How many have you read?
My blog gets a great many hits from people looking for the 100 greatest novels. Lately I have been feeling guilty that when you click through you find no real content just an out of date link. So I have decided to remedy that by listing the novels out and noting which I have read. I thought I would share that with the Blogcritics crowd…
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26 - Natalie Davis
I have read only 64 of the 100, thoroughly embarrassing. And 12 of those I haven't read are sitting on my bookshelves. Gotta find the time...
But not for this list's sake. I hate lists more and more every time someone decides to rank something.
27 - Rodney Welch
MacDiva -- You are so wrong about Nabokov I'm embarrassed for you. It pays to do a little research before you go airing ignorant opinions.
You state: "The list violates its own prejudice at least once, by listing Vladimir Nabakov, who had a great deal of trouble writing in English, and seldom did."
First, you spelled his name wrong. It's Nabokov.
Second, the statement is untrue. He had NO trouble writing in English. Born in Russia, he was raised tri-lingual (English, French, Russian) and wrote his first ten novels (actually nine, as one was published posthumously) in Russian. Once he arrived on these shores in 1941, he rarely wrote in anything but English, and he loved it. He adored the language. He spent a good twenty years at Cornell singing the praises of great English literature in masterful lectures -- which he wrote, by the way -- as well as writing a number of brilliant novels in this adopted tongue, including such masterpieces as Pnin, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada and Speak, Memory -- and many short stories.
Lolita, he once wrote, is about his own "love affair with the English language."
28 - Phillip Winn
Well, I take it back then. I remember the quote about the "love affair with the English language" now, too. Bummer.
29 - Rodney Welch
And, by the way, I read Things Fall Apart earlier this this year, and while it opened a window onto a world I had not seen before, I thought it was merely impressive. It's not a great novel, that I can see.
30 - Eric Olsen
Yes, and he wrote a lot about butterflies in English as well. Freakish guy - he wrote better in English than all but a handful of native speakers, and was a world-class amateur butterfly expert. I loved Lolita, though creepy, but I found Pale Fire an impenetrable nightmare.
31 - Rodney Welch
Beg to differ with you on Pale Fire -- a one-of-a-kind work of art which, if you give it a little time, you may find to be not only one of the most purely entertaining novels ever written, but one of the most addictive. I have evidence of this everyday in my e-mailbox, where members of both the Nabokov and Pynchon listserv groups have spent months diving into the book and trying to dismantle it piece by piece. It's a great novel about artistic jealousy, human loneliness, the creative possibilities of the imagination, the anguish of losing a child and the way love endures beyond the grave -- and it is, also, a remarkable puzzle that resists a final interpretation, which is why certain devotees never tire of playing it.
32 - Mark Saleski
i've read 'em all. what do i win?
33 - Mark Saleski
ok, i was lying.
it's more like, uh...thirteen.
but i've read the first 10 pages of Ulysses about twenty times. any credit for that?
Finnegans Wake? you gotta be kidding me.
34 - BRICKLAYER
Hey, where the heck is Chuck Bukowski? Ham on Rye is better than all of this dreck!!!!!!
35 - Wakero
I must come to the defense of To Kill A Mockingbird. I think it was overlooked. It is a great book for numerous reasons. The first time I read the book in middle school I was more intrigued with Scout and Boo's story than with Atticus. I did not appreciate the social commentary until I read the book in high school and again in college. Like many other novels on the list it operates on several levels but it is one of the few books I have been able to "grow up with." I think that is the genuis of the novel and why it should have been recognized. In any event I think it certainly is one of the 100 greatest American novels.
36 - Mac Diva
Rodney, I did not say Nabakov did not like English. I said he had difficulty writing in it, based on his biographers' accounts. I like Spanish, but I am not fluent enough to write fiction in it.
Mea culpa in regard to the typo.
37 - Edmunds
Where's For Whom The Bell Tolls?
38 - fyreflye
Why are all these books written in English? And why are a majority of them available in Modern Library editions?
You say they were chosen through internet voting? The last time I bothered to check in on that fiasco Atlas Shrugged was neck and neck for first place with Battlestar Galactica.
If you have to use a list to find something to read then maybe you no longer really want that much to read.
39 - Josh Rosen
What will this list look like fifty years from now? Get a glimpse...
There's a new writer named GREG IPPOLITO who you must read. I just checked out an excerpt from his novel "Zero Station," and it blew me away. Right now, he's still a relative unknown; a friend turned my onto his work.
If you're into Michael Chabon, Richard Russo, Yann Martel, etc., you just have to check this guy out...
http://www.zero-station.net
Don't miss it. Seriously.
40 - Josh Rosen
What will this list look like fifty years from now? Get a glimpse...
There's a new writer named GREG IPPOLITO who you must read. I just checked out an excerpt from his novel "Zero Station," and it blew me away. Right now, he's still a relative unknown; a friend turned me onto his work.
If you're into Michael Chabon, Richard Russo, Yann Martel, etc., you just have to check this guy out...
http://www.zero-station.net
Don't miss it. Seriously.
41 - Kate
I'll never be able to read all of them. About a year ago I started reading Joyce - oh dear! It's too compicated for me. It's the most complicated bok I have ever read :)
Kate http://www.all-translations.com
P.S. I wonder if anybody really enjoyed it