Every so often a list appears in some medium with the the best creative writing in history, or the best sellers, or the most famous.
When it comes to sales, things are easier to quantify, which is much more complex when it comes to establishing a selection of the most important books based on their literary quality.
Possibly we only intend to encourage debate among our audience to encourage them to give us their favorite titles themselves and to comment on something that we are going to quote below if they have read them.
I have to say in advance that I do not trust this type of listings (Art is not a matter of rankings ...) and that all this is nothing more than a pretext to draw comments from you with recommendations that help us to establish links between all the users of this community, who are not few and who, as you know, have something very important in common: they love written pages. I think the end justifies the means in this case ...
We took this listing from the magazine Newsweek, who some time ago made this selection of what for them are the 100 best books in history:
The 100 Best Books Ever for Newsweek:
1) War and peace, Leo Tolstoy
2) 1984, George Orwells
3) Ulysses, Joyce
4) Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
5) The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
6) The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
7) To the lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
8) The Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer
9) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
10) Divine Comedy, Dante
11) Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
12) Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
13) Middlemarch, George Eliot
14) Everything falls apart, Chinua Achebe
15) Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16) Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
17) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
18) The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald
19) Catch 22, Joseph Heller
20) Beloved, Toni Morrison
21) Vines of Wrath, John Steinbeck
22) Sons of Midnight, Salman Rushdie
23) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
24) Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
25) Native son, Richard Wright
26) On democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
27) The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
28) History, Herodotus
29) The social contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
30) Capital, Kart Marx
31) The prince, Machiavelli
32) The confessions of Saint Augustine
33) Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
34) History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
35) Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
36) Winnie-the-Pooh AA Milne
37) The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
38) Passage to India, EM Forster
39) On the road, Jack Kerouac
40) To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
41) The Bible
42) A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgués
43) Light of August, William Faulkner
44) The Souls of Black People, WEB Du Bois
45) Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
46) Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
47) Paradise Lost, John Milton
48) Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
49) Hamlet, William Shakespeare
50) King Lear, William Shakespeare
51) Othello, William Shakespeare
52) Sonnets, William Shakespeare
53) Blades of Grass, Walt Whitman
54) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
55) Kim, Rudyard Kipling
56) Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
57) The Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
58) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
59) For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hernest Hemingway
60) Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut
61) Farm Rebellion, George Orwell
62) Lord of the Flies, William Holding
63) In cold blood, Truman Capote
64) The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
65) In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
66) The Eternal Sleep, Raymond Chandler
67) As I Dying, William Faulkner
68) Party, Ernest Hemingway
69) Me, Claudio, Robert Graves
70) The heart is a lone hunter, Carson McCullers
71) Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
72) All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
73) Go say it on James Baldwin Mountain
74) Charlotte's Web, EB White
75) Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
76) Night, Elie Wiesel
77) Rabbit, run J. Updike
78) The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
79) The Evil of Portnoy, P. Roth
80) An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
81) The Day of the Lobster, Nathanael West
82) Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
83) The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Ahmet
84) Dark Matter, Philip Pullman
85) Death of the Archbishop, Willa Cather
86) The Interpretation of Dreams, S. Freud
87) The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
88) Thought of Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong
89) Psychology of Religion, William James
90) Return to Brideshead, Evelyn Waugh
91) Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
92) General Theory of Occupation, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes
93) Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
94) Goodbye to all that, Robert Graves
95) Wealthy Society, John Kenneth Galbraith
96) The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
97) The autobiography of Malcom X, Alex Haley and Malcolm X
98) The Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey
99) The Color Purple, Alice Walter
100) WWII, Winston Churchill
What do you think of the list? Which ones would you remove and which ones would you add? How many of them have you read? Let the debate begin! (From the outset, some Spanish books are missed, right? ...)
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And Cortazar, and Rulfo, and Camus, and Sartre, and Kundera, and Neruda, and Asturias, and Thoreau ... I think they were missing
This list sins of Europeancentricity. Many Latin Americans are missing ... Borges? Cortázar? Rulfo? Lispector? ... Anyway ...
Precisely that is what we say in the body of the article, that authors from various backgrounds and especially Spanish-speaking authors are missed. The debate starts to roll… we hope to continue receiving your suggestions for a "real" list of the best books ever.
I do not dare to say take this one out, but Don Quixote and Metamorphosis in my view have earned a place in this list, and I find it difficult to believe that the thousand and one nights are not there ..
Totally agree ... and many other titles missing ...
Cervantes, Unamuno, Becquer, Dario, Stoker ... There are many missing and more than enough.
The interpretation of dreams, for example, is very hard to read for a pagan in psychology.
The Bible, one thing is that it is the most read and another one of the best. It becomes eternal.
I think that of those 100, I will have read about 30. But, is that books on economics, politics, I do not like to read. 🙂
Although essential books are missing from this list, such as those by the Spanish Americans Borges, Rulfo, Octavio Paz and Mario Vargas Llosa, they are always useful. They serve to appreciate the cultural matrioterism of those who make them, and to give us an idea of how universal readers have more than fifty percent already read from most of any list. In short, such a list does not show who reads and who does not, but rather the way in which those who make them like to look at their navels. I said!
but what about Don Quixote ????????????????????????????????????
do not the Spanish write ?????
Poor newsweek people, who have missed a whole world of possibilities by not contemplating literature in Spanish. They will never be able to write the saddest verses one night while the moon in the sea shimmers in waves of white and blue. And I confirm the saying so Spanish: «the things from whom they come, ...»
This is what we were looking for friends! Debate and proposals. Please do not stop recommending works and authors so that readers have more references about possible new readings!
It is true that the hole is very large as works, before Shakespeare's Hamlet and Otello I would place his Romeo and Juliet and as for authors the emptiness is felt by not mentioning Oscar Wilde. Greetings..
If Cervantes, Borges and Rulfo are not there, go ahead, (anyone is wrong from here to China), but I do not forgive the absence of JK Toole, the creative genius of Ignatius J. Reilly.- Not to mention Pynchon and his Arcoiris.- Of course: Churchil and ... Lytton Strachey are there, I don't even know how to spell the name, in anger over so much absence and so much Saxon presence, I'm going to read it, even if it costs me my (literary) life!
Much Hispanic American literature is missing. Orhan Pamuk does not appear, nor Naguib Mahfuz, and Where is Don Quixote ?. At least it is still an interesting list of course, but like all lists, it is somewhat arbitrary.
And The Thousand and One Nights? Plato? Cervantes? Edgar Allan Poe? G. Wells ?, L. Caroll ?, Borges? 🙁
Ah! And the Russian master Fyodor Dostoevsky?
Those biased it seems that they did not read or ignore Don Quixote among many great books to include his irrelevant and precarious readings !!!!