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tkp ([info]tkp) wrote,
@ 2008-02-19 00:26:00

Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Insomnia Post #394723
Not nearly as exciting as other insomnia posts, as I think I might actually go to sleep soon. Though am feeling neurotic enough that I'm thinking about going and counting all my other insomnia posts and numbering each in the title, then editing this so the number is correct.

Yeah.

So, this is kind of cool. You can vote for your top ten "Best Novels" here. Your lists gets sorted into a database and after a certain interval, will go towards generating a list of the "Top Ten Best Novels" chosen by the people, for the people, or what the ef ever.

I did find the experience harrowing and nail-biting as one place said top ten "favorite", but everywhere else said "best". To me these are vastly different! "Favorite" to me means impact it had on me, how much enjoyment I get from reading it, how much I think about it, how it made me feel. "Best" to me means quality of writing, quality and possible positive impact of ideas, and the actual realistic positive social impact. Jane Eyre is one of my favorite novels. It isn't imo one of the best.

(Then of course there's the connotation in such a list of "most classic" or "most well known". Gone With The Wind is a classic, but neither my favorite nor best. Hmm.)

I've read 45, which might not really be a figure to be proud of. Since The DaVinci Code made the list.



The List of People's Top 100 Novels

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (must read again)
9. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
10. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
11. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
13. Ulysses by James Joyce
14. Animal Farm by George Orwell
15. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
16. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
17. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (read half)
18. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
19. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
20. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
21. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
22. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (own)
23. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (own)
24. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
25. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
26. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
27. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
28. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (own)
29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (actually only listened to the book tape. Does that count?)
30. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
31. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
32. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Actually did not finish. Even though both a best and favorite book. Hmm...)
33. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
34. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
35. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (W.T.F'g.F?)
36. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
37. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
38. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
39. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
40. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
41. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (started this and could NOT get through it)
42. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (own)
43. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (never even heard of this one)
44. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman (currently reading)
45. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (read a couple)
46. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
47. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
48. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
49. The Stand by Stephen King
50. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
51. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
52. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
53. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
54. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
55. Watership Down by Richard Adams
56. Dracula by Bram Stoker
57. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (own. Is on book club list.)
58. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (own. Is on book club list)
59. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
60. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (never heard of this one, either.)
61. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (but I bought it for my brother, once!)
62. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (SO impressed with world that this one's on here. Doesn't get enough attention, and it's one of my favorites. Also, best.)
63. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
64. Dune by Frank Herbert
65. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (own)
66. Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
67. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (Should not be a best. Movies totally PWN!)
68. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
69. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
70. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Also a favorite and a best that I haven't *actually* finished yet. *Hangs head* What's up with that? It's just so much WORK.)
71. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
72. The Trial by Franz Kafka
73. I, Claudius by Robert Graves (But . . . I own the miniseries!)
74. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
75. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (never heard of. Do I fail?)
78. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
79. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
80. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
81. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
82. The Stranger by Albert Camus
83. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
84. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
85. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston LeRoux
86. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
87. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
88. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
89. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (read one or two, of course.)
90. Persuasion by Jane Austen
91. Light in August by William Faulkner
92. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
93. Call of the Wild by Jack London
94. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
95. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
96. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
97. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (own)
98. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
99. The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel (again, have not heard of)
100. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

(Post a new comment)


[info]fodian
2008-02-19 03:32 pm UTC (link)
OMG MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA IS ON THIS LIST???

Hahahaha. This is like a list of books I hate, but that one is just making me fly completely off the handle. Oh, book lists.

