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

[Borges]

This one from a 2004 book called 'The Novel 100' A rankling of the 100 best novels of all time...

1. Don Quixote - Cervantes
2. War and Peace - Tolstoy
3. Ulysses - Joyce
4. In Search of Lost Time - Proust
5. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
6. Moby Dick - Melville
7. Madame Bovay - Flaubert
8 Middlemarch - George Eliot
9. The Magic Mountain - Mann
10. The Tale of Genji - Lady Murasaki
11. Emma - Austen
12. Bleak house - Dickens
13. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain
15. Tom Jones - Fielding
16. Great Expectations - Dickens
17. Absolom, Absolom - Faulkner
18. The Ambassadors - HenryJames
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Marquez
20. The GReat Gatsby- Fitzgerald
21. To the Lighthouse - Woolf
22. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
23. The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
24. Vanity Fair - Thackeray
25. Invisble Man - Ellison
26. Finnegan's Wake - Joyce
27. The Man Without Qulaities - Musil
28. Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
29. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
30. Women in Love - Lawrence
31. The Red and the Black - Stendahl
32. Tristram Shandy - Sterne
33. Dead Souls - Gogol
34. Tess of the D'Urbevilles - Hardy
35. Buddenbrooks - Hardy
36. Le Pere Goirot - Balzac
37. A Portrait of the Artitst as a Young Man - Joyce
38. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
39. The Tin Drum - Grass
40. Molloy Malone Dies, The Unnameable - Beckett
41. Pride and Prejudice - Austen
42. The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
43. Fathers and Sons - Turgenev
44. Nostromo - Conrad
45. Beloved - Morrison
46. An American TRagedy - Dreiser
47. Lolita - Nabokov
48. The Golden Notebook - Lessing
49. Clarrissa - Richardson
50. Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin
51. The Trial - Kafka
52. Jane Erye - Charlotte Bronte
53. The Red Badge of Courage - Crane
54. The GRapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
55. Petersburg - Bely
56. Things Fall apart - Achebe
57. The Princess of cleves - Lafayette
58. The Stranger - Camus
59. My Antonia - Cather
60. The coutnerfeiters - Gide
61. The Age of Innocence - Wharton
62. The Good Soldier - Ford
63. The Awakening - Chopin
64. A Passage to India - Forster
65. Herzog - Bellow
66. Germinal - Zola
67. Call it Sleep - Henry Roth
68. U.S.A. Trilogy - Dos Passos
69. Hunger - Hamsun
70. Berlin Alexanderplatz- Doblin
71. Cities of Salt - Munif
72. The Death of Artemio Cruz - Fuentes
73. A Farwell to Arms - Hemmingway
74. Brideshead Revisited - Waugh
75. The LAst chronicle of Barset - Trollope
76. The Pickwick Papers - Dickens
77. Robinson Crusoe - Defoe
78. The sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe
79. Candide - Voltaire
80. Native Son - Wright
81. Under the Volcano - Lowry
82. Oblomov - Goncharov
83. Their eyes Were Watching God - Hurston
84. Waverly - Scott
85. Snow country - Kawabata
86. 1984 - Orwell
87. The Betrothed - Manzoni
88. The Last of the Mohicans - Cooper
89. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Stowe
90. Les Miserables - Hugo
91. On the Road - Kerouac
92. Frankenstien - Shelley
93. The Leopard - Lampedusa
94. The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
95. The Woman in the White - Collins
96. The Good Soldier Svejk - Hasek
97. Dracula - Stoker
98. The Three Musketeers - Dumas
99. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Doyle
100.Gone with the Wind - Mitchell

[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.