Thanks for posting your list of 100. I have a lot of reading to do before I die. How about Herman Hesse? He doesn't show up on many lists of 100, but Siddhartha and Steppenwolf are excellent novels (in my opinion).
How do you rank Maurice Blanchot, as a Francophile? I somewhat recently read ‘The Madness of the Day’ and really loved it. Also, I think Henry Miller’s Topic of Cancer OR Tropic of Capricorn (or both) should be on the list.
As a Russian, it’s pleasing to see so many Russian works on the list. However, this is still seen through the prism of a Western thinker. For example, most Russians (who live in Russia) would not include Solzhenitsyn. His language was not so good. The westerners read him in translations and don’t notice that he’s just a political propagandist of the Cold War rationality, and cannot be in the same league as all other Russian writers and thinkers on the list. On the other hand, most westerners wouldn’t know who is Pushkin, who is of course #1 for any Russian. A good example of impossibility to translate real genius of Russian irrationality. Thanks.
Thanks for these comments. I recall Jordan Peterson going to Russia and getting a rude shock that most Russians did not share his idolisation of Solzhenitysn for the reasons you state. Спасибо большое.
But "most people" would listen to Taylor Swift above Tarja Turunen. It is true he treated his first wife absolutely atrociously though he guiltily helped her with money when she was dying, but really - he destroyed her life. Still an intellectual juggernaut who will educate a person more about Russia, its tumultuous history and melting pot of different peoples more than anything else out there.
Thanks so much for your comment ^ it's very thought-provoking.
"Genius of Russian irrationality"--I'm currently reading 'We'. Should I consider the theme of excessive rationality as a more serious or cutting theme than I might understand it as an American reader (familiar with Taylorism no fear!) in context of specifically Russian irrationality?
Perhaps my use of the word irrationality was not so appropriate. Russian classical thinking is more paradoxical and inclusive and open than irrational.
But with rationality it’s much easier. Rationality always implies some target, objective. You prove a theorem, or you achieve some KPIs. With the exception of mathematics, already in physics, you need to start ignoring things: assume perfect vacuum, or perfect sphere, no winds, etc. otherwise you are in chaos. So your rational approach demands that you ignore things. Inevitability you develop a bubble- everything is perfect inside it. But you exclude. Excluded from a bubble could be a gas (in physics), a class (in economics) or a whole race (in some utopia/dystopia).
Oh my goodness but ‘We’ is about all of that …. hyperrationality. They even seem to live in some sort of a bubble, and yes to the simplification of reality into a model… And certainly I think I see some paradox in a counterposed position. Larger picture, I do see what you mean. Irrationality is a fine word, but I’m understanding you to mean that has to be understood in a detached sense, similar to how one might describe a historical era as “rational” or “romantic”, where the meaning is about a zeitgeist, not the personal meaning as in “he is so romantic” or “she is so irrational”.
You are arguing that Solzhenitsyn is a RATIONAList? Mr. mystical Russian peasant soul of motherland himself? He is many things that I dislike, but "rational" is not one of them.
Indeed, he took sides for truth, justice and righteousness - he was the Jesus and the inhumanly strong Soviet political machinery the Pharisees, Sadducees and Herodians.
It's vital reading. All novels and indeed all books have a point of view. Perhaps the point of view is deliberately inconclusive, perhaps it comes to conclusions. He came to conclusions. I don't blame him and it's his moral right to do so, whether or not others like what he said or want to suppress it.
Well, Russians, ie the people actually familiar with whatever Solzhenitsyn was writing about, think his conclusions are .. not interesting. Btw, he spent so much time in the West, why he didn’t write anything about it? Nabokov wouldn’t understand, would he?
For western readers Solzhenitsyn is ok, because Russia is this mythical place where bad things happen in terrible cold - here is a convenient author to support that. And btw look at that beard! Tolstoy 2.0 clearly! A Russian reads it and .. nothing.
If he’s not accepted in his native country few generations after, why? Russians accepted all their great authors exiled and prosecuted. Unlike many greats, Solzhenitsyn enjoyed government support while alive! He was brought back personally by Gorbachev, surrounded by governmental care and his works were forced into school curriculum! He started writing political recommendations about how to build new Russia, where exact borders should be (hint- not what they are now) and what to do with the Jews. If you fancy him, maybe google all these late works of his.
He did write about the west. Chapter 7, '200 Years Together'. His observations dovetail with other observations, for example 'The Old World in the New', Ross, 1914, see the chapter on Eastern European (Russian/Ukrainian) Jewish immigrant population and some other chapters on other groups, which discuss the effects of the Jewish attack on immigration standards in light of those other immigrant populations' outcomes.
200 years together, means Russians and Jews together (strange title because 100 of those years Jews were not allowed to live in proper Russian lands), how is this about the west? Sounds like chatGPT finding any reference.
Solzhenitsyn had nothing to say about either the West or Russia, b cause he is stuck in deep, religious, unbearably bearded, and historically nonexistent past. And he hates the present, too confusing for him.
