Posted by Steven on 23/8/2011, 9:57:18, in reply to "Re: Read Literature 10th Anniversary Poll"
76.186.51.185
I joined the group in 2005 and have read everything on the list from that point forward (except for not yet finishing the Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway). Of the 39 books prior to 2005, I've only read 16 so far.
So out of the 97 that I've read, here are my Top Ten:
1. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
2. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
4. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
5. The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
6. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
7. Housekeeping - Marilynn Robinson
8. The Sea - John Banville
9. The Death of Virgil - Hermann Broch
10. The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer
On any given day, these five "honorable mention" (and probably others) might have been part of the top ten:
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee
The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
Petersburg - Andrei Bely
There are only three books from this list that I can truly say I didn't like:
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Fifth Business - Robertson Davies
Rituals - Cees Nooteboom
Most of the books we read are ones I've at least heard of and would possibly have read anyway eventually. These are my favorites of the ones that I would possibly never have heard of had it not been for someone's nomination:
Mist - Miguel de Unamuno
Death in Rome - Wolfgang Koeppen
I Am a Cat - Natsume Soseki
I find it very difficult to rate and rank novels, as my perception changes over time. For more than 30 years I have logged every book I've read and rated it on a 1-10 scale. Looking back, there are books I rated "10" that I can't even remember reading, and ones I rated "6" that I now recall as among my all-time favorites. The same is true of lists I've made in the past of my "top 10," "top 25," etc. I was going to follow Sterling's lead and do an all-time "top 10," but the pain of leaving off a worthy book has made it a "top 25."
1. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
2. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
3. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. Sons and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence
5. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
6. The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
7. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
8. The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
9. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
10. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
11. Middlemarch – George Eliot
12. Housekeeping - Marilynn Robinson
13. Vanity Fair – William M. Thackeray
14. Germinal -- Emile Zola
15. The Sea - John Banville
16. The Death of Virgil - Hermann Broch
17. U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
18. The Rainbow – D. H. Lawrence
19. The Ambassadors – Henry James
20. The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
21. The French Lieutenant’s Woman - John Fowles
22. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
23. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
24. The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanizaki
25. The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer
And I can't bear that I still had to leave off The Red and the Black, An American Tragedy, Howards End, Madame Bovary........
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