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Yet another "100 greatest books" list...

beer good

Well-Known Member
...this one perhaps slightly more interesting in that it's compiled from all the others, so it's more of a meta-list, averaging out some of the more [-]personal[/-] odd choices. Like that weird Dostoevsky fellow, for instance.

Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List | Newsweek Books | Newsweek.com

Listed by rank, title, author, year, and who recommended it.

1. War and Peace (F) War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in...
Leo Tolstoy 1869 The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's Reading List, Wikipedia

2. 1984 (F) George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision of "Negative Utopia" is timelier than ever-and its warnings more powerful.
George Orwell 1949 The Telegraph, The Guardian, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library

3. Ulysses (F) Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel...
James Joyce 1922 The Telegraph, The Guardian, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library

4. Lolita (F) The hilarious and tragic story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged Russian man who feels passion only for young the "nymphet" Dolores...
Vladimir Nabokov 1955 The Guardian, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

5. The Sound and the Fury (F) First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told...
William Faulkner 1929 The Guardian, Oprah's Book Club, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

6. Invisible Man (F) Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A...
Ralph Ellison 1952 The Guardian, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

7. To the Lighthouse (F) A landmark of modern fiction, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse explores the subjective reality of everyday life in the Hebrides...
Virginia Woolf 1927 The Guardian, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

8. The Illiad and The Odyssey (F) Gripping listeners and readers for more than 2,700 years, The Iliad is the story of the Trojan War and the rage of Achilles....
Homer 8th century B.C. The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's Reading List

9. Pride and Prejudice (F) Few have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet. Her early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy...
Jane Austen 1813 The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's Reading List

10. Divine Comedy (F) Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the...
Dante Alighieri 1321 The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's Reading List

11. Canterbury Tales (F) With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval...
Geoffrey Chaucer 15th century The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's Reading List

12. Gulliver's Travels (F) The voyages of an Englishman carry him to such strange places as Lilliput, where people are six inches tall; Brobdingnag, a land of...
Jonathan Swift 1726 The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's Reading List

13. Middlemarch (F) It was George Eliot's ambition to create a world and portray a whole community--tradespeople, middle classes, country gentry--in...
George Eliot 1874 The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's Reading List

14. Things Fall Apart (F) Chinua Achebe's tragic novel of pre-colonial Igbo society was a major literary and cultural event when it was published in 1958....
Chinua Achebe 1958 Newsweek, The Guardian, Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe, Time

15. The Catcher in the Rye (F) Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story...
J. D. Salinger 1951 Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

16. Gone with the Wind (F) Margaret Mitchell's epic novel of love and war won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to give rise to two authorized sequels and one of...
Margaret Mitchell 1936 The Telegraph, Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe, Time

17. One Hundred Years of Solitude (F) One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1967 The Telegraph, The Guardian, Oprah's Book Club, Wikipedia, NYPL

18. The Great Gatsby (F) A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess,Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned...
F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

19. Catch-22 (F) Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even...
Joseph Heller 1961 Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

20. Beloved (F) Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and...
Toni Morrison 1987 The Telegraph, The Guardian, Radcliffe, Time

21. The Grapes of Wrath (F) Forced from their home, the Joad family is lured to California to find work; instead they find disillusionment, exploitation, and...
John Steinbeck 1939 NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

22. Midnight's Children (F) Winner of the Booker of Bookers Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's...
Salman Rushdie 1981 Newsweek, The Guardian, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

23. Brave New World (F) Aldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future—where humans are genetically...
Aldous Huxley 1932 The Telegraph, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library

24. Mrs. Dalloway (F) This brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life. Direct and vivid in her...
Virginia Woolf 1925 The Guardian, St. John's Reading List, Radcliffe, Time

25. Native Son (F) Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was...
Richard Wright 1940 NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

26. Democracy in America (NF) In the mid-1800s, a French political scientist named Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States to appraise the meaning and...
Alexis de Tocqueville 1835 The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List

27. On the Origin of Species (NF) In The Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply-held beliefs of the Western world. Arguing for a...
Charles Darwin 1859 The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List

28. The Histories (NF) A Greek historian, Herodotus (c.485-425 BC) left his native town of Halicarnassus, a Greek colony, to travel extensively. He...
Herodotus 440 B.C. The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List

29. The Social Contract (NF) The perfect books for the true book lover, Penguin's Great Ideas series features twelve more groundbreaking works by some of...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762 The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List

30. Das Kapital (NF) One of the most notorious works of modern times, as well as one of the most influential, "Capital" is an incisive critique of...
Karl Marx 1867 The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List

