Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Top ten books of all time

Time Magazine went out and asked the 125 most notable writers in the world what they thought the ten greatest books of all time were. The compiled the list and these are the consensus favorites:
1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot
Now this list is terribly heavy on modern writers. In fact, the oldest book on the list is Hamlet (early 17th century). Where is Homer? Where is Virgil? Where is Dante? In fact, there is no poetry on the list at all. Maybe that is intentional, but it is still unfortunate.

And why two Tolstoy's and no Dostoevsky?

Well, it's a good discussion starter anyway.
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2 comments:

  1. M. Sheldon8:24 PM

    No Dostoevsky, No Ayn Rand...No Machiavelli? No...Socrates? Man. Some lists are just too short.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous12:18 PM

    What about To Kill a Mockingbird? It's easily in the top 5 of America's literure. And how can they not include The Brothers Karamozov or at least one of Tolkien's middle-earth books. the first commentator was right, The list is too short. also consider Sun Tzo's Art of War.

    ReplyDelete

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