"The Greatest Books of All Time" top 100 quest

[prodigalgodson]

Hey folks.

So lately I've been a lot more interested in reading and music in film, and while looking for recommendations I stumbled across this TSP-esque list.

https://thegreatestbooks.org/

Anyone familiar? It gets a little wonky order-wise the further you go down imo, but I thought having completed TSP's top 500, I should make this my new bucket list. So here's what I got so far, and I'm hard at work on Moby Dick atm. Some of these ones I've marked read I only have the vaguest recollections of and definitely owe re-reads too (as much as Paradise Lost captured my middle school imagination, I'm not sure if I read it cover to cover; and I definitely didn't give LOTR the close reading it deserved). I'm also a very slow reader and many of these books are very long, so I expect this will be a very long-term project.

1. In Search of Lost Time -- Marcel Proust
2. Ulysses -- James Joyce
3. Don Quixote -- Miguel de Cervantes
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gael Garcia Marquez 6/10
5. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald 5/10
6. Moby Dick -- Herman Melville 10/10
7. War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy 9/10
8. Hamlet -- William Shakespeare
9. The Odyssey -- Homer
10. Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert 7/10
11. The Divine Comedy -- Dante Alighieri
12. Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov 9/10
13. The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoevsky 9/10
14. Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoevsky 10/10
15. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
16. The Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger 7/10
17. Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austin
18. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain 8/10
19. Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy 7/10
20. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
21. The Illiad -- Homer
22. To the Lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf 9/10
23. Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller 10/10
24. Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad 8/10
25. The Sound and the Fury -- William Faulkner
26. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 8/10
27. Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens
28. One Thousand and One Nights -- anonymous
29. The Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck
30. Absalom, Absalom! -- William Faulkner
31. Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison
32. To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee 9/10
33. The Trial -- Franz Kafka
34. The Red and the Black -- Stendhal
35. Middlemarch -- George Eliot 10/10
36. Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift
37. Beloved -- Toni Morrison
38. Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
39. The Stories of Anton Chekov -- Anton Chekov
40. The Stranger -- Albert Camus 9/10
41. Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte
42. The Aeneid -- Virgil
43. Collected Fiction -- Jorge Luis Borges
44. The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway 6/10
45. David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
46. Tristram Shandy -- Laurence Sterne
47. Leaves of Grass -- Walt Whitman
48. The Magic Mountain -- Thomas Mann 10/10
49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- James Joyce 8/10
50. Midnight's Children -- Salman Rushdie
51. Oedipus Rex -- Sophocles
52. Candide -- Voltaire
53. The Lord of the Rings -- JRR Tolkein 8/10
54. The Idiot -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
55. Les Miserables -- Victor Hugo
56. A Passage to India -- EM Forster
57. The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemingway
58. Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe 5/10
59. Emma -- Jane Austen
60. For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway
61. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka -- Franz Kafka 9/10
62. The Metamorphosis -- Franz Kafka 10/10
63. The Portrait of a Lady -- Henry James
64. Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley
65. Pale Fire -- Vladimir Nabokov 10/10
66. Antigone -- Sophocles 6/10
67. As I Lay Dying -- William Faulkner
68. The Color Purple -- Alice Walker
69. Demons -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
70. Gone with the Wind -- Margaret Mitchell
71. Lord of the Flies -- William Golding 5/10
72. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 9/10
73. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe -- Edgar Allen Poe
74. The Age of Innocence -- Edith Wharton
75. Dead Souls -- Nikolai Gogol
76. On the Road -- Jack Kerouac
77. The Good Soldier -- Ford Maddox Ford
78. Animal Farm -- George Orwell 8/10
79. Orlando -- Virginia Woolf
80. The Canterbury Tales -- Geoffrey Chaucer
81. Vanity Fair -- William Thackery
82. Under the Volcano -- Malcolm Lowry
83. The Waste Land -- TS Eliot 8/10
84. A Farewell to Arms -- Ernest Hemingway
85. Journey to the End of the Night -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine
86. The Castle -- Franz Kafka 10/10
87. A Sentimental Education -- Gustave Flaubert
88. The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
89. Slaughterhouse-Five -- Kurt Vonnegut
90. The Handmaid's Tale -- Margaret Atwood
91. Charlotte's Web -- EB White 7/10
92. Native Son -- Richard Wright 7/10
93. The Charterhouse of Parma -- Stendhal
94. Paradise Lost -- John Milton
95. Gargantua and Pentagruel -- Francois Rabelais
96. Poems of Emily Dickinson -- Emily Dickinson
97. Faust -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
98. Rebecca -- Daphne du Maurier
99. The Flowers of Evil -- Charles Baudelaire
100. Decameron -- Giovanni Boccaccio

[mightysparks]

I'm also a slow reader and prefer reading sci-fi over these kinds of things but I have had my eye on this list. Seems like the list has changed since I made a spreadsheet for it so I'll have to update thatLooks like 5 new additions to the list since the last time I made a spreadsheet and the 5 that fell off I hadn't read anyway. I've seen 18/100:

The Great Gatsby
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Hamlet
The Catcher in the Rye
Madame Bovary
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Pride and Prejudice
Catch-22
Nineteen Eighty Four
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Lord of the Rings
Les Miserables
Lord of the Flies
Brave New World
Animal Farm
Frankenstein
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Handmaid's Tale


Out of those the only ones I really enjoyed were Catch-22, Nineteen Eighty Four, Lord of the Rings, Les Miserables, Lord of the Flies and The Handmaid's Tale.

The #1 is way too daunting for me. If I ever read that it'll probably be the last one I check off the list.

[Chilton]

4. One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gael Garcia Marquez
5. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. Moby Dick -- Herman Melville
14. Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
20. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
26. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
40. The Stranger -- Albert Camus
44. The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway
49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- James Joyce
57. The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemingway
59. Emma -- Jane Austen
61. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka -- Franz Kafka
62. The Metamorphosis -- Franz Kafka
64. Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley
73. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe -- Edgar Allen Poe
76. On the Road -- Jack Kerouac
89. Slaughterhouse-Five -- Kurt Vonnegut


Surprised to see I already read 17 of these (plus four more collecting dust on my shelf). All in all, it seems to be a decent list with at least some variety in terms of language, although still very anglo-centric and old, as most of these lists tend to be. I used to be more into reading and then stumbled on this list as well (and of course the book "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die"), but after reading the first dozen pages of Ulysses (which was then #1 iirc), I quietly gave up on ever finishing it . There are still several books on that list I'd like to read, but safe to say I switched more to film and more modern literature since then.

[OldAle1]

Huh, I don't know that I've seen that list before. It's got some obvious limitations - almost entirely western-centric and focused nearly as much on the 19th and 20th centuries, with earlier works listed being very obvious indeed, but that said it's hard for me to argue with the quality of the choices and hey, it's at least one great books list that doesn't have any Any Rand so there's a huge plus!

I was an English lit major in college and thought (ha) that I'd be a writer and teacher someday back in those days when failure and depression were still being shrugged off sometimes, so I've read a fair number of these and, being a compulsive collector as well, I own the majority of ones I haven't read. I started reading

1. In Search of Lost Time -- Marcel Proust

in the spring of 2016 and read about half of it. I didn't stop because I wasn't loving in - on the contrary, even with just half the book finished I can say pretty honestly that it's likely the greatest novel I've ever read - but I happened to start it in one of those periods where my focus on film was low, and at the end of that summer I started getting really into movies again and just stopped. And it's a book that, for me at least, demands a lot of concentration and daily reading. Thankfully the edition I have has a very detailed summary so I feel it will be easy to pick it up again more or less where I left off, and I've been thinking about that a lot lately. It's one of those things that just has stayed with me. I also started

4. One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gael Garcia Marquez

Around the same time or maybe a little later but I didn't get far for some reason; and it's not a long book. And back in college I read the first half of

48. The Magic Mountain -- Thomas Mann

but the edition available at the time only had the German bulk of the book translated - there is a long, important passage in French that went untranslated and I got there and just stopped. Now I'm pretty sure I could get it with the whole of it translated, though it's one of the few books here that I don't own so I dunno. Anyway, those three are probably the priorities for me, along with some of the shorter works that I've unaccountably missed (or at least have no memory at all of reading).