I've read about 30 of these, and I'm convinced many books reappear on lists like this through sheer inertia, just because they've _always_ been on lists like these. They got canonized and so now they're canonical and everybody is too polite to point out that they're straight up terrible.
Say it with me, say it loud, say it clear, Anna Karenina was garbage when it was written, it's still garbage now, and nothing that has happened will degarbagify it. Tolstoy's head was so far up his own ass it comes out of his mouth again. Calling that book sexist isn't even applying our standards retroactively to a different time and place, Anna Karenina was sexist BY THE STANDARDS OF TSARIST RUSSIA!!! Da fuq we continue to tell people to read it simply defeats me. No, no, no damnit, don't do this to readers!
Then there's Wuthering Heights. What that's doing on these lists I'll never know. It's not a bad attempt for a first novel, and it's a huge tragedy she died so young, and yes if she'd lived to write four or five more books she'd probably have written a great novel but c'mon Emily wasn't even the best writer in her house —where she didn't crack the top two!— let alone the world.
I will never, ever understand how Mann could write a book as beautiful as Buddenbrooks then turn around and write the swollen monstuosity on the mountain I just don't get.
Also, Barsetshire is way better than the Palliser novels — and though both are fun, neither's really high literature.
Drives me crazy. We canonized a bunch of crappy books early, and now there's no going back...
True. Have you read Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium? It is a wonderful take down of all the ‘great writers’ who have said hateful things about women. All in the form of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Highly recommended.
I read The Magic Mountain last year. As an adolescent I read Mann's Doctor Faustus and avoided him for close to 60 years. I found Magic Mountain to be turgid and not great.
I am presently about 2/3 of the way through The Empusium. It is neither turgid nor great. It's FUN! Liberty cap liqueur... a great concept! I may try and add some to my next preparation of pacharán.
How so? Anna is a brilliant person unable to be accepted as such in her society -- tied to a mediocre cad -- forced by her mother to marry a dreadful bore. That's a portrayal of sexism, but it's not sexist in itself.
I agree with this assessment, though in my case Moby Dick is the beneficiary of over-reverence. I have now read it twice, about 30 years apart, and it was no better the second time. In fact, I disliked it so much that I swore off top 100 lists for a while.
Fair call. But this top 100 list has been a lot of fun. Some over-revered books are still books to read before you die because the story taps the culture.
It's funny, I HATED it in my twenties, but I read it again last year and loved it. I really enjoyed the humour of it, the digressions and non sequiturs. Perhaps I WAS normal, and now am not. 😁
Ohhh, so sad you don't love it. Melville is SUCH a hopeless weirdo. I've read Moby Dick 3 times and it got better each time. It's wildly funny — which I found out by reading it aloud to my partner at the time. My sons each read it and loved it, too, which is of course gratifying and totally irrelevant.
I agree with you about Wuthering Heights. It's -- perhaps not terrible but not worthy of being on such a list. (And, hey, perhaps it IS terrible -- I read it at age 15 or so and hated it. Why read it again?
I have read the first four Barsetshire novels, and the first two Palliser (Parliamentarian) novels. I think they are all immensely enjoyable. I will reserve judgement until I've finished both series.
Fair enough. I do like Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles but I felt the seven or so Palliser novels was enough from Trollope for this list. I feel more generous towards the canon than you, and do feel Liza Libes and I both made conscious calls not to repeat the same old, same old out of inertia. One day, before it is too late, I will read Анна Каренина по русскии so must agree to disagree on that point
Chaucer wasn't writing a novel. Neither was Borges. Pantagruel without Gargantua? Pfaaw. No Tale of Genji? It's truly an amazing work.
I agree about Austen, although she's not a great as suggested. Maryanne Evans, on the other hand, WAS great and Middlemarch deserves a higher ranking.
No Twain? No Snopes books? While The Sound and the Fury IS a great novel, the Snopes books deserve to be on any list.
Jean-Christophe (Roland Roland) was done a horrible disservice in translation.
Sigrid Undset? No thanks. Replace her with Harald Laxness.
Too much Dostoevsky, especially so near the top. No Turgenev. (Chekhov doesn't belong because he wrote only plays and short fiction.) Eugene Onegin can only be counted if one includes poetry, in which case I'd suggest Milton as an addition to your list. And Laurence Sterne's marvelous Tristram Shandy. The exclusion of that from a list of this type is criminal.
The first three of Thomas Pynchon's novels are all excellent AND enjoyable.
Homage to Catalonia is hardly a novel. It's not even fiction, although a bit fictionalized.
Since the list is restricted to more than a decade past, I still feel free to recommend the transcendent prose of David Foster Wallace. No longer does it suffer recentcy bias. He wrote marvelous, convoluted but coherent sentences. Same with Saul Bellow, John Barth and a very few others.
The absences are more important than the things included: almost all Latin American authors are absent - also most African and Asian writers. Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook? I recently read Pedro Paramó. I think everyone should.
I take your point re Chaucer. Got lost in memories of E Lit and struggling to maintain consciousness against the drone of a particularly lackluster prof, overheated classroom and inability to track characters in WH. (I still have that issue in some prose, both fiction and non.) Forgot the criteria of this list. My TBR shelf is huge these days. You may have just added to the virtual portion.