31. The Prince (NF) A new edition of the highly exalted and infamous discourse containing observations and instructions on the significance of a rise...
Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List

32. Confessions (NF) When Saint Augustine wrote his Confessions he was facing, and responding to, a growing spread of asceticism in the Roman world.
St. Augustine 4th century The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List

33. Leviathan (NF) The Leviathan is the vast unity of the State. But how are unity, peace and security to be attained' Hobbes' answer is sovereignty,...
Thomas Hobbes 1651 The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List

34. The History of the Peloponnesian War (NF) Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the struggle between Athens and Sparta...
Thucydides 431 B.C. The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List

35. The Lord of the Rings (F) One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind themIn ancient times the...
J. R. R. Tolkien 1954 The Telegraph, Wikipedia, Radcliffe, Time

36. Winnie-the-Pooh (F) Edward Bear acquires a new name, Winnie-the-Pooh, and a new life with the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Woods.
A. A. Milne 1926 The Telegraph, Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe

37. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (F) They open a door and enter a world.
C. S. Lewis 1950 The Telegraph, Wikipedia, NYPL, Time

38. A Passage to India (F) When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular...
E. M. Forster 1924 NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

39. On the Road (F) First published in 1957, this novel epitomized to the world the Beat philosophy. It chronicles a spontaneous and wandering life...
Jack Kerouac 1957 NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

40. To Kill a Mockingbird (F) Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South -- and the heroism of one man in the face...
Harper Lee 1960 Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe, Time

41. The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version. The beloved and timeless King James Version is made available in an affordable edition for Sunday schools, Bible clubs, church...
NA St. John's Reading List, Wikipedia, NYPL

42. A Clockwork Orange (F) Anthony Burgess's modern classic of youthful violence and social redemption, reissued to include the controversial last chapter not...
Anthony Burgess 1962 NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

43. Light in August (F) Joe Christmas does not know whether he is black or white. Faulkner makes of Joe's tragedy a powerful indictment of racism; at the...
William Faulkner 1932 Oprah's Book Club, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

44. The Souls of Black Folk (NF) In this founding work in the literature of black protest, first published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868'1963) eloquently affirms...
W. E. B. Du Bois 1903 St. John's Reading List, NYPL, Modern Library

45. Wide Sargasso Sea (F) A sensual and protected young woman, Antoinette Cosway grows up in the lush natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into...
Jean Rhys 1966 NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

46. Madame Bovary (F) Set amid the stifling atmosphere of nineteenth-century bourgeois France, Madame Bovary is at once an unsparing depiction of a...
Gustave Flaubert 1857 The Telegraph, The Guardian

47. Paradise Lost (F) Paradise Lost is the great epic poem of the English language, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery,...
John Milton 1667 The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List

48. Anna Karenina (F) Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky....
Leo Tolstoy 1877 The Guardian, Oprah's Book Club

49. Hamlet (F) One of the greatest plays of all time, the compelling tragedy of the tormented young prince of Denmark continues to capture the...
William Shakespeare 1603 The Guardian, St. John's Reading List

50. King Lear (F) A king foolishly divides his kingdom between his scheming two oldest daughters and estranges himself from the daughter who loves...
William Shakespeare 1608 The Guardian, St. John's Reading List

51. Othello (F) One of the most powerful dramas ever written for the stage, Othello is a story of revenge, illusion, passion, mistrust, jealousy,...
William Shakespeare 1622 The Guardian, St. John's Reading List

52. Sonnets (F) Shakespeare's sonnets, the greatest of Elizabethan sonnet sequences, were first published in an unauthorized version in 1609....
William Shakespeare 1609 The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List

53. Leaves of Grass (F) I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite...
Walt Whitman 1855 Newsweek, The Guardian

54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (F) The adventures of a boy and a runaway slave as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft.
Mark Twain 1885 Newsweek, The Guardian

55. Kim (F) A white youth in India, becomes friends with an old ascetic priest, the lama. The boy juggles Imperialist life with his spiritual...
Rudyard Kipling 1901 Newsweek, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library

56. Frankenstein (F) Victor Frankenstein is consumed by his desire to discover the secrets of life. After several years of research, Victor feverishly...
Mary Shelley 1818 Newsweek, The Telegraph

57. Song of Solomon (F) Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest...
Toni Morrison 1977 Oprah's Book Club, NYPL, Radcliffe

58. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (F) Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that...
Ken Kesey 1962 NYPL, Radcliffe, Time

59. For Whom the Bell Tolls (F) In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years...
Ernest Hemingway 1940 The Telegraph, NYPL, Radcliffe

60. Slaughterhouse-Five (F) Launched in November, Dell's Kurt Vonnegut reissue program continues with one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the...
Kurt Vonnegut 1969 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