Other books I've definitely read - in most cases over 20 years ago:

5. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. Moby Dick -- Herman Melville
8. Hamlet -- William Shakespeare
13. The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
14. Crime and Punishment[/b] -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
15. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
17. Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austin
18. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain
20. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
24. Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad
25. The Sound and the Fury -- William Faulkner
26. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
27. Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens
30. Absalom, Absalom! -- William Faulkner
31. Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison
33. The Trial -- Franz Kafka
36. Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift
37. Beloved -- Toni Morrison
38. Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
43. Collected Fiction -- Jorge Luis Borges - certainly haven't read everything, but I've read quite a bit of the best-known stuff, most collected in "Labyrinths"
44. The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway
45. David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- James Joyce
53. The Lord of the Rings-- JRR Tolkein
59. Emma -- Jane Austen
61. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka -- Franz Kafka
62. The Metamorphosis -- Franz Kafka
63. The Portrait of a Lady -- Henry James
67. As I Lay Dying -- William Faulkner
72. Brave New World-- Aldous Huxley
73. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe -- Edgar Allen Poe - as with Borges, I've definitely read a good chunk if not the vast majority, but I can't be sure exactly
74. The Age of Innocence -- Edith Wharton
75. Dead Souls -- Nikolai Gogol
78. Animal Farm -- George Orwell
80. The Canterbury Tales -- Geoffrey Chaucer
83. The Waste Land -- TS Eliot
86. The Castle -- Franz Kafka
91. Charlotte's Web -- EB White
97. Faust -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Not gonna try to rate of rank these; let's just say I have the mindset (if not the mind) to appreciate "great literature", and that most of these made very positive impressions on me in one way or another. The major disappointments for me - and it's not that I disliked them, just that they failed to convince me of their mastery on one go - were probably the two dystopias by Orwell and Huxley, and I suspect this is because I was already a pretty heavy science fiction reader and knew many of the concepts, and because both struck me as rather heavy-handed at the time. And I liked Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 more. I'd be curious to revisit them now, as I'd be curious to re-read any of these now - I think The Lord of the Rings is probably the only one of these I've read within the last 20 years.

[gunnar]

I haven't seen this particular site/list before, but I've looked at other such lists in the past. I made a concerted effort for a number of years to read certain classics and also expanded that to read every novel and some of the shorter works from Dickens and Austen. I'm sure that I'll get back to it eventually, but have been reading mostly science fiction and fantasy over the last couple of years. I did reread Brave New World and Crime and Punishment during the last couple of years, though.

Here's what I've read from the list:

3. Don Quixote -- Miguel de Cervantes
6. Moby Dick -- Herman Melville
7. War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy
8. Hamlet -- William Shakespeare
9. The Odyssey -- Homer
14. Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
15. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
16. The Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger
17. Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austin
18. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain
20. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
21. The Iliad -- Homer
22. To the Lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf
23. Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller
24. Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad
26. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
27. Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens
29. The Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck
31. Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison
32. To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
33. The Trial -- Franz Kafka
36. Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift
37. Beloved -- Toni Morrison
38. Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
40. The Stranger -- Albert Camus
42. The Aeneid -- Virgil
44. The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway
45. David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
47. Leaves of Grass -- Walt Whitman
51. Oedipus Rex -- Sophocles
52. Candide -- Voltaire
53. The Lord of the Rings -- JRR Tolkein
57. The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemingway
59. Emma -- Jane Austen
60. For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway
62. The Metamorphosis -- Franz Kafka
64. Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley
66. Antigone -- Sophocles
67. As I Lay Dying -- William Faulkner
71. Lord of the Flies -- William Golding
72. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
78. Animal Farm -- George Orwell
80. The Canterbury Tales -- Geoffrey Chaucer
84. A Farewell to Arms -- Ernest Hemingway
88. The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
89. Slaughterhouse-Five -- Kurt Vonnegut
91. Charlotte's Web -- EB White
92. Native Son -- Richard Wright
94. Paradise Lost -- John Milton
99. The Flowers of Evil -- Charles Baudelaire

I am definitely not a Virginia Woolf fan, but I know that others are. Still, three titles on the list seems excessive. I enjoyed many of these, though a few were a chore to finish.

[RolandKirkSunglasses]

I tried going through a similar list around 10 years ago (there's so many damn lists out there) so I've read half the books on this one. As OldAle said it's got a heavy American + European flavour with a lot of 19th + 20th century novels in there (quite surprised at no asian novels). Out of the ones I've read and you haven't read I've loosely grouped them up so you can take a better whack at them.

Picaresque:
Candide -- Voltaire
Don Quixote -- Miguel de Cervantes

Candide is the much shorter read and pretty entertaining at that. Don Quixote's first part is more adventure-based and the second more philosophical, there's also a story-within-a-story in Part 1.


Play:
Hamlet -- William Shakespeare
Faust -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Faust has 2 parts but some movie versions just film the first part; second part throws in a lot of references to Greek mythology which flew over my head. Hamlet is the more familiar work though school lessons really put me off Shakespeare.


19th century France/Russia:
Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert
Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy
The Red and the Black -- Stendhal
The Charterhouse of Parma -- Stendhal
Les Miserables -- Victor Hugo

Anna Karenina is one of my absolute favourite novels, the storyline bears some similarity to Madame Bovary which came out a couple decades earlier.
Out of the Stendahl's Red & the Black is more of a social climber storyline and Charterhouse of Parma is more action-packed.
Les Miserables is one of my least favourite classic novels. It's an epic story, Hugo's prose is beautiful and there are some memorable set pieces in there but I found it quite melodramatic and over-the-top at times, Victor Hugo loves going on 20-page tangents describing the history of a building or the Battle of Waterloo.


19th century England (male):
Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens
David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
Vanity Fair -- William Thackery

Both Dickens novels deal with childhood and you can't go wrong with either of them. Alice in Wonderland is a brisk read while Vanity Fair feels a little old fashioned in its storytelling and is the longest of the lot.


19th century England (female):
Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austen

Jane Eyre is the more personal work with bits of gothic horror thrown in, the storms are internal compared to Wuthering Heights' external stormy atmosphere. Jane Austen's prose isn't as flashy as the others but doesn't make Pride & Prejudice less shallow than the others.

Hemingway:
The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms -- Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway

Old Man & the Sea is the shortest of those, I much prefer Farewell to Arms over For Whom the Bell Tolls as the latter is all about the build-up to a big event. I don't remember much about Sun Also Rises.


20th century:
The Trial -- Franz Kafka
Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison
On the Road -- Jack Kerouac

Kafka's novel lives up to its reputation, I prefer "Invisible Man" over "To Kill a Mockingbird" when it comes to racism. I didn't get Jack Kerouac's novel at all.

Modernist:
Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
Orlando -- Virginia Woolf
One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gael Garcia Marquez
As I Lay Dying -- William Faulkner

Mrs Dalloway occurs over the course of one day and it's less confusing than "To the Lighthouse". One Hundred Years of Solitude is great but you need a family tree of all the character names because they're all so similar to reflect the theme of history repeating. I don't remember much about Faulkner's novel but he's pretty challenging to read.

Long modernist:
The Magic Mountain -- Thomas Mann
Ulysses -- James Joyce
In Search of Lost Time -- Marcel Proust

Magic Mountain is an amazing novel to read about, it all takes place in one location and it can feel like quite a slog going through it with a fair bit of philosophical dialogue (it's a social commentary on pre-WWI European society). Ulysses flew over my head when I read it (I gave up on Finnegan's Wake after one page), Proust's novel requires a lot of concentration, the pacing is very slow and it took me a couple months to finish it (I was trying to go quickly too!)

