version!), Koran, Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching (sic), etc).
Mathematics and science? Euclid, Newton, Euler, Pascal, Gödel, Einstein, Feynmann, Copernicus, Galileo, Hawking, Muslim Mathematicians, etc.
Sure, not Fiction, but it said ‘Greatest Books’ not ‘Greatest Fiction Books of the Western World’
Kris: not Kepler? His footnotes are great!
Kris:
There is a non-fiction list as well.
Kris:
Moby Dick has a surprising amount of humor. The voice is strangely modern, considering how long ago it was written.
There was quite a bit of fiction in the non fiction listing: Freud, Karl Marx, Keynes, Silent Spring. Facts and fancy or fantasy. No Mein Kampf or Little Red Book? An Inconvienient Truth?
@ om > this work in the NF section should be considered mostly fictional.
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey
The 1154th greatest nonfiction book of all time — with “greatest” being defined very loosely; it was influential, however.
https://notthebee.com/article/depravity-beyond-measure-iu-erects-statue-to-honor-wicked-pedophile
AesopFan:
Truly and utterly depraved; IU Kinsey Institute and Vanderbilt University’s mutilation for moola “medical center.”