61. Animal Farm (F) Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the henhouses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the...
George Orwell 1945 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

62. Lord of the Flies (F) The story that never grows old... Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954,...
William Golding 1954 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

63. In Cold Blood (NF) On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts...
Truman Capote 1965 NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library

64. The Golden Notebook (F) Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the...
Doris Lessing 1962 The Guardian, NYPL, Time

65. Remembrance of Things Past (F) Marcel Proust (1871-1922) spent the last fourteen years of his life writing A la recherche du temps perdu. It is an intimate epic,...
Marcel Proust 1913 The Telegraph, The Guardian, NYPL

66. The Big Sleep (F) When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds...
Raymond Chandler 1939 The Telegraph, NYPL, Time

67. As I Lay Dying (F) One of William Faulkner's finest novels, As I Lay Dying was originally published in 1930, and remains a captivating and...
William Faulkner 1930 Oprah's Book Club, Radcliffe, Modern Library

68. The Sun Also Rises (F) The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example...
Ernest Hemingway 1926 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

69. I, Claudius (F) Considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus,...
Robert Graves 1934 The Telegraph, Modern Library, Time

70. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (F) With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary ...
Carson McCullers 1940 Oprah's Book Club, Modern Library, Time

71. Sons and Lovers (F) Sons and Lovers is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence, and the price of family bonds....
D. H. Lawrence 1913 The Guardian, Radcliffe, Modern Library

72. All the King's Men (F) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on american politics. It...
Robert Penn Warren 1946 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

73. Go Tell It on the Mountain (F) James Baldwin's portrayal of black people in Harlem caught up in a dramatic struggle, and of a society confronting inevitable change.
James Baldwin 1953 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

74. Charlotte's Web (F) Beloved by generations, Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little are two of the most cherished stories of all time. Now, for the first...
E. B. White 1952 Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe

75. Heart of Darkness (F) A masterpiece of twentieth-century writing, Heart of Darkness (1902) exposes the tenuous fabric that holds "civilization" together...
Joseph Conrad 1902 St. John's Reading List, Radcliffe, Modern Library

76. Night (NF) Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager...
Elie Wiesel 1958 Oprah's Book Club, Wikipedia, NYPL

77. Rabbit, Run (F) Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is...
John Updike 1960 The Telegraph, Radcliffe, Time

78. The Age of Innocence (F) Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning classic novel of passion and desire. The beautiful Countess Ellen Olenska, fleeing her brutish...
Edith Wharton 1920 NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library

79. Portnoy's Complaint (F) Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are...
Philip Roth 1969 NYPL, Modern Library, Time

80. An American Tragedy (F) The classic depiction of the harsh realities of American life, the dark side of the American Dream, and one man's doomed pursuit of...
Theodore Dreiser 1925 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

81. The Day of the Locust (F) "Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,' " observed Nathanael West the year before his untimely death...
Nathanael West 1939 NYPL, Modern Library, Time

82. Tropic of Cancer (F) Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller's Tropic of...
Henry Miller 1934 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

83. The Maltese Falcon (F) Sam Spade, a slightly shop-worn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, stars in Hammett's detective fiction, a novel...
Dashiell Hammett 1930 The Telegraph, Radcliffe, Modern Library

84. His Dark Materials (F) Published in 40 countries, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy ' The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber...
Philip Pullman 1995 The Telegraph, Wikipedia

85. Death Comes for the Archbishop (F) Willa Cather's best known novel; a narrative that recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.
Willa Cather 1927 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

86. The Interpretation of Dreams (NF) Freud's Revolutionary Theory: This ground-breaking work, which Freud considered his most valuable, forever changed the way we...
Sigmund Freud 1900 The Telegraph, NYPL

87. The Education of Henry Adams (NF) A scion of the famous Adams family of American statesmen, historian Henry Adams was more drawn to scholarship than to politics. His...
Henry Adams 1918 NYPL, Modern Library

88. Quotations from Chairman Mao (NF) Comrade Mao Tse-tung is the greatest Marxist-Leninist of our era. He has inherited, defended and developed Marxism-Leninism with...
Mao Zedong 1964 Wikipedia, NYPL

89. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (NF) After completing his monumental work, The Principles of Psychology, William James turned his attention to serious consideration of...
William James 1902 NYPL, Modern Library

90. Brideshead Revisited (F) Evelyn Waugh's best-loved novel and the basis for the PBS television production, Brideshead Revisited, the epic story of a great...
Evelyn Waugh 1945 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

91. Silent Spring (NF) First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of...
Rachel Carson 1962 NYPL, Modern Library

92. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (NF) Keynes profoundly influenced the New Deal and created the basis for classic economic theory. 'I can think of no single book that...
John Maynard Keynes 1936 NYPL, Modern Library

93. Lord Jim (F) A bold young English sailor has despised himself ever since an impulsive moment of cowardice. Jim moves East to Patusan, where...
Joseph Conrad 1900 NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library

94. Goodbye to All That (NF) In this autobiography, first published in 1929, poet Robert Graves traces the monumental and universal loss of innocence that...
Robert Graves 1929 The Telegraph, Modern Library

95. The Affluent Society (NF) Galbraith's classic on the "economics of abundance" is, in the words of the New York Times, "a compelling challenge to conventional...
John Kenneth Galbraith 1958 NYPL, Modern Library

96. The Wind in the Willows (F) This is the much-loved classic tales of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad. When Mole goes boating with Ratty instead of doing his...
Kenneth Grahame 1908 The Telegraph, Wikipedia, Radcliffe

97. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (NF) If there was any one man who articulated the anger, the struggle, and the beliefs of African Americans in the 1960s, that man was...
Alex Haley and Malcolm X 1965 NYPL, Modern Library

98. Eminent Victorians (NF) An unparalleled manifesto for the modern biographer, Strachey's razor-sharp essays about 4 prominent Victorians brought him...
Lytton Strachey 1918 The Telegraph, Modern Library

99. The Color Purple (F) Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and...
Alice Walker 1982 NYPL, Radcliffe

100. The Second World War (The Gathering Storm; Their Finest Hour; The Grand Alliance; The Hinge of Fate; (NF) Churchill's six-volume history of World War II -- the definitive work, remarkable both for its sweep and for its sense of personal...
Winston Churchill 1948 NYPL, Modern Library
 
Whoa Nelly! This list is screwed up..there's not a single Harry Potter title or even The Da Vinci Code. This must be an oversight. :lol:
 
Interesting how Jane Eyre didn't make it on here, yet Wide Sargasso Sea (a prequel of sorts to Jane Eyre) managed to secure a spot in the Top 50.
 
Interesting how Jane Eyre didn't make it on here, yet Wide Sargasso Sea (a prequel of sorts to Jane Eyre) managed to secure a spot in the Top 50.

Well, the lists always seem not a little subjective. But you have to give Newsweek a little credit on this list when they include the opinions of giants in the literary world like Oprah. I'm always curious about the qualifications of the people that write these lists and the the criteria they use.
 
I didn't mean to complain about the exclusion of Jane Eyre. I just didn't expect to see the more recent WSS on here, especially since it's a continuation of someone else's story.
 
Well now! That's finally a really friendly list that I can feel quite comfortable with --have read many of the books and would be glad to have read the rest.

As for it being Anglophone (if that is the word), what would a list of top 100 books look like in Quebec, Marc? By all means feel free to post away. I'm curious. Maybe we'll have 200 top books. :)
 
A top 100 books that only includes 3 french books doesn't deserve much credibility in my opinion.

Only a Quebecer would say that,:lol:

And Anglophone is a word by the way,lol,it's what Quebecers mostly, but all Canadians, call all English speaking people.
 
Well i'm sorry to spoil your fun but this list is definately biased. Roughly 80% of those books are anglophone, which is ridiculous because you might not know it but there are many great books outside England and the States.

I am not speaking as a Quebecer when i say this, in fact i don't really care about Quebec and neither do i identify myself as one. I am just aware, unlike some closed minded people, that literature is not typically Anglophone.

Oh and Peder, how the hell would i know what a top 100 books would look like in Quebec? I speak as myself when i talk not as my country >_>
 
Well i'm sorry to spoil your fun but this list is definately biased. Roughly 80% of those books are anglophone, which is ridiculous because you might not know it but there are many great books outside England and the States..
Not easy to spoil my fun but it is one list out of many in this forum.Share with us some of your reads,alot of us here do read Non-Anglophone Literature.



I am not speaking as a Quebecer when i say this, in fact i don't really care about Quebec and neither do i identify myself as one. I am just aware, unlike some closed minded people, that literature is not typically Anglophone.


I am a Quebecer too,and hopefully not one of the closed minded .
 
Well i'm sorry to spoil your fun but this list is definately biased. Roughly 80% of those books are anglophone, which is ridiculous because you might not know it but there are many great books outside England and the States.

I am not speaking as a Quebecer when i say this, in fact i don't really care about Quebec and neither do i identify myself as one. I am just aware, unlike some closed minded people, that literature is not typically Anglophone.