[Dimitris Psachos Springer]

Good list, heavily anglo-oriented (which seems to be the disgusting norm in most lists across the artistic spectrum), but I'll say this: I find it positive that critics are still hanging on to pre-WWII glories (at least 40% of those glories is worthy of all this attention, yes, no matter how "old" they are / the "old" term shows how prejudiced most people are), since only particular countries/names post-1970s deserve one's attention (definitely NOT from U.S. and almost all Western European lands)

Read and Ranked (the 5s are, more or less, equally appreciated, the ranking below is of-the-moment-preference)

1. Pale Fire -- Vladimir Nabokov 5/5
2. Ulysses -- James Joyce 5/5
3. To the Lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf 5/5 (Woolf trashes 2/3s of the authors here)
4. Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov 5/5
5. Orlando -- Virginia Woolf 5/5
6. The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
7. Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert 5/5
8. The Divine Comedy -- Dante Alighieri 5/5
9. The Lord of the Rings -- JRR Tolkein 5/5 (all three, correct? hehe)
10. Hamlet -- William Shakespeare 5/5
11. Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad 5/5
12. Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley 5/5
13. Antigone -- Sophocles (haven't searched Sophocles as I wanted to, yet this one demolishes several "fiction giants" of this list)
14. A Sentimental Education -- Gustave Flaubert 5/5
15. Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf 5/5
16. As I Lay Dying -- William Faulkner 5/5
17. The Waste Land -- TS Eliot 5/5
18. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 5/5
19. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- James Joyce 5/5
20. The Castle -- Franz Kafka 5/5 (Kafka's best, superior to any short I've read by him, including Country Doctor)
21. Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austin 4,5/5 (I'll probably give it a 5, after I read two more from Austen)
22. Lord of the Flies -- William Golding 4,5/5
23. Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoevsky 4,5/5
24. The Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger 4,5/5 (close to brilliant, but I do think others deserve more to take its place)
25. Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens 4/5 (Dickens is fine and all, but I doubt this one of his crown achievements)
26. Animal Farm -- George Orwell (borderline 4,5, but this one doesn't really need to be here, right?)
27. To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee 4/5 (others deserve more to be in this list)
28. The Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck 4/5 (Steinbeck is way too simplistic)
29. The Trial -- Franz Kafka 4/5 (strong bureau-allegory, but, c'mon, let's forget fame for a while)
30. Emma -- Jane Austen 3,5/5 (nah, even Love and Friendship excels over this)
31. The Metamorphosis -- Franz Kafka 3/5 (yeah...no, plenty who were influenced by Kafka surpass Kafka by miles / I do have a couple of great ones by him, this one's definitely OUT)
32. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald 2,5/5 (should be kicked out of the list)
33. The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemingway 2/5 (nope, OUT, how is this even here?)

Read Half (or in need of a re-read)

1. The Illiad -- Homer (botched read during my school days, almost despised it because of how it was taught / I suspect lots will attest to this with similar examples in their English, French, Russian etc departments)
2. The Odyssey -- Homer (botched read during my school days, almost despised it because of how it was taught / I suspect lots will attest to this with similar examples in their English, French, Russian etc departments)
3. Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy (stopped halfway because of a reader's block type-of-"emotion")
4. One Thousand and One Nights -- anonymous (hoping to find a complete version, or else I'll download a pdf)
5. Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift (read a children's edition, will have to atone myself at some point)
6. The Stories of Anton Chekov -- Anton Chekov (all of Chekov's short stories? this one's getting a raincheck)
7. Leaves of Grass -- Walt Whitman (read half, I'm a sucker for poetry, I guess I was a bit affected from a broken heart and left it incomplete)
8. Oedipus Rex -- Sophocles (botched read during my school days, almost despised it because of how it was taught / I suspect lots will attest to this with similar examples in their English, French, Russian etc departments) deliberately posted for a third time
9. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka -- Franz Kafka (again, all his shorts, yes? another raincheck)
10. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe -- Edgar Allen Poe (another raincheck, though I've read quite a lot!)
11. Paradise Lost -- John Milton (1/3 of it, stopped due to linguistic obstacles, even with a helping hand manual beside me / I'd have included Canterbury too, but that I gave up before I reach 1/3, hah)
12. Poems of Emily Dickinson -- Emily Dickinson (maybe it's time to buy/borrow the complete edition, hmmm)
13. Faust -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (still haven't read Part 2, pff)
14. The Flowers of Evil -- Charles Baudelaire (read half of it in my pre-teens, wasn't too keen with cursed/damned poets back then, I was enchanted by English romantics, heh)
15. Decameron -- Giovanni Boccaccio (still haven't read the second volume)

I highly suspect half of those have garnered spots because of their populist acclaim / I mean, Gone with the Wind, let's be serious here / I can name a few masterpieces from Japan, Egypt, Greece, Poland, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, yes, even India, where we could substitute them for...ahem, Charlotte's Web!

To Read (will edit once I decide some priorities, although I have a handful in mind)
1. In Search of Lost Time -- Marcel Proust
2. Don Quixote -- Miguel de Cervantes
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gael Garcia Marquez
4. Moby Dick -- Herman Melville
5. War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy
6. The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain
9. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
10. Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller
11. The Sound and the Fury -- William Faulkner
12. Absalom, Absalom! -- William Faulkner
13. Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison
14. The Red and the Black -- Stendhal
15. Middlemarch -- George Eliot
16. Beloved -- Toni Morrison
17. The Stranger -- Albert Camus
18. Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte
19. The Aeneid -- Virgil
20. Collected Fiction -- Jorge Luis Borges
21. The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway
22. David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
23. Tristram Shandy -- Laurence Sterne
24. The Magic Mountain -- Thomas Mann
25. Midnight's Children -- Salman Rushdie
26. Candide -- Voltaire
27. The Idiot -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
28. Les Miserables -- Victor Hugo
29. A Passage to India -- EM Forster
30. Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe
31. For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway
32. The Portrait of a Lady -- Henry James
33. The Color Purple -- Alice Walker
34. Demons -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
35. Gone with the Wind -- Margaret Mitchell
36. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
37. The Age of Innocence -- Edith Wharton
38. Dead Souls -- Nikolai Gogol
39. On the Road -- Jack Kerouac
40. The Good Soldier -- Ford Maddox Ford
41. The Canterbury Tales -- Geoffrey Chaucer
42. Vanity Fair -- William Thackery
43. Under the Volcano -- Malcolm Lowry
44. A Farewell to Arms -- Ernest Hemingway
45. Journey to the End of the Night -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine
46. Slaughterhouse-Five -- Kurt Vonnegut
47. The Handmaid's Tale -- Margaret Atwood
48. Charlotte's Web -- EB White
49. Native Son -- Richard Wright
50. The Charterhouse of Parma -- Stendhal
51. Gargantua and Pentagruel -- Francois Rabelais
52. Rebecca -- Daphne du Maurier

[3eyes]

58 of the top 100
273 of the top 1000

[prodigalgodson]

Boy, this list gets even weirder as you go down. Looks like I've hit 67 more from the top 1000, most of them things I read as a kid. They've got Twilight and Goodnight Moon but no Notes of a Native Son or The Fire Next Time for Baldwin? No Snow Country for Kawabata? No Silmarillion for Tolkien? No Radiance of the King for Laye? No Dark Tower for Stephen King? No last days of Socrates stuff from Plato? No Spinoza or James Ellroy or John Williams at all?

107. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess) 9/10
146. Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) 10/10
151. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) 6/10
156. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) 4/10
157. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (CS Lewis) 6/10
161. MacBeth (William Shakespeare) 9/10
173. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) 3/10
188. The Plague (Albert Camus) 9/10
192. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) 9/10
193. The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien) 10/10
201. The Republic (Plato) 10/10
202. The Stand (Stephen King) 8/10
207. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) 8/10
209. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (JK Rowling) 7/10
220. Dune (Frank Herbert) 8/10
224. The Road (Cormac McCarthy) 4/10
226. The Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler) 6/10
242. Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon) 10/10
246. Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse) 9/10
256. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera) 9/10
266. Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse) 9/10
284. The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett) 9/10
312. All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy) 10/10
323. The Horse and His Boy (CS Lewis) 7/10
324. Prince Caspian (CS Lewis) 6/10
325. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (CS Lewis) 6/10
326. The Silver Chair (CS Lewis) 4/10
327. The Magician's Nephew (CS Lewis) 7/10
328. The Last Battle (CS Lewis) 8/10
336. Nausea (Jean-Paul Sartre) 9/10
340. A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle) 5/10
342. Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak) 3/10
359. Death in Venice (Thomas Mann) 8/10
369. The Lover (Marguerite Duras) 10/10
390. Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoevsky) 8/10
393. Giovanni's Room (James Baldwin) 9/10
405. Watchmen (Alan Moore and David Gibbons) 10/10
413. His Dark Material (Philip Pullman) 6/10
488. The Giver (Lois Lowry) 4/10
499. A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare) 8/10
509. The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon) 8/10
512. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain) 8/10
520. The Postman Always Rings Twice (James Cain) 8/10
567. V. (Thomas Pynchon) 8/10
588. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John le Carre) 9/10
605. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl) 5/10
620. The Sellout (Paul Beatty) 4/10
629. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder) 9/10
669. Like Water for Chocolate (Laura Esquivel) 3/10
674. The Prince of Tides (Pat Conroy) 8/10
758. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (JK Rowling) 8/10
760. Goodnight Moon (Margaret Wise Brown) 7/10
773. The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman) 6/10
786. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (JK Rowling) 8/10
790. Vernon God Little (DBC Pierre) 8/10
799. A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini) 4/10
804. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (JK Rowling) 8/10
806. Red Harvest (Dashiell Hammett) 10/10
809. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (JK Rowling) 6/10
810. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (JK Rowling) 8/10
811. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (JK Rowling) 7/10
854. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Mildred Taylor) 7/10
865. The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (Marguerite Duras) 7/10
884. Riders of the Purple Sage (Zane Grey) 4/10
893. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) 6/10
936. Suttree (Cormac McCarthy) 10/10
998. Sandman (Neil Gaiman) 9/10

[prodigalgodson]

The major disappointments for me - and it's not that I disliked them, just that they failed to convince me of their mastery on one go - were probably the two dystopias by Orwell and Huxley, and I suspect this is because I was already a pretty heavy science fiction reader and knew many of the concepts, and because both struck me as rather heavy-handed at the time. And I liked Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 more. I'd be curious to revisit them now, as I'd be curious to re-read any of these now - I think The Lord of the Rings is probably the only one of these I've read within the last 20 years.

I was never a big sci-fi reader, and read those two early enough that they made a big impression on me, especially Brave New World. I'd probably give Fahrenheit 451 the edge too though, the horror there is just so unsettlingly mundane.

The Lord of the Rings is one of the ones I'd most like to revisit, I was like 9 when I read it, and I remember in the Helm's Deep part for instance I had no idea what was going on and didn't connect it to the epic battle in the second LOTR film at all. I do remember The Scouring of the Shire making a pretty deep impression on me though. Both The Hobbit and the Silmarillion are much fresher in my mind, and two of my all-time favorites.

[prodigalgodson]

I tried going through a similar list around 10 years ago (there's so many damn lists out there) so I've read half the books on this one. As OldAle said it's got a heavy American + European flavour with a lot of 19th + 20th century novels in there (quite surprised at no asian novels). Out of the ones I've read and you haven't read I've loosely grouped them up so you can take a better whack at them.

Thanks Roland! I'm very surprised no Asian novels either, I would've thought at least one of the big 4 Chinese classics or something from Mishima or Kawabata over Charlotte's Web (??) and Rabelais.

I have a copy of Candide floating around; given Voltaire's philosophical reputation I didn't realize this was in the picaresque style, or an easier read. Don Quixote has always fascinated me but the length and the age have been barriers to entry for a long time.

Tbh I didn't even know Goethe's Faust was a play. I had mixed experiences with high school English reads, sometimes I feel like I ended up short-shrifting some of the assignments (The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men), but it also introduced me to some of my favorite works (Crime and Punishment, The Plague). I think Shakespeare came off pretty well to me in this context (especially since I was able to see some performances of his work around this time), while Sophocles suffered.

Anna Karenina's one of my highest priorities right now; when I finish the Melville I'm planning to hit A Hundred Years of Solitude, then take a break with something lighter like a Ross MacDonald, and then dive in to the Tolstoy. I'm very excited for it, War and Peace was a hell of an experience. Hugo, like Dickens, is one of the authors I've always been a little bit skeptical about for whatever reason; I have a vague sense his work would strike me as corny for lack of a better word. That said, I'm always down for a good 20-page tangent (Pynchon, Moby Dick).

I've picked up a few of the Bronte sisters' books over the last few years, very much looking forward to them.

Hemingway and Faulkner are two giants I've shied away from so far, look forward to digging in before too long.

I'm surprised I haven't read Invisible Man yet actually. To Kill a Mockingbird was just such an essential and recurring part of my childhood, and such a wonderfully evocative portrayal of childhood itself, it retains a special place in my heart. It's a beautiful portrait of human nature from a child's perspective, but there are certainly more insightful and nuanced takes on American racism. I'm not looking forward to the Kerouac at all; I think I would've appreciated it if I was in my 20s when it came out, but I have a feeling it will not have aged well ("corny" again comes to mind from the snippets I've encountered).

Lol my edition of 100 Years has a family tree on the first page, glancing over the times I can see why it's necessary, and I'm usually pretty good at keeping characters straight.

I got The Magic Mountain for Christmas this year, seems challenging but very much up my alley. Yeah I feel like the intimidating shadow of Ulysses has hung over me for years. Portrait of the Artist was such an easy and satisfying read it gave me some hope though. One of these days I'll take the plunge.

[OldAle1]

Whoa I didn't realize it went past 100, just didn't look that far. I don't feel like going through the whole list right now but I did look through the top 250 and I'm at 74 of those total. Not bad I guess for someone who has barely read anything in a couple of decades except easy stuff (i.e. Harry Potter). My nemesis Ms. Rand is down there at #212 with her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, or, it is Better to Have all the Money and Tell the World to Fuck Off than Compromise For a Second, You Miserable Worms. I guess it'd be too much to hope for her total absence. For me it's the literary equivalent of my movie-bane It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World - except far more awful and influential. Just a bit below it is Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler which I recently had with me on a short trip, but failed to break open. That, and returning to Proust, are likely my next forays into the list.

[gunnar]

I'm at

50/100
81/250
152/1000

Candide was mentioned earlier. I read that in high school. We got to choose from a long list of novels for a report and I choose Candide. I thought it was very good.

My top 5 from this list:

135 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
627. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
829. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
805. The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
31. Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison

Other favorites from the ones that I've read

17. Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austen
32. To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
45. David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
157 . The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
193 . The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
220 . Dune by Frank Herbert
260 . Persuasion by Jane Austen
307 . Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
323 . The Horse and His Boy: The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
324 . Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia by C. S. Lewis
325 . The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
327 . The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis
397 . Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
405 . Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons
415 . Germinal by Émile Zola
521 . The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
667 . Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
676 . A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
697 . Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
728 . The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
998 . Sandman by Neil Gaiman

