"The 10 Greatest Books of All Time"

[8ballrollin]

"Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.

But what if—just for argument's sake—you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world—Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them— and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list....

1.Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2.Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3.War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4.Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6.Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7.The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8.In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9.The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10.Middlemarch by George Eliot"

http://www.time.com/time/arts/articl...578073,00.html

Comments?

I've only read four of these books - I'm definitely not a man of letters, I guess.

[creekster]

Did you just use the word ineffable on a sports board?

[8ballrollin]

Originally Posted by creekster

Did you just use the word ineffable on a sports board?

no, no, it was a simple copy and paste for me from the Time article.

[Mormon Red Death]

Originally Posted by 8ballrollin

"Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.

But what if—just for argument's sake—you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world—Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them— and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list....


i1.Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2.Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3.War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4.Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6.Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7.The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8.In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9.The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10.Middlemarch by George Eliot"

http://www.time.com/time/arts/articl...578073,00.html

Comments?

I've only read four of these books - I'm definitely not a man of letters, I guess.

its missing Atlas shrugged...the best novel ever written

[Detroitdad]

Originally Posted by Mormon Red Death

its missing Atlas shrugged...the best novel ever written

I cannot go there with you. Atlas Shrugged is the worst book I have ever read. Of course, there is no accounting for taste.

[Detroitdad]

Originally Posted by 8ballrollin

"Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.

But what if—just for argument's sake—you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world—Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them— and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list....

1.Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2.Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3.War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4.Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6.Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7.The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8.In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9.The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10.Middlemarch by George Eliot"

http://www.time.com/time/arts/articl...578073,00.html

Comments?

I've only read four of these books - I'm definitely not a man of letters, I guess.

How can Don Quixote not be on this list? Taste aside, this one set the bar almost 500 years ago.

[Surfah]

It's funny to me that Fitzgerald is getting a ton of praise again. It wasn't long ago that his wife's work was receiving more attention than his own and some were arguing that The Great Gatsby shouldn't be included in the canon.

Atlas Shrugged is certainly not the worst book ever written by any stretch. In fact in one recent reader's list it was voted most influential book ever or something like that. I like Rand's ideas and the novel is captivating but gets tedious and redundant long before you get to Galt's 50 page monologue.

I think To Kill a Mockingbird should be up there. It should replace The Great Gatsby. I find it interesting that these authors who created the list esteem that book so highly.

[Detroitdad]

Originally Posted by surfah33

It's funny to me that Fitzgerald is getting a ton of praise again. It wasn't long ago that his wife's work was receiving more attention than his own and some were arguing that The Great Gatsby shouldn't be included in the canon.

Atlas Shrugged is certainly not the worst book ever written by any stretch. In fact in one recent reader's list it was voted most influential book ever or something like that. I like Rand's ideas and the novel is captivating but gets tedious and redundant long before you get to Galt's 50 page monologue.

I think To Kill a Mockingbird should be up there. It should replace The Great Gatsby. I find it interesting that these authors who created the list esteem that book so highly.

Well, Rand's perspective is antithetical to my own and therefore it is not surprising that I do not like it.

I don't have a problem with Great Gatsby but I don't really get down with the accolades either. It is a pretty tedious book in my opinion.

[BarbaraGordon]

Originally Posted by 8ballrollin

I'm definitely not a man of letters, I guess...Comments?

Well, as a card-carrying Letters man, er woman, I think the list is, what's the term, retarded. And gay. How can you boil all of the written word down to ten books, and have two of them by tolstoy?? Not that I have anything against Tostoy, mind you, but seems the idea of 20% of the list legitimately going to any one author is a stretch.

[SeattleUte]

I bet that if you surveyed the leading humanities professors worldwide the list of ten greatest works of literature would look something like this (in no particular order):

King Lear

The Pentateuch

The Iliad

The Divine Comedy

Paradise Lost

War and Peace

Anna Karenina

The Brothers Karamazov

The Aeneid

Don Quixote