Posted on 01/31/2012 8:21:59 AM PST by C19fan
“She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Top 10 20th Century
1. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
2. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. The Search of Lost Time — Proust
4. Ulysses — James Joyce
5. Dubliners — James Joyce
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
8. To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf
9. The complete stories of Flannery O’Connor
10. Pale Fire — Nabokov
Top 10 19th Century
1. Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary — Flaubert
3. War and Peace — Tolstoy
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
5. The stories of Anton Chekhov
6. Middlemarch — George Eliot
7. Moby-Dick — Melville
8. Great Expectations — Dickens
9. Crime and Punishment — Dostoevsky
10. Emma — Jane Austen
The 19th picks seem reasonable, but most of the 20th is pretentious, over-rated and even unreadable.
There are many works the better.
Apart from the Marquez, the 20th century list is great. Which do you object to?
Melville was trying to conjure up an experience not just tell a sea story. And then the prose is that good it’s fun to read.
#1- The Holy Bible
#1,997,599,764- The Qur’an
Which in that 20th list was a linch-pin of the tides of intellect or society?
>>I read it in AP English, my junior year in HS. I found it to be almost impenetrable, dull, and lazy (the pastor “looked into his heart”? The big scarlet A in the sky? A girl named Hester?).
You know, I though the same thing until I taught it. “Sound and the Fury” is almost the same because the first chapter is told by a retard and it turns readers off immensely. Most kids hate the Scarlet Letter because of it’s excruciatingly difficult vocabulary, but a lot of my kids can relate teenage pregnancy with Hester’s own Scarlet Letter and the fact that many of the boys that get the girls pregnant creep around school trying to shirk their responsibility. The keystone to the whole novel is Pearl, because she is just something else!
Light in August is a kick ass novel. My sister and my brother in law are white/black and had a boy born on Christmas. You probably can guess who I immediately thought of.
Good to see there are other Flannery readers here.
And, yes, every time I see a peacock, I think of her. Lol!
“linch-pin of the tides of intellect or society”
I don’t know what that means. But they were mostly landmark works that expanded literary horizons and were highly influential on other writers.
They were all of them just literary opium. For the dwellers of the modern opium dens of society. All passive uptake.
>>The most striking omission from The Atlantic’s list is indeed the Bible - it is more widely read than almost any other book and as you say, it is most frequently alluded to in other works - books, poems, and plays. A lack of knowledge of the Bible is a serious impediment to understanding much of the canon of great works in literature.
Very true. Almost every novel references the Bible and Greek/Roman Mythology, and occasionally Shakespeare. Every family meal, the Last Supper; every bath/swim, baptism; every 33 year old, Jesus. I tell my students that you must study the Bible to understand literature.
That being said, I was happy no one gave a nod to “Catcher in the Rye” or “Naked Lunch.” I was totally expecting that from the Atlantic. The Atlantic, founded by OWH, who penned:
Thy sacred leaves, fair Freedom’s flower,
Shall ever float on dome and tower,
To all their heavenly colors true,
In blackening frost or crimson dew,—
And GOD love us as we love thee,
Thrice holy Flower of Liberty!
Then hail the banner of the free,
The starry FLOWER OF LIBERTY!
Lolita was opium? ‘The Sound and the Fury’ is one of the great prose tragedies of 20th century fiction. Pale Fire is as much fun as any novel ever written. ‘In Search of Lost Time’ is the literary equivalent of 20th century physics. I could go on.
What’s wrong with Catcher? It’s just not in the top ten of the 20th century. Salinger was actually something of a conservative. It’s apparent from his other fiction.
I’m sure you have something to say.
Well a great work of Art should induce some sort of hypnotic state. Aesthetic Bliss.
Tolstoy beats out Shakespeare?? Now THAT’S funny!
That was my memory of it too, but I admit I was forced to read it at gunpoint by the government... or at least that was my feeling about it as a sophomore in my American literature class. When I expressed my disdain for it to a friend who is a teacher, he told me to try it again so it is on my list of books to read sometime soon.
I wasn’t too keen on Hamlet. I saw the Branagh movie in high school and it was much more enjoyable than reading it. MacBeth seemed to be just as good either way to me.
One English teacher I had told the class that Shakespeare's plays are PLAYS! and are meant to be acted or watched. Merely reading them takes the spirit out of them as much as trying to turn a great complex novel into a two hour movie.
Tolstoy is the best imaginative writer since Shakespeare so it’s certainly a good comparison.
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