(Reply to this) (Thread)


[info]tkp
2008-02-22 01:29 am UTC (link)
Books you hate, huh? I quite liked most of the 45 I read. I do think it's interesting how there's such a mix of "classic lit" on there and then these best sellers that are popular right now but probably (hopefully?) won't be remembered later. So few people read these days I bet if you assign them to name their top 10 books, what you'll get is a composite of books they read in school and books being made into movies RIGHT NOW.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

it's SO n ot about the post :D
(Anonymous)
2008-02-19 04:31 pm UTC (link)
I've read some of your fanfics I guess it is "10 reasons why I hate you, One reason why I love you" and "Another One Like it Tomorrow"... but I can't find them... could u post it here? (Buffy and Angel)
they are SO amazing... by the way, I'm Rafaela from Brazil :)

(Reply to this)


[info]germaine_pet
2008-02-20 01:47 am UTC (link)
I can't believe The DaVinci Code is on there. I'm glad I borrowed it from the library. If I had paid money for that tripe, I would still be banging my head with the hardcover edition.

I've only read 22 of the books on this list. I fail.

Can I give you my list of 10 favorites? Huh? Can I? Too bad, I will do it anyway, MWAHAHAHA.

1. War and Peace
2. Great Expectations
3. Pride and Prejudice
4. Fall on Your Knees by Anne Marie MacDonald
5. The Trumpet Major by Thomas Hardy
6. Jane Eyre
7. Siddharta by Herman Hesse
8. Homo Faber by Max Frisch
9. La Condition humaine by Andre Malraux
10. Gone with the Wind

(Reply to this) (Thread)


[info]tkp
2008-02-22 01:26 am UTC (link)
Well, considering The DaVinci Code, your 22 is hardly a failure! I'm glad so much of my flist is in agreement about that book.

Have not read 1,2,4,5,8 and 9 on your list. Never heard of any most of them, either (besides 1 and 2, obviously)! Weirdly have not heard of 5, even though it's Hardy. Have to read more of him--kinda hated Return of the Native, but rather liked Tess. Of your list, I should've included Siddhartha. I'm kinda surprised by you having GWTW on there, but considering your A/S love I shouldn't be surprised after all. I own War and Peace. Been meaning to read, as have profound love of Russian lit. Or, ok, Doestovesky; don't suppose that means I won't hate Tolstoy. But that movie with Ralph Fiennes based on Pushkin was good!

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)


[info]germaine_pet
2008-02-22 01:54 am UTC (link)
but considering your A/S love I shouldn't be surprised after all.

Hahahahaha. Reading GWTW is like reading old fanfic. The writing kinda sucks, but I love the characters so much that it just doesn't matter. *g*

Fall On Your Knees was published in the mid-90s, and is one of the most beautiful love stories I've ever read. It's also quirky and unconventional and a gorgeously poetic read. Plus it's set in Cape Breton, which is where I spent my childhood summers, so I can identify with the setting and the characters. I highly recommend it.

I don't think The Trumpet Major is one of Hardy's better-known works. It's a comedy of manners, much in the style of Austen. I found it quite funny.

Not many Anglophones have read La Condition humaine, but it's very well known in France. I read it as part of a class on French history (my French wasn't strong enough to get through it, so I read the English translation). It's set during the Indochinese war near the turn of the century, and introduces a lot of themes that would lay the groundwork for French existentialism. It also has strong female characters and paints a frank, unvarnished portrait of the misogyny of the period, which is rare for male writers of that generation. Or any generation, really.

War and Peace was a seminal work for me. I read it at a time in my life when I was going through some huge upheavals, and I identified with Andrei's spiritual quest in a way that was intense and frightening. I'm sure if I read it today I would still love it for the beauty of the language, but I doubt it would have the same impact. It's weird how a book and a life can intersect to create this event that influences you long after the work has been put away.

(Reply to this) (Parent)


[info]a2zmom
2008-02-20 02:59 am UTC (link)
I lost count. And I not doing it again. I'm guessing I've read somewhere between 35-40 of them.

Stephen King on a list of greatest books. Cue eye roll. And "The Da Vinci Crap"? The man can barely write a sentence.

Amusingly, I have read almost every book that you have never heard of.