full list of books read from this list

3. Don Quixote -- Miguel de Cervantes
6. Moby Dick -- Herman Melville
7. War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy
8. Hamlet -- William Shakespeare
9. The Odyssey -- Homer
14. Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
15. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
16. The Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger
17. Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austen
18. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain
20. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
21. The Iliad -- Homer
22. To the Lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf
23. Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller
24. Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad
26. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
27. Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens
29. The Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck
31. Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison
32. To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
33. The Trial -- Franz Kafka
36. Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift
37. Beloved -- Toni Morrison
38. Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
40. The Stranger -- Albert Camus
42. The Aeneid -- Virgil
44. The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway
45. David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
47. Leaves of Grass -- Walt Whitman
51. Oedipus Rex -- Sophocles
52. Candide -- Voltaire
53. The Lord of the Rings -- JRR Tolkein
57. The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemingway
59. Emma -- Jane Austen
60. For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway
62. The Metamorphosis -- Franz Kafka
64. Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley
66. Antigone -- Sophocles
67. As I Lay Dying -- William Faulkner
71. Lord of the Flies -- William Golding
72. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
78. Animal Farm -- George Orwell
80. The Canterbury Tales -- Geoffrey Chaucer
84. A Farewell to Arms -- Ernest Hemingway
88. The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
89. Slaughterhouse-Five -- Kurt Vonnegut
91. Charlotte's Web -- EB White
92. Native Son -- Richard Wright
94. Paradise Lost -- John Milton
99. The Flowers of Evil -- Charles Baudelaire
103 . Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
106 . King Lear by William Shakespeare
130 . Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
131 . Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
135 . The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
140 . The Tempest by William Shakespeare
148 . The Call of the Wild by Jack London
157 . The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
158 . Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles
161 . Macbeth by William Shakespeare
171 . Dracula by Bram Stoker
174 . The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
177 . The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
185 . Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
189 . The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
190 . The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
192 . Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
193 . The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
206 . The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
207 . The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
209 . Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone by J. K Rowling
212 . Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
213 . Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
214 . Winnie the Pooh by A. A Milne
220 . Dune by Frank Herbert
222 . The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
229 . The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
231 . A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
237 . The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
248 . Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
249 . Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
258 . 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
260 . Persuasion by Jane Austen
265 . The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
292 . The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
293 . The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
304 . War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
307 . Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
323 . The Horse and His Boy: The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
324 . Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia by C. S. Lewis
325 . The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
326 . The Silver Chair: The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
327 . The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis
328 . The Last Battle: The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
340 . A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle
343 . Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
361 . The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
370 . The Adventures of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
379 . Foundation by Isaac Asimov
386 . The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
388 . The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
397 . Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
399 . The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
400 . Neuromancer by William Gibson
404 . Life of Pi by Yann Martel
405 . Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons
406 . Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory
413 . His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
415 . Germinal by Émile Zola
488 . The Giver by Lois Lowry
494 . Othello by William Shakespeare
499 . A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
511 . Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
512 . The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
521 . The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
523 . A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
548 . The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
553 . A Separate Peace by John Knowles
558 . The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
605 . Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl
627 . Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
639 . Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
644 . Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
647 . Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
651 . Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
667 . Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
676 . A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
692 . Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
697 . Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
728 . The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
733 . Time and Again by Jack Finney
734 . I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
741 . Sula by Toni Morrison
758 . Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K Rowling
773 . The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
786 . Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K Rowling
804 . Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K Rowling
805 . The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
809 . Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban by J. K Rowling
810 . Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets by J. K Rowling
811 . Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K Rowling
812 . Richard III by William Shakespeare
821 . Junky by William S. Burroughs
829 . Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
846 . The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett
868 . The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
882 . The Crucible by Arthur Miller
891 . The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
917 . The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
930 . A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
938 . Twelfth Night: Or, What You Will by William Shakespeare
998 . Sandman by Neil Gaiman

[prodigalgodson]

Moby Dick -- Herman Melville

I'd had this sitting in a box for probably a decade, too daunted by its leviathanic proportions to dive in. Then I recently read Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, which had a profound effect on me, and found out this was his favorite novels, which finally gave me the push I needed. The monumental command of language, the relentless procession of otherworldly adventures, the masterful extrapolations of various intricacies, the palpable sense of lived reality, the pervasive but ambiguous mystical and metaphysical underpinnings...god damn, this is the art of the novel sublimated to its pseudo-Platonic essence. "The Doubloon," in which various members of the crew analyze the image on a gold coin Ahab's nailed to the masthead, their multiplicity of interpretations, extensions of their incompatible axiomatic worldviews, illuminating their deepest selves while the object of their contemplation remains an enigma, might be the single best chapter I've ever read.

[prodigalgodson]

One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel García Márquez

I haven't read a book of this caliber before that felt so much like a laundry list of occurrences. The two primary, paradoxically coexisting themes seem to be that things change with time and that history regularly repeats itself; but as much as these concepts arise organically from the narrative, there's not so much an exploration of the nature of time or eternal recurrence as an illustration of their simple fact, both verbalized multiple times by various characters. Likewise with the concept of solitude, which though it's often attributed to various characters (interestingly I don't think the word makes an appearance until about halfway through, but after that it comes up constantly), doesn't get treated with any apparent philosophical or psychological angle. These horny, isolated characters engage in their follies and the chips fall where they may. Marquez's aloof, vaguely ironic style and dense plotting result in a certain distance from his subjects, but there are moments of poignancy and insight, most of which come from the accumulation and synthesis of events than from individual events themselves. The "magical" element contributes to the vibrant milieu, but I'm not sure how substantially different the novel would've been without it. A particularly harrowing take on American imperialism was probably the highlight for me. I found the ending pretty weak, and less true to reality, even in a fantastical sense, than what had preceded it.

[Minkin]

I have to thank this thread for actually + finally giving me some impetus to start reading again - something I haven't made time for in over ten years, but has been long overdue. I already own most of the classics via leatherbound editions, but I could never make time to get to any of them. But that's starting to change and I think I'll always keep a book in rotation from here on out - as though I don't have enough projects to keep me busy, but that's been my excuse for years and I'm trying to combat that.

Granted, I'm not steadily working on the top 100 right away - but I'll try to focus on the greater list of 1500+ books from both the fiction and non-fiction lists. Currently working on #1850 - Fried Green Tomatoes, after recently rewatching the film, which might end up being a theme for some of my choices (even though I've learned right off the bat that it's far better to start with the book than the film).

So thanks for posting this list and for working on it - as I think it's finally what I needed for encouragement to take up this hobby again.

[prodigalgodson]

Hey Minkin, sorry for the late reply, but so glad to hear and happy to help! Enjoy Fried Green Tomatoes -- I have fond memories of my mom reading that to us at dinner.

[RenaultR]

Huh, I don't know that I've seen that list before. It's got some obvious limitations - almost entirely western-centric and focused nearly as much on the 19th and 20th centuries, with earlier works listed being very obvious indeed, but that said it's hard for me to argue with the quality of the choices and hey, it's at least one great books list that doesn't have any Any Rand so there's a huge plus!

I was an English lit major in college and thought (ha) that I'd be a writer and teacher someday back in those days when failure and depression were still being shrugged off sometimes, so I've read a fair number of these and, being a compulsive collector as well, I own the majority of ones I haven't read. I started reading

It seems like every art form's canon is generally western-centric, although each art form seems to have its own non-western region of the world that doesn't get shafted for one reason or another. For film, it's East Asia. For literature, it's Latin America. For music, it's the African-American community and to some extent, Brazil. And so on...

Russians are usually afford "Western canon" status in all art forms, film included.

For what's it's worth, this list of top 100 books has two Latin American-penned works, one Nigerian-penned works and a few African American works.

[prodigalgodson]

Well, scratch Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary off the list. I feel like I had a lot to say about both but waited too long after I read them to post here.

Tolstoy continues to amaze and frustrate me. This is an incredible panorama of contemporary upper-crust Russian society, almost a series of mood pieces the plot happens to move through. I've never read anyone like Tolstoy; his prose is kind of cumbrous and doesn't flow particularly well (at least in this acclaimed translation), but in some senses it's so true to life. He's a slow read even setting aside length, because so much of his description and dialogue is oddly counterintuitive: you not only have to absorb what he wrote, but also why he chose that particular way to describe a scene or action, or for his characters to phrase things in that certain oblique, unusual way, and what they and he really meant by putting it that way. Of course, you can close read anyone that way, but Tolstoy particularly demands it to make sense out of the whole psychological underpinnings of all his scenes. Between that and the almost stream-of-consciousness fervor of the climax I totally understand how it's seen as the bridge between realism and modernism.

I didn't love Madame Bovary, but Flaubert's style is godly. The only analog I can think of in film is someone like Bresson, but without the artifice. The rhythm and flow of the writing and balance of various story elements is perfection. Like that other paragon of adulterous literature it makes for a shrewd analysis of the spectrum of human nature, but from a more ironic, aloof perspective. Lydia Davis did the translation, and this makes me want to check out her original work; not only immaculate prose (judging from the English, not the French), but the introduction she included is the best intro to a novel I can remember reading.

I've started working on a novel of my own, set in the contemporary world of EMS, dealing with the transition from youth to adulthood in our current times, and the complex inner life of those around us it's so easy to take for granted. Both of these influenced my thinking about my project, Tolstoy with his thorough rendering of contemporary society and awkward hyper-realism, Flaubert with his efficiency and precision of style, both with their unusual sense of poetry in the mundane.

