Posted by Steven on 22/8/2011, 10:59:18
76.186.51.185
Ten years ago, Lale, Guillermo, and others inaugurated the ReadLiterature.com book club. Congratulations to them and to all those who have taken part in this worthy and enjoyable endeavor! It has meant a lot to me over the years: great books, lively discussions, and warm friendships.
To commemorate the anniversary, let's have a poll where we each name our top ten books from the selections the group has read together over the years. Even though we read more books some years than others, it turns out that we've read exactly 120 books in 120 months!
This poll is open to anyone who has participated in the group at any time, and you may vote for a book even if you didn't read it as part of the group. Use whatever criteria you think best for picking your "Top Ten." Please list them in order by rank: #1 most favorite, #2 second, etc. Hopefully there will be enough responses and overlap that I can compile a composite "best of the best" list.
Please consider sharing other observations on our reading list, such as "least favorite," "best discovery," "most memorable character," etc. Now here is the ballot, listed in reading order:
2001
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz - Mordecai Richler
In the Fall - Jeffrey Lent
The Razor’s Edge - William Somerset Maugham
The Hidden Force - Louis Couperus
2002
The War of the End of the World - Mario Vargas Llosa
Waiting for My Cats to Die - Stacy Horn
Black Dogs - Ian McEwan
A House for Mr. Biswas - V. S. Naipaul
Blindness - Jose Saramago
A Very Long Engagement - Sebastien Japrisot
A Burt-Out Case - Graham Greene
Straight Man - Richard Russo
The Vivisector - Patrick White
The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
Austerlitz - W. G. Sebald
In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck
2003
Invitation to a Beheading - Vladimir Nabokov
The Golem - Gustav Meyrink
Shipwrecks - Akira Yoshimura
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Against the Grain - Joris-Karl Huysmans
The Beggar - Naguib Mahfouz
Zeno’s Conscience - Italo Svevo
Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar
The Inspector General - Nikolai Gogol
The Same Sea - Amos Oz
Ferdydurke - Witold Gombrowicz
The Dream of Scipio - Iain Pears
2004
Carter Beats the Devil - Glen David Gold
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
A Student of Weather - Elizabeth Hay
Tender Is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
Life: A User’s Manual - Georges Perec
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon - Jorge Amado
Gould’s Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
Rituals - Cees Nooteboom
2005
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
Snow - Orhan Pamuk
Sentimental Education - Gustave Flaubert
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
2006
Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata
The Man Who Was Thursday - G. K. Chesterton
Memed My Hawk - Yashar Kemal
The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer
Saturday - Ian McEwan
I Am a Cat - Natsume Soseki
Summer in Baden Baden - Leonid Tsypkin
True History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey
The Bridge on the Drina - Ivo Andric
Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh
Death in Rome - Wolfgang Koeppen
War with the Newts - Karek Capek
2007
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
The Master - Colm Toibin
The Death of Virgil - Hermann Broch
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee
Victory - Joseph Conrad
The Emigrants - W. G. Sebald
The Cairo Trilogy - Naguib Mahfouz
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fifth Business - Robertson Davies
The Royal Game (Chess Story) - Stefan Zweig
2008
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai
Home of the Gentry - Ivan Turgenev
The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Mist - Miguel de Unamuno
Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky
Embers - Sandor Marai
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa
Zorba the Greek - Nikos Kazantzakis
Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
Arthur & George - Julian Barnes
I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree) - Giovanni Verga
2009
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Jealousy and In the Labyrinth - Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Planetarium - Nathalie Sarraute
The Black Tulip - Alexandre Dumas (pere)
The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) - Hermann Hesse
The Sea - John Banville
De Niro’s Game - Rawi Hage
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
The Vicar of Wakefield - Oliver Goldsmith
The Witches of Eastwick - John Updike
What Maisie Knew - Henry James
The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories - Ivan Bunin
2010
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy - Laurence Sterne
Auto-da-Fe - Elias Canetti
Housekeeping - Marilynn Robinson
Berlin Alexanderplatz - Alfred Doblin
The Stone Angel - Margaret Laurence
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge - Rainer Maria Rilke
The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
The Lover - Marguerite Duras
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Petersburg - Andrei Bely
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master - Denis Diderot
Memento Mori - Muriel Spark
2011
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Severed Head - Iris Murdoch
Wittgenstein’s Mistress - David Markson
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr - E. T. A. Hoffmann
The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa
Journal of a Plague Year - Daniel Defoe
History of the Siege of Lisbon - Jose Saramago
Message Thread
« Back to index