Fun with Book Lists...

[shadowkat]

Fun with book lists.

For the science fiction/fantasy fans?

Go here for a review of the 100 best sci-fi/fantasy according to This Recording.

And here for the 20 best sci-fi of the Decade: http://io9.com/5423847/20-best-science-fiction-books-of-the-decade (according to Io9 - it has full reviews and pic's of the covers or I'd include the list). I've only read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (which I don't really consider sci-fi - Gibson wrote each book in the three book arc, to take place one year before he began writing.)
I own a couple.

The Guardian does 1000 Books Everyone Must Read - part one is sci-fi fantasy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/22/1000-novels-science-fiction-fantasy-part-one


Here's the list of the 100 Best Books in World Literature!

The editors of the Norwegian Book Clubs, with the Norwegian Nobel Institute, polled a panel of 100 authors from 54 countries on what they considered the “best and most central works in world literature.” Among the authors polled were Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, John Irving, Nadine Gordimer, and Carlos Fuentes. The list of 100 works appears alphabetically by author. Although the books were not ranked, the editors revealed that Don Quixote received 50% more votes than any other book.

(Bold one's you've read, italicize what you own or is waiting on your bookshelf, and underline
what you started to read and did not complete.)

* Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
* Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales and Stories - Favorite is still the Snow Queen.
* Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
* Honore de Balzac, Old Father Goriot
* Samuel Beckett, Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable - (damn, none of the one's I actually read)
* Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron
* Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
* Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
* Albert Camus, The Stranger
* Paul Celan, Poems
* Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
* Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote - I do not understand the appeal of this book.
* Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales - forced due to being an English Lit major, although read most of them in high-school and junior high, oddly enough
* Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories; Thousand and One Nights
* Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
* Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
* Charles Dickens, Great Expectations - I keep trying.
* Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
* Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
* George Eliot, Middlemarch - saw the mini-series.
* Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man - I keep meaning to.
* Euripides, Medea
* William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
* Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
* Federico Garcia Lorca, Gypsy Ballads
* Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
* Anon, The Epic of Gilgamesh
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
* Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
* Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
* Joao Guimaraes Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
* Knut Hamsun, Hunger
* Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
* Homer, The Iliad; The Odyssey
* Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
* Anon, The Book of Job
* James Joyce, Ulysses
* Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle
* Kalidasa, The Recognition of Sakuntala
* Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain
* Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
* D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
* Halldor K. Laxness, Independent People
* Giacomo Leopardi, Complete Poems
* Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
* Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking
* Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
* Anon, Mahabharata
* Naguib Mahfouz, Children of Gebelawi
* Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks; The Magic Mountain
* Herman Melville, Moby Dick
* Michel de Montaigne, Essays
* Elsa Morante, History
* Toni Morrison, Beloved
* Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
* Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
* Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Njal's Saga
* George Orwell, 1984 - several times
* Ovid, Metamorphoses
* Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
* Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales
* Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past - come to the conclusion that Proust is an acquired taste.
* Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
* Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
* Jalalu'l-Din Rumi, The Mathnawi
* Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
* Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz, The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard)
* Tayeb Salih, A Season of Migration to the North
* Jose Saramago, Blindness
* William Shakespeare, Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
* Sophocles, Oedipus the King
* Stendhal, The Red and the Black - adored this when I read it in high school for some reason, a French pen-pal rec'd it to me.
* Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
* Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno
* Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
* Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
* Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
* Valmiki, Ramayana
* Virgil, The Aeneid
* Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
* Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; To the Lighthouse - also an acquired taste - I find her impossible to read, way to navel gazing.
* Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Read more: Top 100 Works in World Literature — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0934958.html#ixzz1V8dSLbU7





ALL TIME 100 Novels

TIME critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-Language novels from 1923 to the present. It's in alphabetical order and the same rules as above, bold what you've read, underline what you tried to read, and italicize what you own.