"The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" is a sad book about loneliness. It deals with a deaf mute and an isolated teenage girl. McCullers also wrote the equally good (and equally famous) "A Member of the Wedding".

"The Clan of the Cave Bear" is the first in a series of novels about prehistoric man, basically a Cro-magnum child is adopted by a Neanderthal tribe. man romance. It isn't bad and is by far the best of the series. The author did a tremendous amount of research which makes the story rather interesting.

"A Confederacy of Dunces" is brilliant and hugely funny, a comedy that really can't be described yet with a sense of sadness underpinning it. It is worth mentioning the well known tale associated with the book. O'Toole wrote the novel and eventually despairing of ever seeing it in print, killed himself. His mother brought the hand written novel to the author, Walter Percy, who was at first reluctant to read the hand written mess. When he finally started it, he realized he was holding a masterpiece. O'Toole was awarded the Pulitzer posthumously.


(Reply to this) (Thread)


[info]tkp
2008-02-22 01:22 am UTC (link)
Oh, thanks for the recaps! That last one in particular sounds good.

I think it's interesting how the list is a mix of literature classics and the fly by 5 minute bestseller types that hopefully people will forget about soon.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)


[info]my_daroga
2008-02-22 04:57 pm UTC (link)
We own Confederacy..., by the way, and it's one of Sean's favorites. If you want to read it.

I keep wanting to read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter for the title alone.

(Reply to this) (Parent)


[info]my_daroga
2008-02-20 03:10 am UTC (link)
1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
9. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
10. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
11. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
13. Ulysses by James Joyce
14. Animal Farm by George Orwell
15. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
16. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
17. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
18. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
19. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
20. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
21. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
22. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (own)
23. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
24. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
25. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
26. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
27. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
28. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (own)
29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
30. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
31. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
32. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
33. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
34. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
35. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
36. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
37. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
38. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
39. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
40. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
41. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
42. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (own)
43. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
44. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
45. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
46. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
47. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
48. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
49. The Stand by Stephen King
50. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
51. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
52. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
53. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
54. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
55. Watership Down by Richard Adams
56. Dracula by Bram Stoker
57. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
58. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
59. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
60. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
61. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
62. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
64. Dune by Frank Herbert
65. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
66. Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
67. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
68. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
69. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
70. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
71. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
72. The Trial by Franz Kafka
73. I, Claudius by Robert Graves (But . . . I own the miniseries!)
74. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
75. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
78. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
79. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
80. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
81. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
82. The Stranger by Albert Camus
83. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
84. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
85. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
86. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
87. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
88. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
89. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. Persuasion by Jane Austen
91. Light in August by William Faulkner
92. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
93. Call of the Wild by Jack London
94. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
95. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
97. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

(Reply to this) (Thread)


[info]tkp
2008-02-22 01:20 am UTC (link)
what did you think of the Time Traveller's Wife? I couldn't finish it.

How about Middlesex? I've been thinking about reading it.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)


[info]my_daroga
2008-02-22 01:27 am UTC (link)
I actually really enjoyed TTW. I loved the disjointed narrative and I'm a sucker for 1) Time Travel and 2) Vaguely Inappropriate Romance. What was it made you stop?

Middlesex... was less interesting than I wanted it to be. In the sense that it's about a hermaphrodite, and while it dealt with that, it didn't go quite where I wanted. However, it did weave in the Greek-American immigrant experience in mid-century Detroit, which was interesting.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)


[info]tkp
2008-02-22 01:42 am UTC (link)
Both 1 and 2 were reasons I thought I'd like it. I stopped though because I could not relate to the characters at all, and they were flat, unoriginal, uninteresting, and pretentious to me. And the author kept acting like he was telling us who they were by what they did, as if doing art/liking independent films/being vegans/listening to fringe music makes a person unique or says anything about who they really are.

Possibly I was being very judgey; I kept feeling like I was running into characters Just Like Them in every contemporary novel I ever picked up, and it just makes me kinda hate people.