[prodigalgodson]

The Castle -- Franz Kafka

A thrill to read -- a word that keeps recurring in reviews is "breathless," and really Kafka does something with prose here like what Godard does with cinematic syntax in his debut. Conventional punctuation is done away with, clauses are strung together by the dozen via commas, paragraphs go for pages at a time. And yet the style is simple and highly readable, something midway on the path that leads from Flaubert to Ellroy. It goes without saying that the world Kafka constructs is wonderfully vivid and dreamlike, with an authentic core at the heart of all the strangeness. As much as he's lost in and controlled by a world he doesn't understand, there's nothing nebbish about K. He retains a resilience and assuredness, even as he's rebuffed at every turn, that sets him apart from the passive protagonists of Kafka's earlier writing and seems to reflect the author's maturing state of mind. The manuscript famously ends in the middle of a sentence, and as much as I'd be happy to read 1000 more pages of K.'s indeterminate and meandering exploits, this somehow seems like the perfect non-conclusion. On a personal note, Kafka's streamlined approach had a major effect on my own writing -- on a day off in the middle of reading this I went back to some chapters I'd written and condensed pages into paragraphs, with a resulting style much better suited to the material and the impressions I'm trying to convey. A major new favorite.

[cinewest]

Here's the TSP version (meaning that this is a conglomeration of all other respected lists on the subject) of the "Greatest Books" list:

https://www.listchallenges.com/the-250- ... f-all-time

It's similar to the list you are working off of, but there are some differences.

Being a former English major, I've read about half of the top 250, though only a few in the past 25 years when my reading interests have been more contemporary and varied in subject matter, as well as origination.

The list does remind me that there a quite a few classics I want to go back for, especially those I haven't yet got to in the top 150 or so.

[Knaldskalle]

I have an account there. My main problem with the list is that it's poorly curated.

The Trial by Kafka is ranked 33. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is ranked 61. The Metamorphosis by Kafka is 62. The Castle by Kafka is 86. The Complete Sherlock Holmes is ranked 174. The Hound of the Baskervilles is ranked 177.

It just needs an editor. It would be like TSPDT having separate entries for The Godfather Trilogy, The Godfather, The Godfather II and The Godfather III.

I'm at 23 of the top 100.
21% of the top 250 fiction.
15% of the top 500 fiction.

Top 100

1. In Search of Lost Time -- Marcel Proust
2. Ulysses -- James Joyce
3. Don Quixote -- Miguel de Cervantes
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. Moby Dick -- Herman Melville
7. War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy
8. Hamlet -- William Shakespeare
9. The Odyssey -- Homer
10. Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert
11. The Divine Comedy -- Dante Alighieri
12. Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov
13. The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
14. Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
15. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
16. The Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger
17. Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austin
18. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain
19. Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy
20. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
21. The Illiad -- Homer
22. To the Lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf
23. Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller
24. Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad
25. The Sound and the Fury -- William Faulkner
26. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
27. Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens
28. One Thousand and One Nights -- anonymous
29. The Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck
30. Absalom, Absalom! -- William Faulkner
31. Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison
32. To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
33. The Trial -- Franz Kafka
34. The Red and the Black -- Stendhal
35. Middlemarch -- George Eliot
36. Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift
37. Beloved -- Toni Morrison
38. Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
39. The Stories of Anton Chekov -- Anton Chekov
40. The Stranger -- Albert Camus
41. Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte
42. The Aeneid -- Virgil
43. Collected Fiction -- Jorge Luis Borges
44. The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway
45. David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
46. Tristram Shandy -- Laurence Sterne
47. Leaves of Grass -- Walt Whitman
48. The Magic Mountain -- Thomas Mann
49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- James Joyce
50. Midnight's Children -- Salman Rushdie
51. Oedipus Rex -- Sophocles
52. Candide -- Voltaire
53. The Lord of the Rings -- JRR Tolkien
54. The Idiot -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
55. Les Miserables -- Victor Hugo
56. A Passage to India -- EM Forster
57. The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemingway
58. Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe
59. Emma -- Jane Austen
60. For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway
61. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka -- Franz Kafka
62. The Metamorphosis -- Franz Kafka
63. The Portrait of a Lady -- Henry James
64. Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley
65. Pale Fire -- Vladimir Nabokov
66. Antigone -- Sophocles
67. As I Lay Dying -- William Faulkner
68. The Color Purple -- Alice Walker
69. Demons -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
70. Gone with the Wind -- Margaret Mitchell
71. Lord of the Flies -- William Golding
72. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
73. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe -- Edgar Allen Poe
74. The Age of Innocence -- Edith Wharton
75. Dead Souls -- Nikolai Gogol
76. On the Road -- Jack Kerouac
77. The Good Soldier -- Ford Maddox Ford
78. Animal Farm -- George Orwell
79. Orlando -- Virginia Woolf
80. The Canterbury Tales -- Geoffrey Chaucer
81. Vanity Fair -- William Thackery
82. Under the Volcano -- Malcolm Lowry
83. The Waste Land -- TS Eliot
84. A Farewell to Arms -- Ernest Hemingway
85. Journey to the End of the Night -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine
86. The Castle -- Franz Kafka
87. A Sentimental Education -- Gustave Flaubert
88. The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
89. Slaughterhouse-Five -- Kurt Vonnegut
90. The Handmaid's Tale -- Margaret Atwood
91. Charlotte's Web -- EB White
92. Native Son -- Richard Wright
93. The Charterhouse of Parma -- Stendhal
94. Paradise Lost -- John Milton
95. Gargantua and Pantagruel -- Francois Rabelais
96. Poems of Emily Dickinson -- Emily Dickinson
97. Faust -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
98. Rebecca -- Daphne du Maurier
99. The Flowers of Evil -- Charles Baudelaire
100. Decameron -- Giovanni Boccaccio

I have around 20 books on the Top 100 just waiting for me on the bookshelves, so I don't really have any excuses.

[mjf314]

I have an account there. My main problem with the list is that it's poorly curated.

The Trial by Kafka is ranked 33. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is ranked 61. The Metamorphosis by Kafka is 62. The Castle by Kafka is 86. The Complete Sherlock Holmes is ranked 174. The Hound of the Baskervilles is ranked 177.

What should they do when "The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka" appears on one of the source lists? Not count it? Or split the points evenly among all of the stories?

[OldAle1]

I have an account there. My main problem with the list is that it's poorly curated.

The Trial by Kafka is ranked 33. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is ranked 61. The Metamorphosis by Kafka is 62. The Castle by Kafka is 86. The Complete Sherlock Holmes is ranked 174. The Hound of the Baskervilles is ranked 177.

It just needs an editor. It would be like TSPDT having separate entries for The Godfather Trilogy, The Godfather, The Godfather II and The Godfather III.

Agree with all this. Part of the problem certainly is that you have certain works - novellas most commonly I think - that are sometimes published as individual volumes, and just as often in collections. Kafka's Metamorphosis is a great example there. Another problem is the variety of editions for works, particularly when you consider all the various translations and how books have been published in one country vs in another. This issue doesn't crop up on TSP or most film lists because shorts are considered as separate entities usually - each work is a work itself, there's no "collection of all of Kenneth Anger's films" listed. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the fetish for lists of all kinds and the internet are not that much newer than films on video; the listmakers were well aware of how people actually think of and consume visual media. The book lists on the other hand often seem to have much less in common with how regular people read. Perhaps I'm weird but I just don't tend to think of Greek tragedies, modern plays, poems like The Waste Land, short stories, and massive novels like In Search of Lost Time as all being equivalents and belonging to the same list-making apparatus. In any case however you think of it, most of these book lists do seem rather messy and full of overlaps, unless they restrict themselves purely to novels.

[Knaldskalle]

I have an account there. My main problem with the list is that it's poorly curated.

The Trial by Kafka is ranked 33. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is ranked 61. The Metamorphosis by Kafka is 62. The Castle by Kafka is 86. The Complete Sherlock Holmes is ranked 174. The Hound of the Baskervilles is ranked 177.

What should they do when "The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka" appears on one of the source lists? Not count it? Or split the points evenly among all of the stories?

I'm not really sure what my suggested solution would be, to be honest. Part of that is that I don't really care enough to put serious thought into it, I just know it rubs me the wrong way when I see the inclusion of both "complete works" and individual entries. It gives those who've read "the complete works" a leg up on those who haven't and at the same time it takes up slots that could go to other deserving works. I just want the curation to be consistent, whichever direction that curation takes.

