Burt does a pretty good job of articulating (in short chapters, averaging 3 pages) why he sees these as the best books ever. You may or may not agree with his choices, but his mini-analyses are suitably trenchant.
One "novel" on this list is well over a million words long. Another is unfinished. Can you guess which ones I'm talking about? (Answers: Nos. 4 and 51, respectively.)
One novel's main character rarely gets off the couch unless it's to go to bed. There is essentially no action. (No. 82.)
One novel's protagonist is a pedophile. (Answer: No. 47, of course.)
One novel was thoroughly reviled by the author of another novel on the list. (I'm talking, of course, about No. 88, which was despised by the author of No. 14.)
Two novels on the list are by the same author. One was, for a time, banned in the U.S. The other, upon publication, was assailed by critics as a waste of paper. (Give up? Nos. 3 and 26. The former was banned.)
What's your opinion of the list?
1 | Don Quixote | 1605, 1630 | Miguel de Cervantes |
2 | War and Peace | 1869 | Leo Tolstoy |
3 | Ulysses | 1922 | James Joyce |
4 | In Search of Lost Time | 1913-27 | Marcel Proust |
5 | The Brothers Karamazov | 1880 | Feodor Dostoevsky |
6 | Moby-Dick | 1851 | Herman Melville |
7 | Madame Bovary | 1857 | Gustave Flaubert |
8 | Middlemarch | 1871-72 | George Eliot |
9 | The Magic Mountain | 1924 | Thomas Mann |
10 | The Tale of Genji | 11th Century | Murasaki Shikibu |
11 | Emma | 1816 | Jane Austen |
12 | Bleak House | 1852-53 | Charles Dickens |
13 | Anna Karenina | 1877 | Leo Tolstoy |
14 | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | 1884 | Mark Twain |
15 | Tom Jones | 1749 | Henry Fielding |
16 | Great Expectations | 1860-61 | Charles Dickens |
17 | Absalom, Absalom! | 1936 | William Faulkner |
18 | The Ambassadors | 1903 | Henry James |
19 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | 1967 | Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
20 | The Great Gatsby | 1925 | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
21 | To The Lighthouse | 1927 | Virginia Woolf |
22 | Crime and Punishment | 1866 | Feodor Dostoevsky |
23 | The Sound and the Fury | 1929 | William Faulkner |
24 | Vanity Fair | 1847-48 | William Makepeace Thackeray |
25 | Invisible Man | 1952 | Ralph Ellison |
26 | Finnegans Wake | 1939 | James Joyce |
27 | The Man Without Qualities | 1930-43 | Robert Musil |
28 | Gravity's Rainbow | 1973 | Thomas Pynchon |
29 | The Portrait of a Lady | 1881 | Henry James |
30 | Women in Love | 1920 | D. H. Lawrence |
31 | The Red and the Black | 1830 | Stendhal |
32 | Tristram Shandy | 1760-67 | Laurence Sterne |
33 | Dead Souls | 1842 | Nikolai Gogol |
34 | Tess of the D'Urbervilles | 1891 | Thomas Hardy |
35 | Buddenbrooks | 1901 | Thomas Mann |
36 | Le Pere Goriot | 1835 | Honore de Balzac |
37 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | 1916 | James Joyce |
38 | Wuthering Heights | 1847 | Emily Bronte |
39 | The Tin Drum | 1959 | Gunter Grass |
40 | Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable | 1951-53 | Samuel Beckett |
41 | Pride and Prejudice | 1813 | Jane Austen |
42 | The Scarlet Letter | 1850 | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
43 | Fathers and Sons | 1862 | Ivan Turgenev |
44 | Nostromo | 1904 | Joseph Conrad |
45 | Beloved | 1987 | Toni Morrison |
46 | An American Tragedy | 1925 | Theodore Dreiser |
47 | Lolita | 1955 | Vladimir Nabokov |
48 | The Golden Notebook | 1962 | Doris Lessing |
49 | Clarissa | 1747-48 | Samuel Richardson |
50 | Dream of the Red Chamber | 1791 | Cao Xueqin |
51 | The Trial | 1925 | Franz Kafka |
52 | Jane Eyre | 1847 | Charlotte Bronte |
53 | The Red Badge of Courage | 1895 | Stephen Crane |
54 | The Grapes of Wrath | 1939 | John Steinbeck |
55 | Petersburg | 1916/1922 | Andrey Bely |
