"Frankenstein is better than Dracula? Where is the French litt.? Anc. Greek? or just a Sci-Fi list, it's less soppy, thank you."
To take those in order:
Yes,
I have Victor Hugo and Albert Camus on there,
As the list was for NOVELS, and the Ancient Greeks wrote PLAYS/EPIC POEMS...no...
Sci-Fi? I can't think of a Sci-Fi novel I'd place in the Top 50 All-Time...the closest would be Frankenstein, as some consider that a proto-Sci-Fi novel.
">list of top 50 novels
>hasn't read any tolstoy?"
I freely admitted that, so place him in there as you will...even the top authors here only landed 2 or 3 spots each (I think Dickens, Joyce and Lawrence are tied for the most with 3 each, and then Woolf, Steinbeck and a few others have 2 each) so at most 3/50 masterpieces not included here doesn't skewer the list too badly, in my opinion, especially with the admission at the beginning.
"20. The Catcher in the Rye Out of interest, why? It currently stands as the worst book I've ever read"
...I have to wonder, then...how many "bad books" have you read? O.o
I mean, if Catcher in the Rye is the worst thing you've ever read...and it's considered one of the great American classics...well, I mean, have you read Twilight, sir? For your own sanity I hope not, but I assure you, there's far, far, FAR worse than Catcher in the Rye.
(And if you do mean "the worst book" in terms of just classic/"proper" literary books--which I think we can safely say Twilight is not--I have to say...really? I can think of plenty of "classics" I'd rank as worse--technically I suppose any of the 30 I listed below Catcher could be considered "worse," though not properly as really all 50 are pretty great in one regard or another, there are one or two weak links, but otherwise I think it's a pretty solid lineup...there's a lot of Post-Modernist stuff out there ESPECIALLY that I'd rank a lot lower than Catcher...then again, with a few exceptions--the plays of Beckett and Stoppard as well as Kurt Vonnegut's novels being the main exceptions--I HATE Post-Modernist works, and if I ever write anything ever my goal, besides writing something good, is writing something to strike back at what I consider to be one of the worst movements in literary history, made all the more painful by the fact it came after one of the BEST--Modernism itself, which as you can tell by my lineup I LOVE, my love of Modernist Literature and that era of history is second only to Shakespeare himself and his era for me! :)--so yeah...I don't think 20 is too high for Catcher.)
SacredDigits' response on the matter was also good, +1...
That DOES raise an interesting question, though:
Are there American works that UK WebDippers would rank higher or lower based on British literary tradition and culture, and vice versa, are there British works here that our US folks here don't quite connect with as much as a British audience might?
I'd sort of considered it, for the most part, relatively easy to connect to...same language (or close enough, anyway, "two countries separated by a common language" indeed, but still) and all, but I still thought it'd be easy to connect with them...
In fact if there were any on this list I thought folks might dislike it'd be the French or Russian ones, particularly the latter category, as Russian Lit in general and Dostoyevsky in particular tends to be a bit denser and more overtly philosophical than some English-language work, which I think (in many cases, not all, but many) tries to take a more "conversational" approach to literature...
There's a marked difference, after all, in how "Huck Finn" reads from "The Brothers Karamazov," Twain's work is a lot more zeroed in on the idiosyncrasies of speech and race and "concrete" problems, whereas Dostoyevsky can go on for pages in speech that's very elevated and might not be totally "realistic," but it isn't necessarily supposed to be so, he puts a premium on the ideas over the realism of the scene sometimes.
But anyway, yeah--any disparity in the UK/US viewings of the list? I figured wandering around New York City for a few days would be pretty accessible to both sides of the Pond...?
(I'll admit to one final, albeit very small reason it's that high, a bit of bias--the man was half-Jewish and so "Catcher" is arguably the greatest piece of Jewish-American-penned literature in The Canon...Arthur Miller is really the only competition with "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible," as while Philip Roth and Art Spiegelman--both of whom also made the list--are great as well, neither "Portnoy" nor "Maus" has penetrated the Canon or collective literary consciousness the way "Catcher" has...so it's either Salinger or Miller who's the greatest of the Jewish-American authors in my opinion--Salinger arguably has the more resonant work, but Miller has more great works and was "fully" Jewish while Salinger was "half," so it depends how you score it.
That also brings up a final bit regarding this list--I see now, as I've included Speigelman, Roth, Kafka and Salinger, that there definitely is a bit of a Jewish-Writers bias on my part, understandably so...there are, however, consequences to that--if I were African-American, I'm sure I'd have Ralph Ellison and "Invisible Man" on this list, or Richard Wright and "Native Son," or Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God," or a couple more Toni Morrison novels, some James Baldwin, etc...I DO only have one work on there by an African-American, so that is a potential problem in bias...Gabriel Garcia-Marquez ranks very highly for me, but he's the only Latin American author on there...and despite reading and owning "Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko, a favorite in Native American Lit circles, that didn't crack the list either...so it's almost all white American and British/Irish authors with some French/German/Russian language works as well, while Jewish-American authors overwhelmingly make up the bulk of my "minority" writers while others who were just as good or even better were shut out, so that's an interesting factor I suppose, the issue of cultural bias...
I WILL say that at the very least I think it's a reasonably-fair list in terms of the genders, at least--there's more men, naturally, men were allowed to write for longer and got more attention than women for a long, long time, so having more men than women is almost unavoidable, I'd argue, unless you wanted to intentionally stack things the other way and consciously put as men women in there as men, which I suppose is fair in one respect, but not really fair if you're letting more authors in--male or female--based on their gender instead of their works...that being said, multiple women in the Top 50, and 2 in the Top 10.)
"Speaking of a very American work, I personally would rate Grapes of Wrath higher, it's one of those novels that rotate into being my favorite depending on how I'm feeling an any given day, but of those ones I've read that place above it, I have a hard time making room for it."
I'll level with you--it hasn't stuck with me the way other novels have, so it may very well deserve a higher spot, and maybe after another reading it'll get a higher spot, but in just this round it lost to the likes of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who forever stick in my head.
Rreminder: Protests Tomorrow
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