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So called 'classic' novels top 100 from The Guardian

ErichZann

ErichZann

Striker
How many of these have you read and what do you recommend? I'm a big reader but have only read 3 of these - Dracula, Moby Dick, and The Road. The best fiction novels i have read are Lord of the Rings, and IT.

Are these in this top 100 really all that.....

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Read about 16 of them, some of which only because I was forced to at school

It's all subjective anyway and there's a few on there I haven't read and want to get round to, but if you're going to have a Graham Greene novel on there I'd have The Quiet American and The Power and the Glory on there ahead of End of the Affair. It also fails to list American Tabloid by James Ellroy and the Shipping News by Annie Prolix which piss on 90% of those books from a great height. And if we were being real there would be more Terry Pratchett on the list as well
 
ErichZann said:
How many of these have you read and what do you recommend? I'm a big reader but have only read 3 of these - Dracula, Moby Dick, and The Road. The best fiction novels i have read are Lord of the Rings, and IT.

Are these in this top 100 really all that.....

You must be logged on to see external links
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To Kill a Mockingbird not there.

Load of bollocks.
 
HellsBells said:
To Kill a Mockingbird not there.

Load of bollocks.
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Agreed.

Animal Farm, Far from the Madding Crowd (the actual best English Language novel of all time!), Down and out in Paris and London, The Idiot...the list goes on.

Never read Ulysses but am lead to believe from mates that have, it's a pile of tripe, unintelligible and rambling..

Have Middlemarch on Audiobook and it's good, but no where near as good as anything Hardy wrote and note even top twenty in my book....

still, vive la difference I suppose..
 
Lists like this are always weird and The Guardian had to correct quite a few mistakes
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I enjoy them because they sometimes remind me of something I have always meant to read or suggest a book I haven't thought of.

I have read 32, a good number of those wouldn't make my own top 100 but no lists like it are definitive.

The End Of The Affair is by no stretch of the imagination Graham Greene's best book The Power And The Glory or The Heart of the Matter are surely his best.

I have read all three Toni Morrison in the list, mine would only include The Bluest Eye. Are four Jane Austen novels really all in the top 100 written? Unless I have missed them, did John Updike and Saul Bellow really not write something worthy of inclusion? Two Nabokov? Nothing by Evelyn Waugh?

Fun to talk about though
 
39. But I did do a degree in English which covers a lot of them. And it should be 38 1/2 as I never finished Ulysses as I detested it. 😁
As for recommendations it depends on your tastes really.
My favourite authors from the list would be Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Bronte.
I would definitely recommend the Ripley novels of Patricia Highsmith, however.
 
rochey said:
Agreed.

Never read Ulysses but am lead to believe from mates that have, it's a pile of tripe, unintelligible and rambling…..
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I get this completely. I’m quite a clever lad, PhD etc but I always get the impression that Luvvies read these sorts of books rather than real people. I didn’t expect Sven Hassel or Leo Kessler to make the top 100 but all this Booker prize stuff is just tosh IMHO.

I suppose it’s like the top 100 albums you must listen to before you die sort of thing. I don’t care how good Miles Davis sounds to others, I’d prefer to listen to my children being tortured than any of his records. The same applies to this list - no Of Mice and Men for example or, as mentioned above, Animal Farm.

Down with this sort of thing.

Oh as an edit just the three read for me.
 
The Road.
Nineteen eighty four.
Jane Ayre.
Pride and Pred.
Crime and Punishment
Johnny Alpha said:
I get this completely. I’m quite a clever lad, PhD etc but I always get the impression that Luvvies read these sorts of books rather than real people. I didn’t expect Sven Hassel or Leo Kessler to make the top 100 but all this Booker prize stuff is just tosh IMHO.

I suppose it’s like the top 100 albums you must listen to before you die sort of thing. I don’t care how good Miles Davis sounds to others, I’d prefer to listen to my children being tortured than any of his records. The same applies to this list - no Of Mice and Men for example or, as mentioned above, Animal Farm.

Down with this sort of thing.

Oh as an edit just the three read for me.
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:lol: :lol: Pretty strong that. But funny.
 
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I have read one on the list (Jane Eyre) as it was on the syllabus for my 'O' level English Literature. I got through about 30 pages of Crime and Punishment and gave up as I found the Russian names of the characters very confusing and couldn't remember which was which.
 
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With it being the Guardian I will put my bottom dollar on none of the top 10 (being generous) will be a White British male.

Am I close?
 
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21. Massively helped by studying (and enjoying) Jane Austen for a-levels.
Not sure about that list at all. I mean, Frankenstein and Dracula certainly merit their place in popular culture but are they really two of the best novels ever? I haven’t read them so maybe they are.
No Vonnegut? No Iris Murdoch? A Clockwork Orange? Camus? Kundera?
Some great novelists missed out there imo
 
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