It’s ok to have a different opinion, but I would advise to word your opinion more respectfully.
I’m here to say that I find Wuthering Heights utterly brilliant. Anna Karenina I’m still working my way through. I have a love-hate relationship with that book myself, but I see the quality in it and why so many people love it.
1. Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban, UK). Actually, this is better listened to, as an audiobook, as the language is so strange as to make a barrier to comprehension when reading (at least that was my experience)
2. Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry, UK)
3. The Iliad or the Odyssey (Homer, Greece), depending on whether you like Life or Death.
4. *The Left Hand of Darkness* (Le Guin, USA)
5. The Aubrey/Maturin novels, up to The Letter of Marque (O’Brian, UK). If we’re having Jane Austen (as we should) we can surely make room for Jack and Steven.
6. Pantagruel (Rabelais, France). Everyone should read some Rabelais, “et si non, le fondement vous eschappe!” ;-)
7. The Essais (Montaigne, France)
8. Inner Chapters (Chuang Tzu, China). I’ve been dipping into this for 50 years and there’s always something new in it.
9. The Stars of Samarkand (me, UK). A thriller set in Samarkand in 1445 where our hero, physician Al-Shirazi, joins forces with the beautiful and highly educated Lady Gulnara, and uncovers a plot to topple Ulugh Beg, scholar-king and key figure of the Timurid Renaissance (currently looking for a publisher ;-) )
I hate Riddley Walker. I hate it when “literary” writers slum it in science fiction and get all this acclaim for ideas that are ordinary and even mundane for people familiar with the genre. A Canticle for Lebovitz and Earth Abides are far superior.
I do agree about LeGuin, but I’d go with The Dispossessed.
As I said, I found RW impossible to read, but it excelled as an audio book. Also, it's a bit of a stretch to dismiss his themes and certainly his treatment of those themes as "mundane". I read CfL so long ago I've forgotten it, though some indistinct memory has it as "good". But I'm low-brow, so I also like the Stainless Steel rat books 😁
I like the Stainless Steel Rat books as well! But I wouldn’t say they are on a list of 100 books everyone should read.
So here’s the thing: I wouldn’t say Riddley Walker is mundane. It’s a good enough post-apocalyptic book. But I hate the great literary acclaim for something science fiction writers have done before, and done better. It’s as if a literary writer got all these awards for a novel about a group of people on a train, and one of them committed a murder, and a detective figures out who the killer was through clues. But the people lavishing the book with praise had never read a mystery novel before and didn’t know Agatha Christie had actually written a book about a murder on a train. But this author is getting praise for the brilliant idea of the locked room murder mystery on a moving train.
It’s the same reason I find Margaret Atwood insufferable. She writes science fiction, but then she looks down her nose at science fiction as a genre and spins complicated explanations about how what she writes isn’t science fiction. LeGuin was very literary in her style, and her science wasn’t particularly good, but she was nice to other science fiction writers and didn’t denigrate the genre, of which she was clearly a part.
And if the idea is to write a book with an invented vernacular, make it alien enough but also something people can read. I’d say that both Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange and Heinlein in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress do the whole invented vernacular better.
Where are Don DeLillo, Philip Roth? Kerouac? Norman Mailer? L.F. Céline, Hunter S. Thompson? Jim Harrison? Charles Bukowski? Bret Easton Ellis, Cristina Campo, Joan Didion, McCarthy, Roberto Bolaño, William Gaddis…? It's always the same books that we're told about.
Don't let yourself be trapped by "the road." He wrote superb poetry! Then "Visions of Cody," Big Sur, The Celestial Tramps..., Satorie in Paris, Tristessa, a small but stunning book...
Lots of Aussies on that list I never heard of. 70 of your selection I've read and some of them wouldn't be on my list. 'The Idiot' was a surprising omission as was 'The Third Policeman' and 'The Gingerbread Man'. But hey, total respect for your choices. Thanks.
Joyce actually refused to get an Irish passport even during World War 2 when having it rather than a British one would have been much easier for him to move from Italy to Switzerland as he did in 1943.
I think writers have at least three identities: ethnic (including city or region of birth), linguistic (what language they write in), and national (what passport they hold). British is never an ethnic identity as it is only an empire or nation state. I do think one should respect the choice of an adult as to their chosen nationality. Both Ireland and France can claim Beckett, as both the US and the UK can claim James, Eliot, Auden, and Rushdie among others.
Joyce and Beckett did not choose to be British or French so I don't understand what you're trying to say. Joyce is buried in Switzerland so does that make him Swiss? Nabokov is a Russian or an American/Swiss?
How can you say Joyce didn’t choose to be British when he deliberately applied for a British rather than an Irish passport? Beckett chose to live in Paris, chose to write in French. The French honor him and consider his French literature French.
