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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

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[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!

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[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.

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