Authors Pick Favourite Books Of The 19th And 20th Century

moray mair | Book reviews and writers | February 9, 2012

In a recent book by David Orr, called ‘The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books’, 125 British and American authors — including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen and Joyce Carol Oates — are asked to list what they consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time whether it be in the form of a novel, story collection, play or poem.

In introducing the lists David Orr had this to say:

If you’re putting together a list of ‘the greatest books,’ you’ll want to do two things: (1) out of kindness, avoid anyone working on a novel; and (2) decide what the word ‘great’ means. The first part is easy, but how about the second? A short list of possible definitions of ‘greatness’ might look like this:

1. ‘Great’ means ‘books that have been greatest for me’
2. ‘Great’ means ‘books that would be considered great by the most people over time’
3. ‘Great’ has nothing to do with you or me — or people at all. It involves transcendental concepts like God or the Sublime
4. ‘Great’? I like Tom Clancy

So here we go:

The Top Ten Works Of The 20th Century

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Ulysses by James Joyce
Dubliners by James Joyce
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The complete stories of Flannery O’Connor
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Top Ten Works Of The 19th Century

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The stories of Anton Chekhov
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Emma* by Jane Austen

Top Ten Authors By Number Of Books Selected

William Shakespeare: 11
William Faulkner: 6
Henry James: 6
Jane Austen: 5
Charles Dickens: 5
Fyodor Dostoevsky: 5
Ernest Hemingway: 5
Franz Kafka: 5
James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf: 4

What do you think?

Via Brainpickings