Almost nobody reads "Finnegans Wake," and almost everyone who says they have is either lying or got next to nothing out of it. I had a professor of Irish lit in grad school, whose specialty was Joyce, and even he hadn't read it. He said he was saving it for the retirement home. Harold Bloom is probably single handedly responsible for it being on so many of these lists. "Ulysses," yes. "Finnegans Wake," definately doesn't belong on a list of a mere 100 must read books.
Finnegans Wake ought to be treated like a rare pilgrimage walk. The aim is not to see it all, but to walk some of the way, at least once in your life. I think the trick with Finnegans Wake is to read it online in a hypertext version that unpacks all or most of the references and language play. I will never read it all the way to the end. It is like wandering through a great forest… you only ever seen a sliver of it, but that sliver is so marvellous.
It's a good and interesting list. It's difficult with only having last names to know how many of them are by women. Many of the ones I recognise are male, as are the vast majority of recommendations in the comments. Often books cited or recommended by men tend to be by male authors. This patriarchal frame is limiting in so many ways.
True. Not as many women as I would like by today’s ethical standards, but more than some of these lists. Of course, the “first novel” by Lady Murasaki is there. I might add in the first names in an edit. Of course, there are a few tricks like George Eliot and Henry Handel Richardson - both of whom were women
My god daughter is a great fan of Jane Austen and has been since she was 11 or 12. I recommended George Elliot to her. She said, "I only want to read female authors." Maryanne Evans for sure!
We all have different tastes : great list however I’d include in mine certain ‘popular’ reads that are not only classic but well written and some perhaps prophetic
1. The Hobbit and Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk
3. The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse
mmmm I can see that. To me it was fascinating as a kid,adult,septuagenarian each stage for different reasons. The books were prophetic in many different levels for many different reasons - he was foremost a scientist - perhaps that’s why the style was what it was
Fair, and thanks. I admit that if I have read Jane Eyre, I have forgotten it. I did remember Wuthering Heights though, especially since I grew up with Kate Bush singing it.
I'd add Yukio Mishima's tetralogy Sea of Fertility, Satre's trilogy Roads to Freedom, The Plague by Camus, John Fante's Ask the Dust, Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of Night, Pasó Por Aquí by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Camille by Alexandre Dumas fils, the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos, T.H. White's The Once and Future King, Henri Alain-Fournier's The Lost Domain, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars, and, well, so many others.
Who you are and what your life is and has been like affects very greatly the literature that means something to you and impacts your life. For example, a friend strongly recommended I read Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry but it did nothing for me at all and I would not have bothered finishing it except that I did not want disappoint my friend. That's why I agreed with him that it was truly a great novel. But it really wasn't for me.
I also think _when_ you read a novel is very important in how it influences you. If you read Madame Bovary when you are 14 or 15, it is a powerful window on and a warning about life. If you read it when you are 35 or 40 it is, to a large extent, just FAFO.
Thanks for posting your list of 100. I have a lot of reading to do before I die. How about Herman Hesse? He doesn't show up on many lists of 100, but Siddhartha and Steppenwolf are excellent novels (in my opinion).
And his best was The Glass Bead Game if you want to stay all philosophical .
All of Hesse. Especially Glass Bead Game…
I got to read that one
Notable absentees in my opinion are Zola, Balzac, Dickens, Maupassant, but then I am more a Francophile than a Russophile.
I came to suggest Zola and Maupassant!
Yes and Yes!
Absolutely agree on Dickens
Also Dumas? I would have added The Count of Monte Cristo in the list. But I’m French so biased!
How do you rank Maurice Blanchot, as a Francophile? I somewhat recently read ‘The Madness of the Day’ and really loved it. Also, I think Henry Miller’s Topic of Cancer OR Tropic of Capricorn (or both) should be on the list.
As a Russian, it’s pleasing to see so many Russian works on the list. However, this is still seen through the prism of a Western thinker. For example, most Russians (who live in Russia) would not include Solzhenitsyn. His language was not so good. The westerners read him in translations and don’t notice that he’s just a political propagandist of the Cold War rationality, and cannot be in the same league as all other Russian writers and thinkers on the list. On the other hand, most westerners wouldn’t know who is Pushkin, who is of course #1 for any Russian. A good example of impossibility to translate real genius of Russian irrationality. Thanks.
Thanks for these comments. I recall Jordan Peterson going to Russia and getting a rude shock that most Russians did not share his idolisation of Solzhenitysn for the reasons you state. Спасибо большое.
But "most people" would listen to Taylor Swift above Tarja Turunen. It is true he treated his first wife absolutely atrociously though he guiltily helped her with money when she was dying, but really - he destroyed her life. Still an intellectual juggernaut who will educate a person more about Russia, its tumultuous history and melting pot of different peoples more than anything else out there.
Thanks so much for your comment ^ it's very thought-provoking.
"Genius of Russian irrationality"--I'm currently reading 'We'. Should I consider the theme of excessive rationality as a more serious or cutting theme than I might understand it as an American reader (familiar with Taylorism no fear!) in context of specifically Russian irrationality?
Perhaps my use of the word irrationality was not so appropriate. Russian classical thinking is more paradoxical and inclusive and open than irrational.