I think I heard that about Middlesex, too bad. So many of the things that seem like they *should* be gender explorey, like that documentary we just watched, don't really get at the stuff I'm interested in. Hedwig being a huge exception.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)


[info]my_daroga
2008-02-22 04:55 pm UTC (link)
I know what you mean about the characters. But I don't read a lot of contemporary fiction, so maybe I was less judgey because I wasn't seeing it as a trend or a stream. The concept was enough for me, maybe.

As you know, I Hate Everyone anyway.

So many of the things that seem like they *should* be gender explorey, like that documentary we just watched, don't really get at the stuff I'm interested in.

I always feel, though, that I might be craving exploitation. I'm just not sure. I want details, and information, and delving into what that means on levels from the physical to the existential. But since part of that is, you know, Teh Sex, am I being prurient?

(Reply to this) (Parent)


[info]my_daroga
2008-02-22 04:58 pm UTC (link)
Also--I've read 47 to your 45.

PWND

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)


[info]tkp
2008-02-22 11:11 pm UTC (link)
If you think I didn't count and compare, you don't know me very well. Of course, did not comment on it, as I was the pwnd and not the pwnr. Or whatever. :o)

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)


[info]my_daroga
2008-02-22 11:33 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, it took me a little while to remember to count.

But if you expected me to not say anything, you don't know me very well.

(Reply to this) (Parent)


[info]violaclaire
2008-02-20 09:20 pm UTC (link)
67. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (Should not be a best. Movies totally PWN!)

HERESY!

Okay, I've never actually seen the movies, so I'm not sure I can say that. But I remain convinced that nothing can be superior to my mental image of Rusty following Anne home from Redmond. How can a mere movie cat beat Rusty's half an ear and crooked tail?

(Reply to this) (Thread)


[info]tkp
2008-02-21 01:13 am UTC (link)
Well. To be picky, Rusty isn't in AoGG, right, he's in AotI--or am I remembering wrong? The movie AoGG is based on the first book, and bits of the second. And pwns the first book (and the second) ((even if it does not have Anne dying her nose red)). The movie AoA is based on elements stolen from AoA, AotI, and AoWP, and isn't as good as those books.

It's interesting you bring up Rusty, though. I was trying to convince a friend a bit ago that the movies are better than the books mostly based on the kindness of Anne. There may not be a Rusty in the movies. But at least she doesn't try to kill any cats, either.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)


[info]violaclaire
2008-02-21 02:14 am UTC (link)
Rusty isn't in AoGG, right, he's in AotI

That's right. I tend to think of them as one long book, but AotI was always my favorite. So I'm biased.

I'll concede in your favor then ;) as I always thought the first book was the weakest until the ones where she has kids, so I can easily imagine a movie surpassing it.

But at least she doesn't try to kill any cats, either.

But it was putting him out of his misery! More or less . . . Yeah, that was a bit troubling to read at age eight. But really, it was Phil's idea, even if Anne went along with it, so it's easiest to blame Phil. (Logic and ethics do not, admittedly, enter much into my irrational defense of favorite childhood books.)

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)


[info]tkp
2008-02-21 06:36 am UTC (link)
AotI was my favorite of the books. It suffers from not enough Marilla and Gilbert, though, for me. The first movie is better than all the books, imo. I do not say that often re: books vs movies. (Though I also say it about Gone With The Wind).

Book!Anne kinda put me off in other ways, too, that was just an example. I felt like she was kinda judgey, like I felt like she looked down on Marilla and Matthew because they were not as "quick" as her. Obviously she loved them, I was just uncomfortable with the way she thought of them sometimes. I guess I didn't feel like she was humble enough, or something.

It's funny though, because I *loved* Phil. Better than book!Anne, actually, I think. I didn't remember at all that she was the one who wanted to kill Rusty! Though I haven't read the books since I was like 10...I'm impressed I remember as much as I do, in fact!

(Reply to this) (Parent)

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