[Knaldskalle]

Oh, and for some reason, this discussion reminded me of someone who insisted that you couldn't "check" a Shakespeare play if you hadn't read it (I think it was a discussion over on Goodreads, but I may be misremembering that). I thought that was a funny take, since that meant that none of Shakespeare's contemporaries, could potentially have "checked" his plays during his lifetime - the first plays weren't published until after his death. And given that they're, you know, plays you can argue that reading them is not the proper way to experience the plays and certainly not what the author intended. I have both read and seen Hamlet, so I "checked" that with confidence, but it still amuses me that I, in this guy's opinion, couldn't "check" A Midsummer Night's Dream, since I've only seen the play thrice (three different performance, two different languages).

[prodigalgodson]

Here's the TSP version (meaning that this is a conglomeration of all other respected lists on the subject) of the "Greatest Books" list:

https://www.listchallenges.com/the-250- ... f-all-time

It's similar to the list you are working off of, but there are some differences.

Being a former English major, I've read about half of the top 250, though only a few in the past 25 years when my reading interests have been more contemporary and varied in subject matter, as well as origination.

The list does remind me that there a quite a few classics I want to go back for, especially those I haven't yet got to in the top 150 or so.

I think that's an older edition of this list. Wow though, that's a lot of books! Props.

[prodigalgodson]

The Trial by Kafka is ranked 33. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is ranked 61. The Metamorphosis by Kafka is 62. The Castle by Kafka is 86. The Complete Sherlock Holmes is ranked 174. The Hound of the Baskervilles is ranked 177.

Yeah, the collection thing is annoying, and a reason I won't really consider this quest complete until I also read #101 Tess of the d'Urbervilles. That said, there's actually only one redundancy in the Kafka case -- the "Complete Stories" is just his collected published short stories, not his novels. But yeah, having the story collection followed immediately by one of the stories included in the collection (Metamorphosis) seems pretty wonky and suspect.

[prodigalgodson]

Oh, and for some reason, this discussion reminded me of someone who insisted that you couldn't "check" a Shakespeare play if you hadn't read it (I think it was a discussion over on Goodreads, but I may be misremembering that). I thought that was a funny take, since that meant that none of Shakespeare's contemporaries, could potentially have "checked" his plays during his lifetime - the first plays weren't published until after his death. And given that they're, you know, plays you can argue that reading them is not the proper way to experience the plays and certainly not what the author intended. I have both read and seen Hamlet, so I "checked" that with confidence, but it still amuses me that I, in this guy's opinion, couldn't "check" A Midsummer Night's Dream, since I've only seen the play thrice (three different performance, two different languages).

It makes sense that reading the script of a play is a different experience than watching it, but it always used to weird me out that playbooks were even considered literature. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the only plays I've both read and seen performed, so glad to know I can officially check it by whatever standard.

[cinewest]

Here's the TSP version (meaning that this is a conglomeration of all other respected lists on the subject) of the "Greatest Books" list:

https://www.listchallenges.com/the-250- ... f-all-time

It's similar to the list you are working off of, but there are some differences.

Being a former English major, I've read about half of the top 250, though only a few in the past 25 years when my reading interests have been more contemporary and varied in subject matter, as well as origination.

The list does remind me that there a quite a few classics I want to go back for, especially those I haven't yet got to in the top 150 or so.

I think that's an older edition of this list. Wow though, that's a lot of books! Props.

So it is. Must have added more American lists as Great Gatsby has jumped to #5, and while it is often considered the Great American Novel, that conception is somewhat dated in multiple ways (maybe these booklists need a Sight and Sound like shake up, i.e. more women writers, more non-white, non-english language writers, and more contemporary writers).

I do think that Gatsby is an important American novel from the first half of the 20th century, but don't think it warrants a place in the top 50, much less the top 10. Ditto The Catcher and the Rye (though I enjoyed it, as well), 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Sun Also Rises- all books I liked a great deal when I read them, but not really in the same class as some of the others they have landed next to on this list.

I also like the idea of breaking the list into categories, involving more comparable forms, ie Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, etc.

[flavo5000]

I have an account there. My main problem with the list is that it's poorly curated.

The Trial by Kafka is ranked 33. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is ranked 61. The Metamorphosis by Kafka is 62. The Castle by Kafka is 86. The Complete Sherlock Holmes is ranked 174. The Hound of the Baskervilles is ranked 177.

It just needs an editor. It would be like TSPDT having separate entries for The Godfather Trilogy, The Godfather, The Godfather II and The Godfather III.

Agree with all this. Part of the problem certainly is that you have certain works - novellas most commonly I think - that are sometimes published as individual volumes, and just as often in collections. Kafka's Metamorphosis is a great example there. Another problem is the variety of editions for works, particularly when you consider all the various translations and how books have been published in one country vs in another. This issue doesn't crop up on TSP or most film lists because shorts are considered as separate entities usually - each work is a work itself, there's no "collection of all of Kenneth Anger's films" listed. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the fetish for lists of all kinds and the internet are not that much newer than films on video; the listmakers were well aware of how people actually think of and consume visual media. The book lists on the other hand often seem to have much less in common with how regular people read. Perhaps I'm weird but I just don't tend to think of Greek tragedies, modern plays, poems like The Waste Land, short stories, and massive novels like In Search of Lost Time as all being equivalents and belonging to the same list-making apparatus. In any case however you think of it, most of these book lists do seem rather messy and full of overlaps, unless they restrict themselves purely to novels.

I think the most appropriate way to do this would be to treat each short story as a separate work and separate vote within a vote for a collection. The best stories/novellas would naturally bubble up the highest regardless. At least, that's the most TSPDT solution to it.

[timmy_501]

Wow, it's been a long time since I went through and rated things from a list. Nostalgia time:

1. In Search of Lost Time -- Marcel Proust
2. Ulysses -- James Joyce
3. Don Quixote -- Miguel de Cervantes
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gael Garcia Marquez 8/10
5. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald 8/10 (Probably more fun to read about this book than actually read it. My lit crit textbook had an essay in each section on this book because it lends itself fairly well to all sorts of interpretations.)
6. Moby Dick -- Herman Melville 10/10
7. War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy
8. Hamlet -- William Shakespeare 8/10
9. The Odyssey -- Homer 8/10 (Feels ridiculous to rate this or Shakespeare)
10. Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert
11. The Divine Comedy -- Dante Alighieri
12. Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov
13. The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoevsky 10/10
14. Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoevsky 19/10
15. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte 6/10
16. The Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger 8/10
17. Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austin 8/10
18. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain 7/10
19. Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy
20. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
21. The Illiad -- Homer 8/10
22. To the Lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf
23. Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller 10/10
24. Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad 9/10
25. The Sound and the Fury -- William Faulkner 9/10
26. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 10/10
27. Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens 8/10
28. One Thousand and One Nights -- anonymous
29. The Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck 7/10
30. Absalom, Absalom! -- William Faulkner 10/10
31. Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison 8/10
32. To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee 6/10 (This thing is fine for the YA novel it is but I don't get why people act like it's something more - it's very simplistic)
33. The Trial -- Franz Kafka 7/10
34. The Red and the Black -- Stendhal
35. Middlemarch -- George Eliot
36. Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift 9/10
37. Beloved -- Toni Morrison 9/10
38. Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf 7/10
39. The Stories of Anton Chekov -- Anton Chekov
40. The Stranger -- Albert Camus 9/10
41. Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte
42. The Aeneid -- Virgil
43. Collected Fiction -- Jorge Luis Borges
44. The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway 7/10
45. David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
46. Tristram Shandy -- Laurence Sterne (I was supposed to read this but never completed it. It seemed good)
47. Leaves of Grass -- Walt Whitman 10/10 (Not sure I've actually read the whole thing)
48. The Magic Mountain -- Thomas Mann 8/10
49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- James Joyce 4/10 (I actually really dislike Joyce)
50. Midnight's Children -- Salman Rushdie
51. Oedipus Rex -- Sophocles 8/10
52. Candide -- Voltaire
53. The Lord of the Rings -- JRR Tolkein 8/10
54. The Idiot -- Fyodor Dostoevsky 8/10
55. Les Miserables -- Victor Hugo
56. A Passage to India -- EM Forster
57. The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemingway 8/10
58. Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe 7/10
59. Emma -- Jane Austen
60. For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway
61. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka -- Franz Kafka
62. The Metamorphosis -- Franz Kafka 8/10
63. The Portrait of a Lady -- Henry James
64. Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley 10/10
65. Pale Fire -- Vladimir Nabokov 9/10
66. Antigone -- Sophocles 7/10
67. As I Lay Dying -- William Faulkner 9/10
68. The Color Purple -- Alice Walker
69. Demons -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
70. Gone with the Wind -- Margaret Mitchell 1/10 (I read this in middle school and even then thought it was too proslavery - and I've lived in Tennessee most of my life)
71. Lord of the Flies -- William Golding 7/10
72. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 9/10
73. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe -- Edgar Allen Poe 8/10 (Probably a few of these I haven't read but I've read a bunch)
74. The Age of Innocence -- Edith Wharton 9/10
75. Dead Souls -- Nikolai Gogol 9/10
76. On the Road -- Jack Kerouac
77. The Good Soldier -- Ford Maddox Ford 8/10
78. Animal Farm -- George Orwell 9/10
79. Orlando -- Virginia Woolf 6/10
80. The Canterbury Tales -- Geoffrey Chaucer
81. Vanity Fair -- William Thackery
82. Under the Volcano -- Malcolm Lowry
83. The Waste Land -- TS Eliot 9/10
84. A Farewell to Arms -- Ernest Hemingway
85. Journey to the End of the Night -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine
86. The Castle -- Franz Kafka
87. A Sentimental Education -- Gustave Flaubert
88. The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne 8/10
89. Slaughterhouse-Five -- Kurt Vonnegut 10/10
90. The Handmaid's Tale -- Margaret Atwood
91. Charlotte's Web -- EB White
92. Native Son -- Richard Wright 7/10
93. The Charterhouse of Parma -- Stendhal
94. Paradise Lost -- John Milton 8/10
95. Gargantua and Pentagruel -- Francois Rabelais
96. Poems of Emily Dickinson -- Emily Dickinson 9/10
97. Faust -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
98. Rebecca -- Daphne du Maurier
99. The Flowers of Evil -- Charles Baudelaire
100. Decameron -- Giovanni Boccaccio