But with rationality it’s much easier. Rationality always implies some target, objective. You prove a theorem, or you achieve some KPIs. With the exception of mathematics, already in physics, you need to start ignoring things: assume perfect vacuum, or perfect sphere, no winds, etc. otherwise you are in chaos. So your rational approach demands that you ignore things. Inevitability you develop a bubble- everything is perfect inside it. But you exclude. Excluded from a bubble could be a gas (in physics), a class (in economics) or a whole race (in some utopia/dystopia).
Oh my goodness but ‘We’ is about all of that …. hyperrationality. They even seem to live in some sort of a bubble, and yes to the simplification of reality into a model… And certainly I think I see some paradox in a counterposed position. Larger picture, I do see what you mean. Irrationality is a fine word, but I’m understanding you to mean that has to be understood in a detached sense, similar to how one might describe a historical era as “rational” or “romantic”, where the meaning is about a zeitgeist, not the personal meaning as in “he is so romantic” or “she is so irrational”.
It’s not a short read, it’s full length, but if you are curious here it s https://gutenberg.org/files/61963/61963-h/61963-h.htm
The author was a mathematician although his first calling was writing, which is an interesting story in itself.
I have on good authority that Pushkin doesn't translate in English at all.
You are arguing that Solzhenitsyn is a RATIONAList? Mr. mystical Russian peasant soul of motherland himself? He is many things that I dislike, but "rational" is not one of them.
Solzhenitsyn takes sides, that’s his rationale. That understandably overwhelms him, becomes his personal vendetta. How is this literature?
Yes, that is true, and most writers do. However, for that reason, I included Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but not the Gulag Archipelago.
The Gulag is a masterpiece. It screams for Justice for the forgotten.
Indeed, he took sides for truth, justice and righteousness - he was the Jesus and the inhumanly strong Soviet political machinery the Pharisees, Sadducees and Herodians.
It's vital reading. All novels and indeed all books have a point of view. Perhaps the point of view is deliberately inconclusive, perhaps it comes to conclusions. He came to conclusions. I don't blame him and it's his moral right to do so, whether or not others like what he said or want to suppress it.
Well, Russians, ie the people actually familiar with whatever Solzhenitsyn was writing about, think his conclusions are .. not interesting. Btw, he spent so much time in the West, why he didn’t write anything about it? Nabokov wouldn’t understand, would he?
For western readers Solzhenitsyn is ok, because Russia is this mythical place where bad things happen in terrible cold - here is a convenient author to support that. And btw look at that beard! Tolstoy 2.0 clearly! A Russian reads it and .. nothing.
If he’s not accepted in his native country few generations after, why? Russians accepted all their great authors exiled and prosecuted. Unlike many greats, Solzhenitsyn enjoyed government support while alive! He was brought back personally by Gorbachev, surrounded by governmental care and his works were forced into school curriculum! He started writing political recommendations about how to build new Russia, where exact borders should be (hint- not what they are now) and what to do with the Jews. If you fancy him, maybe google all these late works of his.
He did write about the west. Chapter 7, '200 Years Together'. His observations dovetail with other observations, for example 'The Old World in the New', Ross, 1914, see the chapter on Eastern European (Russian/Ukrainian) Jewish immigrant population and some other chapters on other groups, which discuss the effects of the Jewish attack on immigration standards in light of those other immigrant populations' outcomes.
200 years together, means Russians and Jews together (strange title because 100 of those years Jews were not allowed to live in proper Russian lands), how is this about the west? Sounds like chatGPT finding any reference.
Solzhenitsyn had nothing to say about either the West or Russia, b cause he is stuck in deep, religious, unbearably bearded, and historically nonexistent past. And he hates the present, too confusing for him.
I've read about 30 of these, and I'm convinced many books reappear on lists like this through sheer inertia, just because they've _always_ been on lists like these. They got canonized and so now they're canonical and everybody is too polite to point out that they're straight up terrible.
Say it with me, say it loud, say it clear, Anna Karenina was garbage when it was written, it's still garbage now, and nothing that has happened will degarbagify it. Tolstoy's head was so far up his own ass it comes out of his mouth again. Calling that book sexist isn't even applying our standards retroactively to a different time and place, Anna Karenina was sexist BY THE STANDARDS OF TSARIST RUSSIA!!! Da fuq we continue to tell people to read it simply defeats me. No, no, no damnit, don't do this to readers!
Then there's Wuthering Heights. What that's doing on these lists I'll never know. It's not a bad attempt for a first novel, and it's a huge tragedy she died so young, and yes if she'd lived to write four or five more books she'd probably have written a great novel but c'mon Emily wasn't even the best writer in her house —where she didn't crack the top two!— let alone the world.
I will never, ever understand how Mann could write a book as beautiful as Buddenbrooks then turn around and write the swollen monstuosity on the mountain I just don't get.
Also, Barsetshire is way better than the Palliser novels — and though both are fun, neither's really high literature.
Drives me crazy. We canonized a bunch of crappy books early, and now there's no going back...
"There are no moral or immoral books", there are no sexist books. Anna Karenina is brilliant, a timeless masterpiece.
