(Somebody's) List of Best novels of all time

[Knitting A Conundrum]

I am a heretic. I still love to read Hemingway, and that was heretical where I took English...

[Cyclopean Squid]

They say it's a novel about the fact that life goes on despite novels.

That's a good way to put it. I like the way it ends (I won't ruin it for our fellow FReepers who haven't had the pleasure yet).

[Knitting A Conundrum]

I'm still trying to catch up, but i will pass on my druthers...

[Knitting A Conundrum]

You didn't have the right reader.

You should come away intoxicated.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

It might be. I haven't gotten to it yet.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

LOL! Especially the last one...

[bruin66]

10. The Tale of Genji - Lady Murasaki

Yikes! That's the most crushingly boring novel ever written. Right up there with Beowulf

[monkey]

Tolstoi is the best and most important novelist - War and Peace is unmatched. Dostoevsky is also good but went for low-hanging apples. Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is superb.

Re: this list, Austen and Elliot are trivial, good to see Moby Dick so high (too high) - it is the great american novel, Proust, Joyce and The Great Gatsby are always overrated on these things.

[monkey]

I would have included The Sun Also Rises, because it is one of the finest books ever written by one so young, and it captures youth and enjoyment of life (as does so much of Hemingway's writing).

[Borges]

Austen was the first to treat marriage as a complex set of social negotiaions with economic and moral factors taken into account. Nothing trivial about it. And Eliot brought a genunine intellectual rigor to the English novel. Unless you just think the everday is trival. George Eliot is something of the English Tolsoty actually.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

I still love to read Hemingway, and that was heretical where I took English...

It's fashionable nowadays for English-teacher-types to beat up on Hemingway. I have no idea why: great writing is great writing.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

I would have included The Sun Also Rises, because it is one of the finest books ever written by one so young, and it captures youth and enjoyment of life (as does so much of Hemingway's writing).

Well said. Jake Barnes was a well-written character.

[mware]

My favorite is Antigone by SOPHOCLES.

I recall my ancient history professor at university was having difficulty getting the students to read,The Satyricon until he told them it was the first pornographic novel in western civilization.

[monkey]

Not recognizing that a writer is trivial is like not knowing who the sucker is at a poker game.

[Borges]

Well that makes suckers out of all the scholars and others who have learned from them then.

[justshutupandtakeit]

I have read 47 of these. Has anyone else actually read Petersburg?

BTW Thomas Mann wrote Buddenbrooks not Hardy. Got the wrong Thomas there.

[justshutupandtakeit]

That is perhaps the best Bad Novel of all time. Highly enjoyable.

[Borges]

That's my bad in transcription.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Though most of my class hated MOby (if they even read it) I LOVED it.

How anyone could think A Tale of Two Cities boring is beyond me. You must not like to read.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

He puts you in the scene almost immediately. I like his writing...but no doubt he's pc incorrect for his man-woman viewpoints as much as anything.