The Greatest Books of All Time

[Ville]

The Greatest Books of All Time, as Voted by 125 Famous Authors



"Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work," Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers' success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. "The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books" asks 125 of modernity's greatest British and American writers—including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates—"to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time- novels, story collections, plays, or poems."

Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list—so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point.

[...]

Top Ten Authors by Points Earned

1. Leo Tolstoy – 327

2. William Shakespeare – 293

3. James Joyce – 194

4. Vladimir Nabokov – 190

5. Fyodor Dostoevsky – 177

6. William Faulkner – 173

7. Charles Dickens – 168

8. Anton Checkhov – 165

9. Gustave Flaubert – 163

10. Jane Austen – 161


[... Full Article At Link Above]

[Riki]

The Greatest Books of All Time

For the voters.

[Ville]

Below is an interesting bit on relationships between Tolstoy and Checkov.


Chekhov: "Among other things, he [Tolstoy] spoke about me and my works. Finally, when I was about to say goodbye he took my hand and said, 'Kiss me goodbye.' While I bent over him and he was kissing me, he whispered in my ear in a still energetic, old man's voice, 'You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.'"

…

Ivan Bunin, winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 1933, recalls in the new biography how Chekhov would tell him about Tolstoy: "I admire him greatly. What I admire the most in him is that he despises us all; all writers. Perhaps a more accurate description is that he treats us, other writers, as completely empty space. You could argue that from time to time, he praises Maupassant, or Kuprin, or Semenov, or myself. But why does he praise us? It is simple: it's because he looks at us as if we were children. Our short stories, or even our novels, all are child's play in comparison with his works. However, Shakespeare … For him, the reason is different. Shakespeare irritates him because he is a grown-up writer, and does not write in the way that Tolstoy does."

[Joe McCarthy]

Admit it: you posted this because there are so many Russians on the list.

[Sally]

There is a lot of great material by Russian authors.

These are some of my favourites:

The Death of Ivan by Ilyich Leo Tolstoy
The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekov
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Any poem by Mikhail Lermontov

[Drawing-slim]

Dostoevsky shouldn't make this list, I found him dissapointing
Chekhov with his short stories is brlliant.

[Comte Arnau]

Only 20 novels from only two centuries, and writers in only four languages (English: 65% - Russian: 20% - French: 10% - Spanish: 5%).

But they call it the Greatest Books of All Time...


Thanks for the link, though. I like this type of things, only that they should use less pompous titles.

[Treffie]

My personal favourite

[beaver]

But they call it the Greatest Books of All Time...

There should be also at least Servantes, Rabelais and Goethe on the top positions if they were talking about "Greatest Books of All Time", not talking about Gomer etc. Right name for the thread would have been (imho): who influenced writers from the "Anglosphere" during the first half of the 20th century most of all?

[Comte Arnau]

These lists usually suck because they're obviously based on what voters have read, and voters have only read what has been translated into their language. The best works in languages spoken by fewer than 50 millions can be just as good or even better than some well-known works, they only happened not to be translated into English until recent times. Some aren't translated as of yet.

What is more, comparing works of the last two centuries with older works is a bit unfair, simply because of the change in the language. Readers of today will always prefer recent books because they are more palatable to our taste. There should always be different categories for ancient, medieval, early modern and contemporary works. It is easier to compare Shakespeare with Molière or Lope de Vega, three masters of drama in their respective languages, than with any 20th-century novel writer, for instance.

Maybe we should start an Apricity Literary Canon of our own.