I stand with Anna Karenina, too ❤️
Sorry if Anna Karenina is not sexist, the word doesn’t mean anything at all.
Tolstoy hated women, nothing will ever convince me otherwise.
True. Have you read Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium? It is a wonderful take down of all the ‘great writers’ who have said hateful things about women. All in the form of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Highly recommended.
I read The Magic Mountain last year. As an adolescent I read Mann's Doctor Faustus and avoided him for close to 60 years. I found Magic Mountain to be turgid and not great.
I am presently about 2/3 of the way through The Empusium. It is neither turgid nor great. It's FUN! Liberty cap liqueur... a great concept! I may try and add some to my next preparation of pacharán.
Neither if you are backing up your claim
Plenty of work in out there for you to read. It's not a academic paper. Search for yourself or read his books.
I have read his books and you still haven’t made an actual argument.
How so? Anna is a brilliant person unable to be accepted as such in her society -- tied to a mediocre cad -- forced by her mother to marry a dreadful bore. That's a portrayal of sexism, but it's not sexist in itself.
Shzzzzzzzxxxzx.....
Correct it doesn’t mean anything
I agree with this assessment, though in my case Moby Dick is the beneficiary of over-reverence. I have now read it twice, about 30 years apart, and it was no better the second time. In fact, I disliked it so much that I swore off top 100 lists for a while.
Fair call. But this top 100 list has been a lot of fun. Some over-revered books are still books to read before you die because the story taps the culture.
Well Moby Dick is in a strange place in these lists: beloved of critics but universally hated by normal people. Life’s too short for books like that.
Nope. Read it on my own. It was fine.
Then read The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, which is truly brilliant and not hated (though perhaps because it's not read enough!)
YES!
It's funny, I HATED it in my twenties, but I read it again last year and loved it. I really enjoyed the humour of it, the digressions and non sequiturs. Perhaps I WAS normal, and now am not. 😁
Ohhh, so sad you don't love it. Melville is SUCH a hopeless weirdo. I've read Moby Dick 3 times and it got better each time. It's wildly funny — which I found out by reading it aloud to my partner at the time. My sons each read it and loved it, too, which is of course gratifying and totally irrelevant.
I read Moby Dick after getting my heart broken. It was fine. Better than insomnia.
Moby Dick would be a great story at about 50% of its current size.
I agree with you about Wuthering Heights. It's -- perhaps not terrible but not worthy of being on such a list. (And, hey, perhaps it IS terrible -- I read it at age 15 or so and hated it. Why read it again?
I have read the first four Barsetshire novels, and the first two Palliser (Parliamentarian) novels. I think they are all immensely enjoyable. I will reserve judgement until I've finished both series.
I do love Wuthering Heights and have read it several times, but probably because I was entranced by the Pat Benatar song.
Kate Bush, I believe:)
Fair enough. I do like Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles but I felt the seven or so Palliser novels was enough from Trollope for this list. I feel more generous towards the canon than you, and do feel Liza Libes and I both made conscious calls not to repeat the same old, same old out of inertia. One day, before it is too late, I will read Анна Каренина по русскии so must agree to disagree on that point
I have read the first 20-30 pages of Anna Karenina many times.
I loathed Wuthering Heights as an undergrad. Loathed it. Would nominate any Austen work in its place. And where is Chaucer?
Chaucer wasn't writing a novel. Neither was Borges. Pantagruel without Gargantua? Pfaaw. No Tale of Genji? It's truly an amazing work.
I agree about Austen, although she's not a great as suggested. Maryanne Evans, on the other hand, WAS great and Middlemarch deserves a higher ranking.
No Twain? No Snopes books? While The Sound and the Fury IS a great novel, the Snopes books deserve to be on any list.
Jean-Christophe (Roland Roland) was done a horrible disservice in translation.
Sigrid Undset? No thanks. Replace her with Harald Laxness.
Too much Dostoevsky, especially so near the top. No Turgenev. (Chekhov doesn't belong because he wrote only plays and short fiction.) Eugene Onegin can only be counted if one includes poetry, in which case I'd suggest Milton as an addition to your list. And Laurence Sterne's marvelous Tristram Shandy. The exclusion of that from a list of this type is criminal.
The first three of Thomas Pynchon's novels are all excellent AND enjoyable.
Homage to Catalonia is hardly a novel. It's not even fiction, although a bit fictionalized.
Since the list is restricted to more than a decade past, I still feel free to recommend the transcendent prose of David Foster Wallace. No longer does it suffer recentcy bias. He wrote marvelous, convoluted but coherent sentences. Same with Saul Bellow, John Barth and a very few others.
The absences are more important than the things included: almost all Latin American authors are absent - also most African and Asian writers. Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook? I recently read Pedro Paramó. I think everyone should.
I take your point re Chaucer. Got lost in memories of E Lit and struggling to maintain consciousness against the drone of a particularly lackluster prof, overheated classroom and inability to track characters in WH. (I still have that issue in some prose, both fiction and non.) Forgot the criteria of this list. My TBR shelf is huge these days. You may have just added to the virtual portion.
