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/Archive 1
Since discussion seems to have died on this some time ago, I've decided to archive and begin anew. I'll start with a list of books currently in the category, alphabetical order by author.
Fengshen Yanyi
Journey to the West
Lazarillo de Tormes
Louisa May Alcott .
Little Women
Jane Austen .
Pride and Prejudice
Honoré de Balzac .
Le Père Goriot
L. Frank Baum .
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Charlotte Brontë .
Jane Eyre
Emily Brontë .
Wuthering Heights
Mikhail Bulgakov .
The Master and Margarita
Edgar Rice Burroughs .
Tarzan of the Apes
Albert Camus .
The Fall
Albert Camus .
The Plague
Albert Camus .
The Stranger
Cao Xueqin .
Dream of the Red Chamber
Lewis Carroll .
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Miguel de Cervantes .
Don Quixote
Agatha Christie .
And Then There Were None
Joseph Conrad .
Heart of Darkness
Daniel Defoe .
Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens .
Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens .
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens .
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens .
Bleak House
Charles Dickens .
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens .
Great Expectations
Isak Dinesen .
Out of Africa
Fyodor Dostoevsky .
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky .
The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky .
The Brothers Karamazov
Arthur Conan Doyle .
A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle .
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Alexandre Dumas .
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas .
The Count of Monte Cristo
George Eliot .
Middlemarch
William Faulkner .
The Sound and the Fury
Henry Fielding .
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Gustave Flaubert .
Madame Bovary
E. M. Forster .
Howards End
Gabriel Garcia Marquez .
One Hundred Years of Solitude
William Gibson .
Neuromancer
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe .
The Sorrows of Young Werther
William Golding .
Lord of the Flies
Günter Grass .
The Tin Drum
Thomas Hardy .
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Nathaniel Hawthorne .
The Scarlet Letter
Sadegh Hedayat .
The Blind Owl
Joseph Heller .
Catch-22
Ernest Hemingway .
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway .
The Old Man and the Sea
Victor Hugo .
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Victor Hugo .
Les Misérables
Aldous Huxley .
Brave New World
Henry James .
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James .
The Turn of the Screw
James Joyce .
Ulysses
James Joyce .
Finnegans Wake
Franz Kafka .
The Trial
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos .
Les Liaisons dangereuses
D. H. Lawrence .
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harper Lee .
To Kill a Mockingbird
Lu Xun .
The True Story of Ah Q
Luo Guanzhong .
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Herman Melville .
Moby-Dick
A. A. Milne .
Winnie-the-Pooh
Margaret Mitchell .
Gone with the Wind
Murasaki Shikibu .
The Tale of Genji
Vladimir Nabokov .
Lolita
George Orwell .
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Boris Pasternak .
Doctor Zhivago
Marcel Proust .
In Search of Lost Time
Thomas Pynchon .
Gravity's Rainbow
Erich Maria Remarque .
All Quiet on the Western Front
Jean Jacques Rousseau .
Julie, or the New Heloise
Salman Rushdie .
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie .
The Satanic Verses
J. D. Salinger .
The Catcher in the Rye
Mary Shelley .
Frankenstein
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn .
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
John Steinbeck .
The Grapes of Wrath
Stendhal .
The Red and the Black
Robert Louis Stevenson .
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson .
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Bram Stoker .
Dracula
Harriet Beecher Stowe .
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Jonathan Swift .
Gulliver's Travels
William Makepeace Thackeray .
Vanity Fair
Leo Tolstoy .
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy .
Anna Karenina
Ivan Turgenev .
Fathers and Sons
Mark Twain .
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain .
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Jules Verne .
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
H. G. Wells .
The War of the Worlds
Oscar Wilde .
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf .
To the Lighthouse
I move that we add the following at a blow:
Chinua Achebe.
Things Fall Apart
Jane Austen.
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen.
Mansfield Park
Jane Austen.
Emma
Jane Austen.
Persuasion
Honoré de Balzac.
Eugénie Grandet
Honoré de Balzac.
Illusions Perdues
Honoré de Balzac.
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
Honoré de Balzac.
La Rabouilleuse
Honoré de Balzac.
La Cousine Bette
Raymond Chandler .
The Big Sleep
Wilkie Collins .
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins.
The Moonstone
Joseph Conrad.
Lord Jim
Joseph Conrad.
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad.
The Secret Agent
Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Notes from Underground
George Eliot.
Adam Bede
George Eliot.
The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot.
Silas Marner
George Eliot.
Daniel Deronda
Ralph Ellison.
Invisible Man
William Faulkner.
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner.
Light in August
William Faulkner.
Absalom, Absalom!
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The Great Gatsby
Gustave Flaubert.
Sentimental Education
E. M. Forster.
A Passage to India
Nikolai Gogol .
Dead Souls
Thomas Hardy.
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy.
The Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy.
Jude the Obscure
Jaroslav Hasek.
The Good Soldier Svejk
Ernest Hemingway.
The Sun Also Rises
Henry James.
Daisy Miller
Henry James.
Washington Square
Henry James.
The Wings of the Dove
Henry James.
The Ambassadors
Henry James.
The Golden Bowl
James Joyce.
Dubliners
James Joyce.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
D. H. Lawrence.
Sons and Lovers
Thomas Mann.
Death in Venice
Thomas Mann.
The Magic Mountain
Robert Musil.
The Man Without Qualities
Samuel Richardson .
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
Samuel Richardson.
Clarissa
Walter Scott.
Waverley
Stendhal.
The Charterhouse of Parma
Laurence Sterne .
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman
Leo Tolstoy.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Anthony Trollope.
Chronicles of Barsetshire (alternately,
Barchester Towers and/or
The Last Chronicle of Barset , individually)
Anthony Trollope.
Palliser novels
Anthony Trollope.
The Way We Live Now
Virginia Woolf.
Mrs Dalloway
Émile Zola .
L'Assommoir
Émile Zola .
Nana
Émile Zola .
Germinal
I further suggest that the following be moved down to high importance:
Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Tarzan of the Apes
Agatha Christie.
And Then There Were None
Isak Dinesen.
Out of Africa
Arthur Conan Doyle.
A Study in Scarlet
William Gibson.
Neuromancer
Sadegh Hedayat.
The Blind Owl
Thoughts? My propositions are admittedly centered on anglophone literature, and particularly focused on the 19th and early 20th century. Still, I think the importance of most of the works I suggest adding is fairly obvious, and the removals are also fairly clearly out of place in the current list. There are probably others that ought to be added, though, but I think this would be a decent start. It would give us about 150 top importance novels. I'd suggest that with 50 or 100 more than that, we'd have a fairly good sample to more or less set the "top" importance novels.
john k (
talk ) 19:27, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
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