[C19fan]

The Brontes were robbed!!! I read Madame Bovary and I am sorry but it is not top 10 material but I suppose today's "edgy" writers like the "edginess" of Bovary.

[CaptainK]

I was pulling for at least one Bronte on the list.

[Silentgypsy]

Ping.

I’m inserting a “Nay” for William Faulkner before scanning the list.

[FatherofFive]

Moby Dick is a good story but a bad book.

[CaptainK]

The way you feel about Bovery, I feel about Gatsby.

[InterceptPoint]

James Joyce??

Perhaps some learned Freeper can explain the supposed greatness of this virtually unreadable author to me. I don’t get it and I have tried. The stream of consciousness business just makes for labored reading for me. Apparently not for others. In fact I have an Irish acquaintance who claims to read Joyce every night. But to me the Joyce mystique remains a mystery.

Now Jane Austin is a different story. She should top the list. Readable over and over.

[napscoordinator]

No John Grisham. I call BS.

[miss marmelstein]

Bovary certainly is edgy, lol! One of the greatest books I've ever read but it gave me a panic attack worse than “In Cold Blood.” Emma is one scary chick. And the Brontes was robbed! How could anyone leave off “Wuthering Heights” (an edgy book, too.)

[FroggyTheGremlim]

No Tolkein? No LOTR?

[cdcdawg]

One Hundred Years of Solitude is just awful beyond description. I will never get those hours back. That said, I’m not surprised it made their list. Madame Bovary over Brothers Karamazov? I guess there were already too many Russians. The Brontes got robbed.

[Silentgypsy]

The consensus is that the intellectuals can take a long walk off a short pier.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

English class turned me off of literature, and i was never impressed by any novel, until I read “The Brothers Karamazov.” Everything else pales in comparison.

[Lancey Howard]

No Sidney Sheldon??
Ridiculous.

[Cicero]

Authors chosen by The Atlantic have a bit of narrow-mindedness.

Greatest books of all time? And they eliminate

The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Aeneid
Oedypus Rex
The Divine Comedy

Not to speak of The Bible.

Or, in modern times:

The Lord of the Rings
Brideshead Revisited

[apillar]

I must be a literary heathen. Although I was forced to read most of these books in High School and College, I found virtually all theme to be dull and ponderous and I certainly wouldn't re-read any of them by choice or as leisure reading. Give me some Agatha Christie, Steven King, or Tom Clancy any day...

[mrsmith]

Monkeys at their keyboards: eventually they’ll type everything LOL~!

Well, at least Shakespeare, though none of his works, got a mention...

[struggle]

My List (and I am a lit. teacher)

1. The Bible (no other work is so often alluded to)
2. The Iliad/Odyssey
3. MacBeth
4. Sound and the Fury (narrative experimentation)
5. Hamlet
6. Scarlet Letter
7. Huck Finn
8. Nichomachean Ethics
9. Mere Christianity
10. Walden/Civil Disobedience

[antidisestablishment]

Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus Tales comprise some of the greatest American literature. Too complex for modern intellectuals, they are have been consigned to the racist bin along with Twain. Truth is too offensive for modern sensibilities...

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

I’ll take THE ILLIAD, ODESSEY, THE AENEID any day along with the works of Kipling and the short stories of John Russell(THE LOST GOD), Don Quixote, and some of the works of Ernest Hemingway.

Most of the so-called “great novels” are extremely boring, and in my youth I read hundreds of good novels.

[Liberty Valance]

They always leave off “Homer Price and his donut machine”.
What were they thinking?

[blueunicorn6]

The Atlantic? No.....come on.....The Atlantic? Their idea of great literature is “Any Curious George book”.