It’s ok to have a different opinion, but I would advise to word your opinion more respectfully.
I’m here to say that I find Wuthering Heights utterly brilliant. Anna Karenina I’m still working my way through. I have a love-hate relationship with that book myself, but I see the quality in it and why so many people love it.
There are bits of Wuthering Heights that really are brilliant. I can respect people who love it.
People who love Anna Karenina are my enemies.
We stand alone united against a sea of enemies.
In no particular order, I’d add:
1. Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban, UK). Actually, this is better listened to, as an audiobook, as the language is so strange as to make a barrier to comprehension when reading (at least that was my experience)
2. Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry, UK)
3. The Iliad or the Odyssey (Homer, Greece), depending on whether you like Life or Death.
4. *The Left Hand of Darkness* (Le Guin, USA)
5. The Aubrey/Maturin novels, up to The Letter of Marque (O’Brian, UK). If we’re having Jane Austen (as we should) we can surely make room for Jack and Steven.
6. Pantagruel (Rabelais, France). Everyone should read some Rabelais, “et si non, le fondement vous eschappe!” ;-)
7. The Essais (Montaigne, France)
8. Inner Chapters (Chuang Tzu, China). I’ve been dipping into this for 50 years and there’s always something new in it.
9. The Stars of Samarkand (me, UK). A thriller set in Samarkand in 1445 where our hero, physician Al-Shirazi, joins forces with the beautiful and highly educated Lady Gulnara, and uncovers a plot to topple Ulugh Beg, scholar-king and key figure of the Timurid Renaissance (currently looking for a publisher ;-) )
I hate Riddley Walker. I hate it when “literary” writers slum it in science fiction and get all this acclaim for ideas that are ordinary and even mundane for people familiar with the genre. A Canticle for Lebovitz and Earth Abides are far superior.
I do agree about LeGuin, but I’d go with The Dispossessed.
A Canticle for Libowitz is definitely one of the wonderful books.
Einstein Intersection Samual Delaney
The Magus John Fowles (esp. when your a young man)
As I said, I found RW impossible to read, but it excelled as an audio book. Also, it's a bit of a stretch to dismiss his themes and certainly his treatment of those themes as "mundane". I read CfL so long ago I've forgotten it, though some indistinct memory has it as "good". But I'm low-brow, so I also like the Stainless Steel rat books 😁
I like the Stainless Steel Rat books as well! But I wouldn’t say they are on a list of 100 books everyone should read.
So here’s the thing: I wouldn’t say Riddley Walker is mundane. It’s a good enough post-apocalyptic book. But I hate the great literary acclaim for something science fiction writers have done before, and done better. It’s as if a literary writer got all these awards for a novel about a group of people on a train, and one of them committed a murder, and a detective figures out who the killer was through clues. But the people lavishing the book with praise had never read a mystery novel before and didn’t know Agatha Christie had actually written a book about a murder on a train. But this author is getting praise for the brilliant idea of the locked room murder mystery on a moving train.
It’s the same reason I find Margaret Atwood insufferable. She writes science fiction, but then she looks down her nose at science fiction as a genre and spins complicated explanations about how what she writes isn’t science fiction. LeGuin was very literary in her style, and her science wasn’t particularly good, but she was nice to other science fiction writers and didn’t denigrate the genre, of which she was clearly a part.
And if the idea is to write a book with an invented vernacular, make it alien enough but also something people can read. I’d say that both Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange and Heinlein in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress do the whole invented vernacular better.
"Canticle" is great.
Thanks for mentioning LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness! Her work is amazing and that one is definitely a must read!
The lack of science fiction in this list is disappointing.
Not only SF but not Including LOTR is questionable
Amen to Riddley Walker
Where are Don DeLillo, Philip Roth? Kerouac? Norman Mailer? L.F. Céline, Hunter S. Thompson? Jim Harrison? Charles Bukowski? Bret Easton Ellis, Cristina Campo, Joan Didion, McCarthy, Roberto Bolaño, William Gaddis…? It's always the same books that we're told about.
Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy are absolutely amazing. Horrible, horrifying and transcendent. THE VOICE!
Kerouac is great if read stoned and young. I read 'On the Road' straight when I was fifty. What a Waste!
Don't let yourself be trapped by "the road." He wrote superb poetry! Then "Visions of Cody," Big Sur, The Celestial Tramps..., Satorie in Paris, Tristessa, a small but stunning book...
I may give the poetry a try
In the trash where they all belong
Many do. Fear and Loathing holds up.
On the Campaign Trail or in Las Vegas?
In Las Vegas.
Joyce is Irish, not British.
Thanks. I have corrected.
Lots of Aussies on that list I never heard of. 70 of your selection I've read and some of them wouldn't be on my list. 'The Idiot' was a surprising omission as was 'The Third Policeman' and 'The Gingerbread Man'. But hey, total respect for your choices. Thanks.
At Swim-Two-Birds.
Joyce actually refused to get an Irish passport even during World War 2 when having it rather than a British one would have been much easier for him to move from Italy to Switzerland as he did in 1943.
Did he? So that make him British? Samuel Beckett had a French passport, he was French so.