* The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow
* All the King's Men (1946), by Robert Penn Warren
* American Pastoral (1997), by Philip Roth
* An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser
* Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
* Appointment in Samarra (1934), by John O'Hara
* Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (1970), by Judy Blume - one of my favorite YA novels.
* The Assistant (1957), by Bernard Malamud
* At Swim-Two-Birds (1938), by Flann O'Brien
* Atonement (2002), by Ian McEwan - hated this book, because the characters made me crazy, but it does have an interesting twist
* Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison - haunting ghost story, skip the film, read the book
* The Berlin Stories (1946), by Christopher Isherwood - I Am Camera is featured in it.
* The Big Sleep (1939), by Raymond Chandler
* The Blind Assassin (2000), by Margaret Atwood
* Blood Meridian (1986), by Cormac McCarthy
* Brideshead Revisited (1946), by Evelyn Waugh
* The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder
* Call It Sleep (1935), by Henry Roth
* Catch-22 (1961), by Joseph Heller - painful read, painful.
* The Catcher in the Rye (1951), by J.D. Salinger also painful read, did not like this book.
* A Clockwork Orange (1963), by Anthony Burgess
* The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by William Styron
* The Corrections (2001), by Jonathan Franzen
* The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon
* A Dance to the Music of Time (1951), by Anthony Powell
* The Day of the Locust (1939), by Nathanael West
* Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather
* A Death in the Family (1958), by James Agee
* The Death of the Heart (1958), by Elizabeth Bowen
* Deliverance (1970), by James Dickey
* Dog Soldiers (1974), by Robert Stone
* Falconer (1977), by John Cheever
* The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), by John Fowles
* The Golden Notebook (1962), by Doris Lessing
* Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), by James Baldwin - I think I did, I honestly can't remember.
* Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell
* The Grapes of Wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck
* Gravity's Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pynchon
* The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald
* A Handful of Dust (1934), by Evelyn Waugh
* The Heart is A Lonely Hunter (1940), by Carson McCullers
* The Heart of the Matter (1948), by Graham Greene
* Herzog (1964), by Saul Bellow
* Housekeeping (1981), by Marilynne Robinson
* A House for Mr. Biswas (1962), by V.S. Naipaul
* I, Claudius (1934), by Robert Graves
* Infinite Jest (1996), by David Foster Wallace
* Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison
* Light in August (1932), by William Faulkner
* The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), by C.S. Lewis
* Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov
* Lord of the Flies (1955), by William Golding
* The Lord of the Rings (1954), by J.R.R. Tolkien
* Loving (1945), by Henry Green
* Lucky Jim (1954), by Kingsley Amis
* The Man Who Loved Children (1940), by Christina Stead
* Midnight's Children (1981), by Salman Rushdie
* Money (1984), by Martin Amis
* The Moviegoer (1961), by Walker Percy
* Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
* Naked Lunch (1959), by William Burroughs
* Native Son (1940), by Richard Wright
* Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson
* Never Let Me Go (2005), by Kazuo Ishiguro
* 1984 (1948), by George Orwell
* On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouc
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), by Ken Kesey
* The Painted Bird (1965), by Jerzy Kosinski
* Pale Fire (1962), by Vladimir Nabokov - must read for all academics and poets and critics, it's a satire on academia and criticism - the entire story takes place in the footnotes! Best use of footnotes ever!!
* A Passage to India (1924), by E.M. Forster
* Play It As It Lays (1970), by Joan Didion
* Portnoy's Complaint (1969), by Philip Roth
* Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt - Loved this - also a must read for poets and academics - it's a love story that takes place inside an academic puzzle.
* The Power and the Glory (1939), by Graham Greene
* The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), by Muriel Spark
* Rabbit, Run (1960), by John Updike
* Ragtime (1975), by E.L. Doctorow
* The Recognitions (1955), by William Gaddis
* Red Harvest (1929), by Dashiell Hammett
* Revolutionary Road (1961), by Richard Yates
* The Sheltering Sky (1949), by Paul Bowles
* Slaughterhouse Five (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut
* Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson
* The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), by John Barth
* The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner
* The Sportswriter (1986), by Richard Ford
* The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1964), by John le Carre
* The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway
* Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston
* Things Fall Apart (1959), by Chinua Achebe
* To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee
* To the Lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf
* Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller
* Ubik (1969), by Philip K. Dick
* Under the Net (1954), by Iris Murdoch
* Under the Volcano (1947), by Malcolm Lowry
* Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
* White Noise (1985), by Don DeLillo
* White Teeth (2000), by Zadie Smith
* Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys

Graphic Novels

* Berlin: City of Stones (2000), by Jason Lutes
* Blankets (2003), by Craig Thompson
* Bone (2004), by Jeff Smith
* The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002), by Kim Deitch
* The Dark Knight Returns (1986), by Frank Miller - a very good critique of our information age and view of super-heroes and vigilantes.
* David Boring (2000), by Daniel Clowes
* Ed the Happy Clown (1989), by Chester Brown
* Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), by Chris Ware
* Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories (2003), by Gilbert Hernandez
* Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1951793,00.html#ixzz1V8SRuRUW

My problem with this memes is some of the books I swear I read, but I honestly can't remember them so didn't bold or do anything.

Comments

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

I like these lists, especially that the "world literature" list (god, I hate that term) is actually divided between a lot of different works and times. Some really good stuff in there; some I've read and can't recommend highly enough would be Things Fall Apart, Hunger, Midnight's Children, American Pastoral, At Swim-Two-Birds (weeeeird, but hilarious), The Crying Of Lot 49 (likewise), Play It As It Lays and Revolutionary Road.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Took me a while to find a decent list. So many look like they were cobbled off of the NY Times Best Seller List. My main goal was a list that did not have Ayn Rand anywhere on it. (sigh - overrated writer).

At Swim-Two Birds looked interesting. I think I've read American Pastoral, but I can't remember it. Same with Things Fall Apart. Both sound incredibly familiar.