May 27, 2013

  • Best Books of All Time - World Library List

    In 2011, 100 notable writers voted on the 100 greatest novels of all time. I was curious to see how many I had read, and let me say... I'm a little surprised of how many I've never even heard of...


    Finished Reading

    Started but didn't finish

    Never read

    The List

    1) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin

    2) 1984 by George Orwell

    3) Hamlet by William Shakespeare

    4) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    5) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

    6) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

    7) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

    8) The Odyssey by Homer

    9) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

    10) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

    11) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

    12) The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway

    13) The Brother Karamazov by Fryodor Dostoyevsky

    14) The Stranger by Albert Camus

    15) King Lear by William Shakespeare

    16) Don Quioxote by Miguel de Cerventes Saavaedra

    17) The Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Anderson

    18) Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

    19) The Iliad by Homer

    20) The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Caucer

    21) Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

    22) The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

    23) Madame Boavary by gustave Flaubert

    24) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

    25) Othello by William Shakespeare

    26) Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf

    27) The Trial by Franz Kafka

    28) Ulysses by James Joyce

    29) Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

    30) Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

    31) The Collected Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

    32) The Arabian Nights by Anonymous

    33) Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

    34) Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

    35) Blindness #1 by Jose Saramago

    36) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

    37) Invisible Man by Ralph Eillison

    38) Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

    39) The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous

    40) Beloved by Toni Morrison

    41) The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

    42) The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka

    43) Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life by George Eliot

    44) A Doll's House by Henrik Insem

    45) Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

    46) The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    47) Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac

    48) To the Lighthouse by Virginia Wolf

    49) Medea by Euripides

    50) Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov

    51) Hunger by Knut Hamsun

    52) The Aeneid by Virgil

    53) Faust: First Part by Joahann Wolfgang van Goethe

    54) Leaves of Grass by Walt Witman

    55) The Decameron by Giovanni Boccoccio

    56) Dead Souls by Nikilai Gogol

    57) Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1) by Marcel Proust

    58) The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

    59) Ficciones by Jorge Lius Borgas

    60) The Red and the Black by Stendhal

    61) Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann

    62) Metamorphoses by Ovid

    63) Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourenar

    64) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

    65) Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

    66) Mahabharata by Annoynmous

    67) The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne

    68) Ramayana by William Buck

    69) The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

    70) Demons by Fydor Dostoyevsky

    71) The Tin Drums by Gunter Grass

    72) Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

    73) Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

    74) Njal's Saga by Anonymous

    75) Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert

    76)  Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable: A Trilogy by Samuel Beckett

    77) The Castle by Franz Kafka

    78)  مثنوی معنوی by Rumi

    79) Gargantua an Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais

    80) Independent People by Halldor Laxness

    81) Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

    82) The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

    83) أولاد حارتنا by نجيب محفوظ

    84) The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

    85) Jacques the fatalist by Denis Diderot

    86) Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

    87) Romancero Gitano by Fredrico Garcia Lorca

    88) The Book of Job by Anonmyous

    89) The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

    90) Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun

    91) Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

    92) Berlin Alexanderplatz Alfred Doblin

    93) Poems of Paul Celan by Paul Celan

    94) The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabatoa

    95) History by Elsa Morante

    96) Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo

    97) The Recognition of Sakuntala by Kalidasa

    98) Grande Sertao: Veredas by Joao Guimaraes Rosa

    99) The Poems of Leopardi by Giacomo Leopardi

    100) The Orchard: The Bostan of Saadi of Shiraz by Saadi

     

    How many have you read?

     

     

Comments (14)

  • Neat! PS. you theme hurts my eyes and change the colors of the room :P

  • I've read these
    Othello
    The Divine Comedy
    The Canterbury Tales
    Moby-Dick
    The Iliad
    Don Quioxote
    The Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales
    The Old Man and the Sea
    The Odyssey
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    1984
    Most of the books I've never heard of.

  • I'm surprised I read so many...38

  • This blog post is really great; the standard stuff of the post is genuinely amazing.
    how to remove jailbreak from iphone 4s

  • More like greatest English/Western-European novels of all time. 

    Most titles look familiar, but I've only read a handful during high school.

  • I believe I am probably much much older than you and as such have been reading longer, but like you I am surprised by how many I have never heard of!

  • Three by Kafka? Four Dostoyevskys?  That ain't right.  Where is Phillip Roth?  Amy Tan?  James Baldwin?

  • 24, I think.  19 still waiting on my shelf to be read.  Only recognized one out of the last ten.

  • Anyone with internet connection and a computer could go to "ManyBooks.net and download a classic book that is not under copywrite protection. You have to select a format and right now Amazon with its Kindle format is growing to be the most popular format to read a free downloaded book from manybooks.net

    I use the old format that Amazon has used. Mobipocket format is not bad and their "desktop" version can convert PDF, text and other formats to read on the computer.
    Microsoft's old ebook version is now discontinued. However even old discontinued formats have hacked version to convert even that into a readable format.
    @we_deny_everything - If Philip Roth made the list, I would have been leery of it. But you are right about Amy Tan and James Baldwin they both are modern writers that will be on the "classic" list.

  • @PPhilip - I am sure you must be joking.

  • @we_deny_everything - I read "Pornoy's complaint" and that was a bit shocking in those days. Maybe you are referring to his other works that is considered a classic?

  • @PPhilip - Ya think?  What tipped you off?  Was it his 2 National Book Awards, 3 PEN/Faulkner Awards, National Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Ambassador Book Award?

  • I'm as bewildered to see 'Pride and Prejudice' at the top as I am to see 'Pere Goriot' as low as 47.

    'Goriot' is a well-observed, thought-provoking moral journey, with real characters with dirt under the nails.
    'P&P' is a trashy romance, with all the well-worn devices of the time: everybody turning out to be everybody else's long-lost cousin, cardboard gruff chap turns out to be cardboard not so bad after all chap, reversal of fortunes... the usual crap. 

  • Best Books of All Time – World Library List | Roo_Crew2015's Xanga Site

Comments are closed.

Post a Comment