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This, according to 125 great writers:
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Hamlet by William Shakespeare The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov Middlemarch by George Eliot
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1578073,00.html#ixzz1JHKV2SaP
I would only include Huck Finn and Hamlet on the list. I have read all of them except the Checkov book and Middlemarch.
No Homer? No Melville? No Kipling? No Dostoevsky? No Washington Irving? No Shelley? No Lawrence? Come on people. 🙂
What about Tolkien or some of the Latin classics. The only books I see on that list are ones guys with goatees in coffee shops get all angsty about.
I would only include Huck Finn and Hamlet on the list. I have read all of them except the Checkov book and Middlemarch.
Include Tom Sawyer also in the list. ;D
At U.C. Berkely 1950, I took a “great books” course that included:OthelloDon QuixoteWar and PeaceMadame BovaryVanity Fair in the 1930s had famous authors list the most boring books they had read. Many classics made the cut.
I imagine that this list changes over time even if the voters are choosing from the same pool of books, based on the prevailing tastes at the time. The books that are truly remarkable, though, will be on “best ever” lists today, as well as 50 years ago, or 50 years into the future. I am guessing that Hamlet will still be on this list, whereas something like Lolita might not.
With or without Lolita, still on a local map 😀 I wonder what would it be with a worlwide map ?
It sounds like you have something in mind. Care to share?