Oh and Peder, how the hell would i know what a top 100 books would look like in Quebec? I speak as myself when i talk not as my country >_>

Of course it's biased. If you are reading a list of books from a website in English you can safely expect the books will be of the same origin. This is such a common criticism. I'm still waiting for that ideal list with a single book from every country on the planet so I can know what the actual 100 greatest books are.
 
Well i'm sorry to spoil your fun but this list is definately biased. Roughly 80% of those books are anglophone, which is ridiculous because you might not know it but there are many great books outside England and the States.

Well, Marc, I think we do know quite well that there is literature from the whole world outside England and the United States (and France), and that the subject list does not reflect that very well.

I am just aware, unlike some closed minded people, that literature is not typically Anglophone.

So you are in the right place after all, Marc, since many of us are not that closed minded either, and are actually aware of literature that is not typically Anglophone as you put it. Difficult though it may be for you to imagine, some of us actually do read literature from elsewhere. So, welcome! And please check your prejudices at the door, at least until you know us better.

Oh and Peder, how the hell would i know what a top 100 books would look like in Quebec? I speak as myself when i talk not as my country >_>

Oh, I was just guessing that somebody who knew that a list was not "credible" to use your term might have some notion, however vague, of what a more credible list might look like. And might even have seen one published somewhere, the same as the original poster saw that list he posted. I didn't imagine for a minute that you would have compiled such a list yourself, or memorized a hundred different titles that you might have seen someplace. If you don't know, that's OK too. Opinions are always welcome here, even if they are based on nothing . . . . I think. :confused:
So, welcome to the discussion,
Perhaps you can recommend one book?
Peder
 
Well, Marc, I think we do know quite well that there is literature from the whole world outside England and the United States (and France), and that the subject list does not reflect that very well.



So you are in the right place after all, Marc, since many of us are not that closed minded either, and are actually aware of literature that is not typically Anglophone as you put it. Difficult though it may be for you to imagine, some of us actually do read literature from elsewhere. So, welcome! And please check your prejudices at the door, at least until you know us better.



Oh, I was just guessing that somebody who knew that a list was not "credible" to use your term might have some notion, however vague, of what a more credible list might look like. And might even have seen one published somewhere, the same as the original poster saw that list he posted. I didn't imagine for a minute that you would have compiled such a list yourself, or memorized a hundred different titles that you might have seen someplace. If you don't know, that's OK too. Opinions are always welcome here, even if they are based on nothing . . . . I think. :confused:
So, welcome to the discussion,
Perhaps you can recommend one book?
Peder


You couldn't expect much of an answer from a 17 years old whose first language is not english. Despite the poor quality of my writing, I still do believe that my point was right, and therefore, I will spend some of my not-so-precious time to reply, but À armes égales this time, which is why I will be using french.


Je réalise bien que ce genre de palmarès comporte une part inévitable de biais, mais cette liste n'en est pas moins répugnante. Elle témoigne de la suffisance de certains anglophones, qui semblent croire que le patrimoine littéraire mondial se réduit aux seuls États-Unis et Royaume-Uni. Cette attitude ethnocentriste, trop répandue dans la culture anglo-saxonne pour me surprendre, vous fait lever le nez sur une quantité innombrables de chef-d'oeuvres, tant français qu'allemands, qu'italiens, ou de je ne sais quelle autre nation qui a une forte tradition littéraire.

Vous me demandez de nommer des oeuvres dignes de figurer parmi cette
liste. Cette requête est risible, et illustre bien votre étroitesse d'esprit. Si vous êtes incapable de remettre en question cette injure suprémaciste par vous-même, je doute pouvoir vous être d'une quelconque utilité en cela.

Par ailleurs, le ton sarcastique et moqueur de votre réponse me fait rire bien plus qu'il ne m'affecte. Rabrouer de la sorte quelqu'un qui n'a pas même l'âge de la majorité, alors que vous êtes grisonnant et bientôt en décrépitude, c'est faire preuve d'un manque flagrant de magnanimité. Continuez à vous complaire dans cette voie pendant les quelques années qu'il vous reste à vivre, il doit être trop tard pour changer de toute façon.

P.S.: Yes, I do feel better now :lol:
 
Thank you! I will be making a complete introduction as soon as I'll have gathered enough energy and patience to suffer the almost systematic french-english dictionnary browsing :lol:

:flowers:
 
Thank you! I will be making a complete introduction as soon as I'll have gathered enough energy and patience to suffer the almost systematic french-english dictionnary browsing :lol:

:flowers:

... at which time I hope you will be providing an English translation of the French rejoinder above that made you feel so good?
 
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