I think writers have at least three identities: ethnic (including city or region of birth), linguistic (what language they write in), and national (what passport they hold). British is never an ethnic identity as it is only an empire or nation state. I do think one should respect the choice of an adult as to their chosen nationality. Both Ireland and France can claim Beckett, as both the US and the UK can claim James, Eliot, Auden, and Rushdie among others.
Joyce and Beckett did not choose to be British or French so I don't understand what you're trying to say. Joyce is buried in Switzerland so does that make him Swiss? Nabokov is a Russian or an American/Swiss?
How can you say Joyce didn’t choose to be British when he deliberately applied for a British rather than an Irish passport? Beckett chose to live in Paris, chose to write in French. The French honor him and consider his French literature French.
Almost nobody reads "Finnegans Wake," and almost everyone who says they have is either lying or got next to nothing out of it. I had a professor of Irish lit in grad school, whose specialty was Joyce, and even he hadn't read it. He said he was saving it for the retirement home. Harold Bloom is probably single handedly responsible for it being on so many of these lists. "Ulysses," yes. "Finnegans Wake," definately doesn't belong on a list of a mere 100 must read books.
Finnegans Wake ought to be treated like a rare pilgrimage walk. The aim is not to see it all, but to walk some of the way, at least once in your life. I think the trick with Finnegans Wake is to read it online in a hypertext version that unpacks all or most of the references and language play. I will never read it all the way to the end. It is like wandering through a great forest… you only ever seen a sliver of it, but that sliver is so marvellous.
It doesn't REALLY end. It goes back to the beginning.
I wasted a long time struggle with it, found parts amusing and would then lose the thread. For word wooze, I prefer Lawrence Durell.
A vote to include Gravity’s Rainbow by Pynchon. Astounding work of fiction
Ugh
It's a good and interesting list. It's difficult with only having last names to know how many of them are by women. Many of the ones I recognise are male, as are the vast majority of recommendations in the comments. Often books cited or recommended by men tend to be by male authors. This patriarchal frame is limiting in so many ways.
True. Not as many women as I would like by today’s ethical standards, but more than some of these lists. Of course, the “first novel” by Lady Murasaki is there. I might add in the first names in an edit. Of course, there are a few tricks like George Eliot and Henry Handel Richardson - both of whom were women
My god daughter is a great fan of Jane Austen and has been since she was 11 or 12. I recommended George Elliot to her. She said, "I only want to read female authors." Maryanne Evans for sure!
Todays ethical standards would ban all of these so who cares about them
We all have different tastes : great list however I’d include in mine certain ‘popular’ reads that are not only classic but well written and some perhaps prophetic
1. The Hobbit and Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk
3. The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse
4. Shogun by James Clavell
5. Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
Foundation felt like a radio play. Lots of talking about what was happening, but not much showing of what was happening.
mmmm I can see that. To me it was fascinating as a kid,adult,septuagenarian each stage for different reasons. The books were prophetic in many different levels for many different reasons - he was foremost a scientist - perhaps that’s why the style was what it was
Abraham Verghese is terrific. Surprised to see you rate "Wuthering Heights" above "Jane Eyre", the latter a far superior work for many reasons.
Fair, and thanks. I admit that if I have read Jane Eyre, I have forgotten it. I did remember Wuthering Heights though, especially since I grew up with Kate Bush singing it.
-Les croisades vue par les arabes (The crusades through Arab Eyes) by Amin Maalouf.
- Las casa de los espiritus (the House of the Soirits) by Isabel Allende.
-In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish.
...
And a movie when you get tired of reading: Иваново детство (Ivan's Childhood) by Andrei Tarkovsky.
100 Movies to watch will need to be another list. thanks for the tips
And of course thank you for sharing @jeffrich I will have more books to read, before my death Insha'Allah.
All you really need to do is read Dostoevsky’s oeuvre.
I'd add Yukio Mishima's tetralogy Sea of Fertility, Satre's trilogy Roads to Freedom, The Plague by Camus, John Fante's Ask the Dust, Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of Night, Pasó Por Aquí by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Camille by Alexandre Dumas fils, the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos, T.H. White's The Once and Future King, Henri Alain-Fournier's The Lost Domain, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars, and, well, so many others.
Who you are and what your life is and has been like affects very greatly the literature that means something to you and impacts your life. For example, a friend strongly recommended I read Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry but it did nothing for me at all and I would not have bothered finishing it except that I did not want disappoint my friend. That's why I agreed with him that it was truly a great novel. But it really wasn't for me.
I also think _when_ you read a novel is very important in how it influences you. If you read Madame Bovary when you are 14 or 15, it is a powerful window on and a warning about life. If you read it when you are 35 or 40 it is, to a large extent, just FAFO.
Agree on Mishima, and what a joy to see someone recognize “Le Grand Meaulnes” !
Le Grand Meaulnes definitely
Great suggestions and great point on how life experience shapes the list
Got a lot of reading to do...
Doris Lessing with "The Fifth Child" would be in my list.
J.M. Coetzee would also make it but with "Disgrace"