What’s the greatest novel of all time?
0 voters
Well, how would you vote?
Tolkien? Leiber? Moorcock? Excuse me… :raspberry: 
Greatest book?
Kinda a narrow choice isn’t it?
There are some classics but I don’t know if they are best of all time.
Ski
where’s the freakin’ Iliad/Odyssey by me homeboy Homer? I mean, we gonna be kicking it old school style, we gonna be kicking it old school, homes? Am I right or am I right?
The Aenid sucked ass, though. That Virgil whudn’t nothing but a wannabe.
Hello? Where’s Dickens? Where’s Hemingway? Where’s Jane Austen?
Choosing the greatest work of fiction is nigh an impossible task anyway. You must have started this thread to mess with us!
The brothers K is the gretaest book on that list. Alien, Charles Dickens? Yuk.
I like Dicken’s deployment of literary devices and sharp social criticism.
You also forgot Cervantes, Hugo, Joyce, Henry James, and the Brontes.
Here is the Guardian’s list of the 100 greatest novels of all time:
I said “novel” rather than "works of literature. (Want to do another poll for that?) That rules out Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe (unless you think “Sorrows of Young Wether” is the greatest of all time!), and so on.
Right about Dickens and the Brontes, though. (Cervantes and Joyce are on there, though.) I tried to list the obvious choices, to save trouble for people, but some slipped my mind. (Tolkien seems…farfetched to me, but I guess he has a lot of support out there.)
As a basis for the greatest books of all time I like to think that those that come closest to rendering the human condition deserve to be on anyone’s list.
[quote=“Screaming Jesus”]
Right about Dickens and the Brontes, though. (Cervantes and Joyce are on there, though.) [/quote]
Sorry, I didn’t see them first time I looked.
Hesse, Kundera, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Flaubert, Camus, Greene, Kafka, Wilde, Hardy, Salinger…
It’s harder to name the exact books from these authors.
Maybe you should have made this ‘If you were on a desert island and could only have ONE novel, which would it be?’ instead…
[quote=“Alien”]Maybe you should have made this ‘If you were on a desert island and could only have ONE novel, which would it be?’ instead…
[/quote]
That’s not fair because naturally you’d pick some long-ass work like Remembrance of Things Past or Les Miserables - a couple of thousand pages that would keep you occupied for the looong time you’re on that island. You’re not going to pick something shorter but better like a concise little Graham Greene or J.D. Salinger novel.
And actually, if I could only take one book with me on the desert, it wouldn’t be a novel. I’ve always wanted to take a crack at Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but geez, that thing is 3,000 pages long!
[quote=“Alien”]I like Dicken’s deployment of literary devices and sharp social criticism.
You also forgot Cervantes, Hugo, Joyce, Henry James, and the Brontes.
Here is the Guardian’s list of the 100 greatest novels of all time:
observer.guardian.co.UK/review/s … 36,00.html[/quote]
It’s an interesting list with a few surprises and a nice mix of critic’s and popular choices.
Alien, if you like Dickens, I highly recommend Balzac. Here’s what Oscar Wilde said of him:
At an interview once I was asked which book I would take if I could only have one book if stranded on an island. I said I’d take the Koran, as I had never read it, but I could be sure it would provide me with a life time of thought. I didnt get the job, they said they were looking for answers relating to survival guides, or something more practical to the situation. And something to do with a lack of qualifications. But still…
[quote=“mod lang”][quote=“Alien”]Maybe you should have made this ‘If you were on a desert island and could only have ONE novel, which would it be?’ instead…
[/quote]
That’s not fair because naturally you’d pick some long-ass work like Remembrance of Things Past or Les Miserables - a couple of thousand pages that would keep you occupied for the looong time you’re on that island. You’re not going to pick something shorter but better like a concise little Graham Greene or J.D. Salinger novel.
[/quote]
Not necessarily a LONG book! I’d take something that I’d be delighted to read again and again and analyse and appreciate from various angles. Memorise. Internalise.
It’d have to be Shakespeare for me, then. The collected works of…! Because it’d be hard to choose one play.
But if I had to, I guess The Tempest, or Midsummer’s Night Dream.
If I couldn’t take Shakespeare, then maybe Dickens Tale of Two Cities. I adore that book. But if I couldn’t take Dickens because it had to be American (homeland security, you know…) then it’d be Huckleberry Finn, because it’s just great. And it’s fun to read aloud. And it makes me laugh.
But if I couldn’t take Twain (because it was racist), then I’d take a wee bit of sci fi, Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 or Orwell’s 1984, or Huxley’s Brave New World. But if I couldn’t take a male author, I’d take Kate Chopin’s book ‘The Awakening’. This is too hard. Someone would have to toss a book at me.
Bingo!
On a desert island: One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This is harder than picking the ten best Beatles songs.
I choose To Kill a Mockingbird, but on another day, I might choose another.
I haven’t read any of those listed. Shame on me.
Now, if I could be any animal…
So they picked 1984, but not Animal Farm with the classic line “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” (forgive the paraphrasing if any) What about the Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum?
Of that list I have read 9 of them and am in the middle of reading a 10th one (Catch-22 by Joseph Heller) and that doesn’t include the ones I’ve only seen as a movie (another 11 of them). That’s 10%. Do I get a prize? A cookie?
Martin Amis was on that list. Money? Even ‘Time’s arrow’ was more passable. Crikey moses, that was a crap book. His dad’s book “The Old Devils” would kick the crap out of that in a fight.
No Charles Bukowski fans in the house?
How come this isn’t even nominated? :s
I personally preferred The Nancy Drew mysteries.
which series featured the overweight 'Chet" and his red Jalopy?
As a young English boy I had no clue what a Jalopy might be, I just knew that someone was always 'jumping in Chet’s Jalopy for a ride."
