Guardian List of 100 Best Novels of All Time

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:These lists always make me laugh. So many books that were deemed "important" by old, mostly white people long ago. There are some newer books on there, of course.

The Guardian is out of the UK and it shows.

What's wrong with being white? Are we supposed to list books from every part of the globe? We live in a euro-centric culture and there is literally nothing wrong with that.

The list is definitely not just white people. There’s at least five from African American writers, one from the Caribbean, at least one from India, at least one from Korea, at least one Latin anmericqn, and at least two from Africa. That was just based on my clocking on a few so I suspect there are a lot more. Some Anglo bias is to be expected given that it’s a list generated by English speakers of books read in English.

Whoa! Out of 100, that's all they could find? That's sad.

You lose a lot even with the best translations. This is presumably a list of the best novels in English. But even with the difficulties in translation, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Fyodor Dostoevsky are still life-changing reads. I can only imagine what it's like reading their books in the original language.

But, generally, you always lose a lot of subtlety in translations. And this is a list of best books in English, so anything that needs to be translated needs to be pretty darn compelling to break through all the problems that translation presents.

I’ve read them in the original. Dosoevsky is a bit tiring in the original but I do like the original of notes from underground because only in Russian can you be that morose and pissy.

[Anonymous]

Missing Steinbeck, Twain and Vonnegut (not to mention Wharton and Hawthorne) feels like a snub of America, although Morrison, Walker, and Edward Jones’s the known world are all really solid picks. I’d probably pick Steinbeck over Hemingway if I could only do one white American male early 20th century author, although I do like Hemingway more than most.

If someone wanted me to just pick 10, it would take me forever because I’d want to go back and reread the ones I read decades ago to see if they still hold up.

[Anonymous]

No John Fowles either. I quite like Jane Austen but they put way too many of her novels on the list.

[Anonymous]

I enjoy all of these lists! Agree that they always reveal say a lot about the biases of the list-maker. I think it's a very solid list.

[Anonymous]

To Kill A Mockingbird is omitted. 'Nuff said about the validity of this list.