Nice. Can we expect a list out of this?
Yes, i’ll do one soon!
Thanks, Kenji. I hope others checkout the original poll thread for some great lists of possibilities, besides the ‘top’ picks. We have some serious bibliophiles/book fanatics among our film lovers. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
Nice to see Dostoevsky riding high, as he was my real introduction to serious lit. as a kid. We had to read a lot of English and American classics in high school English, but not anything in translation. My own progression was from Dostoevsky, to Kafka, to Joyce – then I was hooked on books. Btw – we weren’t allowed to do any reports on Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye – that was a banned book at our school, believe it or not. Crazy, eh? Who can account for such narrow-mindedness? Also, happy that so many here like Borges, as he was masterful at the short form. Some good films made from some of these books, as I mentioned on Kenji’s original thread.
Now, I’m looking forward to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die poll. I’ve nearly got my list ready!
Here is the list in the Lists section, with films to represent many of the books (rarely up to scratch)
Oops, sorry, i left out The Bell Jar! In the group from 11-25
Only read 10 of the 50. Guess I know what my next 40 books will be.
I’m gonna use it and the further selections (see List above) as a reading guide for the next essentials too
I’m sad to see Invisible Man didn’t make it.
But seeing It on the list did give me a chuckle. :)
For anyone who decides to read A Confederacy of Dunces, read Hamsun’s Hunger either right before or right after, they are great companion pieces.
Invisible Man almost made it, is in the longer selection- see list linked above
Dammit, Kenji. Never tried to “list” literature. This may take some time.
Did the bottom group receive three votes each?
The longer list at the bottom was a mix of scores; a few may have had 3, a lot had 2, some only 1- a cross section. but the most interesting thing really is exploring individual lists, i think. I’ve already ordered some selected books from amazon
How about Jostein Gaarder’ books, Kenji? There is no Jostein Gaarder’s books. The Solitaire Mystery was great according to me. Sorry if OOT.
Is there any link for Polling list, Kenji? Thanks in advance.
I’ve put a link marked “here”, several comments above this- all the selections can be found in a link there or another thread in Off Topic
yeah, thanks. glad to see Orwell’s 1984 at the top. I was late for cultural poll :(. anyway thanks, Kenji.
Happy to see Dostoevsky’s Demons made it! Although it should have been higher than Crime and Punishment! :P
Overwhelmingly, people chose novels as their favorite books. Many lists contained only that. I wonder why that is.
I guess many people are still reading novels mostly. Most of my selections were novels, too.
Kenji
1. Nineteen Eight Four (Orwell)
2= Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
The Trial (Kafka)
4. Catch 22 (Heller)
5= Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
Hamlet (Shakespeare)
7= The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez)
Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)
10. Labyrinths (Borges)* – including vote for a single short story
11. The Book of Disquiet (Pessoa)
Don Quixote (Cervantes)
Fictions (Borges)
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
In Cold Blood (Capote)
Jane Eyre (C.Bronte)
Light in August (Faulkner)
Macbeth (Shakespeare)
The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov)
Metamorphosis (Kafka)
Moby Dick (Melville)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey)
Ulysses (Joyce)
24. Animal Farm (Orwell)
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole)
Dead Souls (Gogol)
The Demons (Dostoevsky)
Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Franny and Zooey (Salinger)
Great Expectations (Dickens)
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
The Hobbit (Tolkein)
Hunger (Hamsun)
It (King)
Johnny Got his Gun (Trumbo)
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Blake)
The Return of the Native (Hardy)
Snow Country (Kawabata)
The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
The Stranger (Camus)
Tom Jones (Fielding)
Tristram Shandy (Sterne)
Watership Down (Adams)
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Murakami)
Wuthering Heights (E.Bronte)
50. Farewell my Lovely (Chandler)* – including a general vote for Chandler