Best Novels Yet Written
 

There's plenty of great literature that I haven't read (Moby Dick for one), but from my readings the best novels are:

In Search of Lost Time (Proust), The Brother's Karamazov (Dostoevsky), Ulysses (Joyce), and Don Quixote (Cervantes). These are all top tier novels that are at the top of my "best books" list.

There's nothing like reading In Search of Lost Time, Benjamin's Illuminations, and Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil as a trifecta.

I also enjoy the murkiness of Finnegan's Wake (Joyce) and To the Lighthouse (Woolf).

I'm not nearly as high on To Kill a Mockingbird as many were on CB the other day. I'd take Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom over it every day of the week.



To stab at current events:

It's always dubious to guess where books will be regarded eventually, but I see the Potter Books as being in league with Peter Pan, the Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland. Tim was right the other day when he was distinguishing them from the greatest works of literature, but at the same time acknowledging their worth as stories.

Joyce sucks. I'd rather stare at wallpaper.

A-freakin men.... I had a lit professor who told a story of brittish sailor who was marooned on an island for a week with nothing but finnegan's wake. the book drove him crazy

Atlas shrugged should be in the discussion

A couple good commentaries helped me through my first reading of FW, but there's much in there that I don't have a grasp on at all. I actually found the book through Marshall McLuhan, who's interpretation is interesting, to say the least.

Tolstoy is the greatest ever.

I think I have loved every great Russian psychological novel I have read, leading with Bros. Karamazov and Anna Karenina. Somethign about all that snow must make them turn inward.

Slaughterhouse five is also a great book, IMO.

Also Les Miserabls can be a life changing experience.

Atlas Shurgged? Not so much for me.

I love the two you mentioned. But War and Peace and some of the shroter novels by Tolstoy are my favorite novels.

Atlas Shrugged seems to be a college age classic and little more.

What's a "shorter novel" by Tolstoy? 700 pages? ;)

I've yet to read any Tolstoy but I want to read his works. Gotta expand my horizons.

My favorite is still The Count of Monte Cristo. Revenge is fun.

His greatest short novels in my opinion are Hadji Murad, The Cossacks, and The Kreutzer Sonata. But they're all great. They're all collected in this volume. http://www.amazon.com/Great-Short-To...5559673&sr=1-1
The three novels I listed are darker and more psychological than even Anna Karenina, certainly more so than War and Peace. By Hadji Murad, which is a war novel and was published postumously, he had lost all of his starry eyed admiration for Russian nobility and royalty and the Church. Bloom, by the way, thinks Hadji Murad is his greatest. It's partly about Islam and Islamic culture.