56 | Things Fall Apart | 1958 | Chinue Achebe |
57 | The Princess of Cleves | 1678 | Madame de Lafayette |
58 | The Stranger | 1942 | Albert Camus |
59 | My Antonia | 1918 | Willa Cather |
60 | The Counterfeiters | 1926 | Andre Gide |
61 | The Age of Innocence | 1920 | Edith Wharton |
62 | The Good Soldier | 1915 | Ford Madox Ford |
63 | The Awakening | 1899 | Kate Chopin |
64 | A Passage to India | 1924 | E. M. Forster |
65 | Herzog | 1964 | Saul Bellow |
66 | Germinal | 1855 | Emile Zola |
67 | Call It Sleep | 1934 | Henry Roth |
68 | U.S.A. Trilogy | 1930-38 | John Dos Passos |
69 | Hunger | 1890 | Knut Hamsun |
70 | Berlin Alexanderplatz | 1929 | Alfred Doblin |
71 | Cities of Salt | 1984-89 | 'Abd al-Rahman Munif |
72 | The Death of Artemio Cruz | 1962 | Carlos Fuentes |
73 | A Farewell to Arms | 1929 | Ernest Hemingway |
74 | Brideshead Revisited | 1945 | Evelyn Waugh |
75 | The Last Chronicle of Barset | 1866-67 | Anthony Trollope |
76 | The Pickwick Papers | 1836-67 | Charles Dickens |
77 | Robinson Crusoe | 1719 | Daniel Defoe |
78 | The Sorrows of Young Werther | 1774 | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
79 | Candide | 1759 | Voltaire |
80 | Native Son | 1940 | Richard Wright |
81 | Under the Volcano | 1947 | Malcolm Lowry |
82 | Oblomov | 1859 | Ivan Goncharov |
83 | Their Eyes Were Watching God | 1937 | Zora Neale Hurston |
84 | Waverley | 1814 | Sir Walter Scott |
85 | Snow Country | 1937, 1948 | Kawabata Yasunari |
86 | Nineteen Eighty-Four | 1949 | George Orwell |
87 | The Betrothed | 1827, 1840 | Alessandro Manzoni |
88 | The Last of the Mohicans | 1826 | James Fenimore Cooper |
89 | Uncle Tom's Cabin | 1852 | Harriet Beecher Stowe |
90 | Les Miserables | 1862 | Victor Hugo |
91 | On the Road | 1957 | Jack Kerouac |
92 | Frankenstein | 1818 | Mary Shelley |
93 | The Leopard | 1958 | Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa |
94 | The Catcher in the Rye | 1951 | J.D. Salinger |
95 | The Woman in White | 1860 | Wilkie Collins |
96 | The Good Soldier Svejk | 1921-23 | Jaroslav Hasek |
97 | Dracula | 1897 | Bram Stoker |
98 | The Three Musketeers | 1844 | Alexandre Dumas |
99 | The Hound of Baskervilles | 1902 | Arthur Conan Doyle |
100 | Gone with the Wind | 1936 | Margaret Mitchell |
I read that book a few years ago. I'm much more of a fan of contemporary literature like Fight Club, High Fidelity, and The Corrections than this guy.
ReplyDeleteGood lord, Beloved by Toni mOrrison is overrated.
I know some of these are great books, and I'm sure most are. But the idea that only 2 novels in the last 50 years are worth cracking the top 100 is hard to believe. For that to be true far too much weight would have to be given to the influence the books have had, or the reputation they've built, as opposed to their actually quality. (Frankenstein, I'm looking at you)
ReplyDeleteThere are actually three Joyce novels on the list. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is No. 37.
ReplyDeleteI totally have this book and am systematically trying to work my way through it during my lifetime...I think I have only read like 14 on the list! :-(
ReplyDeleteIt's a little anglocentric of Mr. Burt to list all the foreign language novels only by their translated English titles (Manzoni's "I Promisi Sposi" becomes 'The Betrothed" for example). Does he rank those foreign language examples as great in their translated editions only—and if that's the case, which of the many translations?
ReplyDeleteThe list has many good books but I think an invaluable addition would be Lewis Carol's "Alice in Wonderland".
ReplyDelete
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ReplyDeleteشركات نقل عفش
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ReplyDeleteشركات نقل عفش ونظافة ومكافحة حشرات
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