Pretty fun project but personally I tend to prefer to focus mostly on newer works. I just find it less relatable to read something from so long ago.

[prodigalgodson]

The Magic Mountain -- Thomas Mann

What a strange and indeed magical novel! It begins more prosaically than I'd expected, following a protagonist whose ordinariness Mann repeatedly insists on, taking its time to set the strange scene of a tubercular sanatorium in the Alps and familiarize the reader with its rhythms and routines. Gradually as time passes and we're drawn deeper into the lives of a fascinating cast of eccentrics, the story becomes increasingly esoteric, philosophical, and unorthodox. In an explicit allusion to alchemical processes, our protagonist is hermetically sealed off from his familiar world and the strange forces of this physically degraded but sexually and intellectually stimulating microcosm sublimate his spirit into a more rarefied, ethereal mode of being, culminating in some of the most powerful and unexpected scenes I've encountered in literature. Mann has a lugubrious and somewhat awkward prose style, at least in translation, full of repetitions, ambiguous ironies, and complex, meandering ruminations on equally complex, abstract concepts. I regularly found myself having to stop and meditate on a particular sentence or passage until I was satisfied I could explain its ideas internally in my own words (a reading habit I picked up a decade ago as a philosophy major, for better or worse), which made for a rigorous and highly rewarding experience, but also meant it took me a long time to get through the 700 pages, especially the second half. I'm not sure Mann really develops all his ideas -- for instance, why love of death is a reflection of love of life, or why one must pass through a world of death (even in the more abstracted senses of "death") in order to understand or appreciate the world of living -- thoroughly enough to meet the philosophical standards he seems to set for himself. Maybe part of the point is that these assertions are things that must be experienced rather than argued for (and certainly there are Wittgensteinian nods to the absurdity of dialectic reasoning and the inconstancy of language itself), but I'm not sure he sufficiently illustrates them in an implicit way with his hero's experiences either (though one oneiric sequence juxtaposing the world of life and the realization of humanity's most noble potential with the world of death and the horror of its basest instincts is one of the absolute highlights of the novel, and of literature more broadly). You kind of get a roundabout sense of these things, and to some extent I feel them confirmed intuitively by personal experience, but for a book where so much is explicitly discussed and reasoned out, there is a certain lack of satisfaction as regards these points, especially since he returns to the aforementioned ideas with the somewhat disappointing closing sentence of the novel (though as I sat there after finishing I had a nagging sense that what I perceived to be its triteness was intentionally ironic).

If nothing else, the incomplete intellectual catharsis demonstrates the extent of Mann's ambition and the impossibility of human art and intellect to capture life's most profound mysteries, mysteries in which The Magic Mountain immerses itself more deeply than most fiction would dare. Another major new favorite for me. Mynheer Peeperkorn is that fucking dude!

[prodigalgodson]

The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway

A mixed bag. I love the sparseness of the prose and can see its influence on many writers I admire, even if Hemingway's sense of spare poetry doesn't always jibe with mine. There's a highly evocative sense of time and place, especially in the opening Parisian section. And Hemingway writes with a kind of hidden purposefulness, elucidating a sense of listless disillusionment with a poignancy that's hard to deny. But ultimately the grab bag of main characters either come off as judgmental and hateful in a way that meshes poorly with their dionysian instincts, or like one-dimensional whiny hangers-on (the latter category reserved mostly for women and an infamously sketched Jewish character) -- all of whom are portrayed so contemptuously its hard to find any empathic footholds. The only redeeming qualities of this motley group are their robustness in the face of disappointment, their careless generosity, and a conditional fondness for each other. Some reviews seem to place the narrator Jake on a moral pedestal, but aside from an injury that makes his bitterness more understandable and tolerable than that of his compatriots, I didn't find him to be any better or worse than most of his ronde of comrades. It's always tricky to gauge the gap between an author and their narrator, but the blanketing lack of sympathy in his both the external and subjective aspects of Hemingway's characterizations makes Jake feels less a perspective to consider critically than a mouthpiece for Hemingway's own questionable gestalt. Anyhow spending time with these self-destructive carousers left a bad taste in my mouth, and despite the book's brevity and conciseness it was hard to pick back up once I'd set it down, even having gotten through big chunks in each sitting.

[prodigalgodson]

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain

When I was a kid I was introduced to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, read it several times, and loved it. My parents didn't want me to read its sequel at the time because of the casual racism and slurs, regardless of their context. And time passed and I got interested in other stuff, and never returned to Huck Finn til now. Well, I see where my folks were coming from, but I kind of wish my they'd let me read it at the time, because for all its subtlety and innovation it really is still a kid's book at heart. I can certainly appreciate it now, but from a bit of a distance, and I can only imagine the excitement and wonder it would've imparted at 10 or so.

On the other hand, it was interesting to read at this point having previously come across so many of the writers and stories it inspired. Huck's such a genuinely likeable character and makes for a great protagonist. The book's never laugh-out-loud funny, but Twain makes amusing use of Finn's narration to shed light on the foibles and hypocrisies of American society, without portraying too hopeless a view of humanity. The story bounds along in typical picaresque fashion, some episodes longer and more substantial than others; there's a certain unevenness to the plotting as a result, but when Twain gets it right it makes for striking literature. There are some lovely lyrical moments with Huck and Jim on the river, with Huck's simplicity lending the descriptions a sense of understated beauty. The literal transposition of regional dialects did get to be a bit much, not to mention its questionable taste. But the biggest problem arrives with the return of Tom Sawyer about two-thirds of the way through, which I was excited for until the story's momentum ground utterly to a halt to focus on his tedious and inane scheming. A poor, very extended closing arc for an often gripping narrative, though it does finally close out on a stronger note. Overall, I found the novel alternatingly inspired and tiresome while I was reading it, but looking back on it after I've finished it feels like a fairly brilliant if highly flawed, idiosyncratic yet archetypal yarn whose influence can be seen everywhere in myriad works that followed. I'd have to give Melville credit for the great American novel, but there's a solid argument for this as the great American novel.