100 novels everyone should read
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No Lord Of The Rings is one book. That's how it was written and how it was intended to be read. Tolkien was forced into the rather artificial dividing of the work by his publisher and he was never happy with it. Most modern editions reunite the three parts in a single volume in any event.
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Crap list. No Dune, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Martian Chronicles, Foundation and Empire, Dhalgren, etc.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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I managed to score 8 plus starts on another 3. It should be noted that number 100 on the list is actually 3 books.
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Well hardly invalid. It's a list of 100 novels that should be read. It doesn't say anywhere that it's the only 100 novels you should read nor indeed that these are the 'best', 'greatest' or any other superlative you care to mention. It doesn't even claim that the list is any kind of definition of 'literature' as we know it.
Member 9082365 wrote: It doesn't say anywhere that it's the only 100 novels you should read nor indeed that these are the 'best', 'greatest' or any other superlative you care to mention. Though my reply was tongue in cheek, all of the above are implied when the title states I "should" read them. My intent was to add a different opinion to the mine's-bigger-than-yours conversations by everyone's claim to how many they've read. Another reason not to take me more seriously, is that I think The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the greatest novel of all time - with War and Peace coming in a close second. "I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand." - Douglas Adams
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Member 9082365 wrote: It doesn't say anywhere that it's the only 100 novels you should read nor indeed that these are the 'best', 'greatest' or any other superlative you care to mention. Though my reply was tongue in cheek, all of the above are implied when the title states I "should" read them. My intent was to add a different opinion to the mine's-bigger-than-yours conversations by everyone's claim to how many they've read. Another reason not to take me more seriously, is that I think The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the greatest novel of all time - with War and Peace coming in a close second. "I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand." - Douglas Adams
I don't think there's any such implication. In fact, on the whole, things you should do are often on the less than enjoyable side. I agree, for example, that one should read Ulysses for an understanding of 'stream of consciousness', the Irish voice, and the beginnings of surrealism and absurdism as the first World War's horrors began to impinge on the universal consciousness and conscience. That doesn't for one second suggest that I think you're likely to find it an enjoyable read or that it's going to be a favourite. I'm far from sure that the 'greatest novel of all time' is in any way meaningful. I'm happy to agree that HGTTG is the greatest sci-fi pastiche featuring dolphins and white mice as super intelligent beings with a special interest in really hot tea and towels but to suggest that there is any actual point of comparison between it and a translated Russian novel about the the causes and effects of conflict is almost as mad as actually believing that white mice are super intelligent beings and ultimately responsible for everything that constitutes the history on which 'War and Peace' is grounded! At the end of the day (or the beginning or any point in between) just what does 'great' mean in relation to literature? The longest, the funniest, the bizarrest, the most grammatical, best use of the subjunctive ........ ?
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11 for sure, a few others I was on the fence about. However, I've seen the movie for lots of others, so that's pretty much the same thing. ;)
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Well, of that list I've read 46. At least half of those 46 books I didn't think were that great. I am a lot older now, and some of them I find quite unreadable, like Nausea, Der Glasperlenspeil, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ulysses. Others in the list are still awesome, and I have re-read recently, like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Code of the Woosters, Pride & Prejudice. Any list of just 100 books is going to be flawed, and this list is just as flawed as any other. Moby Dick at second, and Anna Karenina at third place show that the list-maker is bound by convention. If Moby Dick wasn't a "great" novel, no-one would read it. And I doubt that any modern reader would put up with the spineless, inanimate jelly that Tolstoy uses as the sock-puppet for all his delusions of womanhood in Anna Karenina. OK, Middlemarch at number one. Personally I would have had a Jane Austen, or perhaps a P.G. Wodehouse. But if I had chosen a George Eliot, I would have picked Silas Marner, the only really happy Eliot novel.
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I've read 41 of them, that's a pretty random list, it seems to be a list of 100 books the author has read that seem impressive enough to include in a list. I was not surprised to see Moby Dick on that list, it's so overrated, what a miserable piece of turgid prose and over-wrought symbolism. It's a book that people only pretend to like because they're supposed to. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance should be on that list, that's most certainly a book everyone should read. Also, if sci-fi is going to be included then something by Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula Le Guin should be on that list somewhere.
Ursula LeGuin is on the list. Gibson and Clarke should make way for Heinlein and Asimov, IMHO.
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23 or there about. Going back 45 years ain't easy. add .5 for a botched attempt (reaching page 111) to read Ulysses when I visited Dublin which I thought would motivate me further :-D .