Posted on 10/30/2006, 6:04:55 PM by meandog
October is National Book Month; local bibliophiles share their favorite reads
Which books fall into which category? It depends on whom you ask.
With the National Book Foundation proclaiming October as National Book Month, this seemed like a great time to crack the covers, as it were. And for those who might have let the official month slip by, long winter evenings beckon. Find a plump chair, a crackling fire, a glowing lamp--and settle in.
What should you read?
There are plenty of book lists, compiled by organizations like Time magazine or the BBC.
One, "The Top 100 Books of All Time," published in the British newspaper The Guardian, includes a staggering variety of reading material, ranging from the Bible's Book of Job to Astrid Lindgren's "Pippi Longstocking." (See accompanying list.)
The Guardian attributes the list to "a vote by 100 noted writers from 54 countries as released by the Norwegian Book Clubs." It doesn't say who the writers are, or why they voted for a particular book.
This troubles Christofer C. Foss, associate professor of English at University of Mary Washington.
"I'd like to talk to these 54 writers and find out how they selected these books. What criteria did they use? Are these personal favorites?" he asked.
Foss said he couldn't quarrel with any of the selections, but he did notice a preponderance of books by European and U.S. writers, most of them men.
(Excerpt) Read more at fredericksburg.com ...
The list:
Top 100 books of all time
The following list of 100 best works of fiction, alphabetically by author, was determined by 100 noted writers from 54 countries. Published in England's The Guardian newspaper, May 8, 2002.
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe, Nigeria (b. 1930)
Fairy Tales and Stories
Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark (1805-1875)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, England (1775-1817)
Old Goriot
Honore de Balzac, France (1799-1850)
Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Samuel Beckett, Ireland (1906-1989)
Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy (1313-1375)
Collected Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina (1899-1986)
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë, England (1818-1848)
The Stranger
Albert Camus, France (1913-1960)
Selected Poems and Prose
Paul Celan, Romania/France (1920-1970)
Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France (1894-1961)
Don Quixote de la Mancha
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain (1547-1616)
Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer, England (1340-1400)
Selected Stories
Anton P. Chekhov, Russia (1860-1904)
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad, England (1857-1924)
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri, Italy (1265-1321)
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens, England (1812-1870)
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Denis Diderot, France (1713-1784)
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Alfred Döblin, Germany (1878-1957)
Crime and Punishment
The Idiot
The Possessed
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Russia (1821-1881)
Middlemarch
George Eliot, England (1819-1880)
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison, United States (1914-1994)
Medea
Euripides, Greece (circa 480-406 B.C.)
Absalom, Absalom
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner, United States (1897-1962)
Madame Bovary
A Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert, France (1821-1880)
Gypsy Ballads
Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain (1898-1936)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia (b. 1928)
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Mesopotamia (circa 1800 B.C.)
Faust
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany (1749-1832)
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol, Russia (1809-1852)
The Tin Drum
Gunter Grass, Germany (b. 1927)
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil (1880-1967)
Hunger
Knut Hamsun, Norway (1859-1952)
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway, United States (1899-1961)
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Homer, Greece (circa 700 B.C.)
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906)
The Book of Job
Israel (600-400 B.C.)
Ulysses
James Joyce, Ireland (1882-1941)
The Complete Stories
The Trial
The Castle
Franz Kafka, Bohemia (1883-1924)
The Recognition of Sakuntala
Kalidasa, India (circa 400)
The Sound of the Mountain
Yasunari Kawabata, Japan (1899-1972)
Zorba the Greek
Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece (1883-1957)
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence, England (1885-1930)
Independent People
Halldor K. Laxness, Iceland (1902-1998)
Complete Poems
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy (1798-1837)
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing, England (b. 1919)
The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking
Astrid Lindgren, Sweden (1907-2002)
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Lu Xun, China (1881-1936)
Mahabharata
India (circa 500 B.C.)
Children of Gebelawi
Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt (b. 1911)
Buddenbrook
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann, Germany (1875-1955)
Moby Dick
Herman Melville, United States (1819-1891)
Essays
Michel de Montaigne, France (1533-1592)
History
Elsa Morante, Italy (1918-1985)
Beloved
Toni Morrison, United States (b. 1931)
The Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu, Japan (973-1025?)
The Man Without Qualities
Robert Musil, Austria (1880-1942)
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/ United States (1899-1977)
Njaal's Saga
Iceland (circa 1300)
1984
George Orwell, England (1903-1950)
Metamorphoses
Ovid, Italy (circa 43 B.C.)
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa, Portugal (1888-1935)
The Complete Tales
Edgar Allan Poe, United States (1809-1849)
Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel Proust, France (1871-1922)
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Francois Rabelais, France (1495-1553)
Pedro Paramo
Juan Rulfo, Mexico (1918-1986)
Mathnawi
Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan (1207-1273)
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie, India/Britain (b. 1947)
The Orchard
Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran (circa 1200-1292)
Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih, Sudan (b. 1929)
Blindness
Jose Saramago, Portugal (b. 1922)
Hamlet
King Lear
Othello
William Shakespeare, England (1564-1616)
Oedipus the King
Sophocles, Greece (496-406 B.C.)
The Red and the Black
Stendhal, France (1783-1842)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne, Ireland (1713-1768)
Confessions of Zeno
Italo Svevo, Italy (1861-1928)
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift, Ireland (1667-1745)
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Leo Tolstoy, Russia (1828-1910)
Tales from a Thousand and One Nights
India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt (700-1500)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain, United States (1835-1910)
Ramayana
Valmiki, India (circa 300 B.C.)
The Aeneid
Virgil, Italy (70-19 B.C.)
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman, United States (1819-1892)
Mrs. Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf, England (1882-1941)
Memoirs of Hadrian
Marguerite Yourcenar, France (1903-1987)
Number #1: Things fall apart?
Surely it's better than the works of Shakespeare, Plato, or the other Masters.
This list is cr@p.
No way that they did not include Hillary's book or Bill Clinton's.
How about Earth in the Balance?
the great gatsby anyone?
I've read maybe 10 of these ... guess I aint cultured enuf
There are plenty of books that belong nowhere near this list, including the first selection listed.
Calm down, calm down. The list is alphabetical by author. Okay?
It's alphabetic.
Les Miserables?
Did I miss it or is it really not there?
Also Tale of Two Cities Missing?
What, no Maya Angelou?
At least Dickens got on the list.
Job is fiction?
By Freeper Your Ad Here.
The Book of Job is considered fiction? Maybe they should have included the Koran as well.
Borges, this thread is your time to shine.
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