What are the greatest novels of all time in your opinion?

What are the greatest novels of all time in your opinion?

>Explain why (that’s the most important thing here).

I’m planing to spend this year reading novels. I have read several poems and plays and epics in the last years, but need to improve my understanding of the novel form.

Some of the novels Inhabe read that I loved are:

War and Peace
Anna Karenina
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Memoirs of Hadrian
Lolita

Other urls found in this thread:

brainpickings.org/2012/01/30/writers-top-ten-favorite-books/
theguardian.com/world/2002/may/08/books.booksnews
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>Is your gf quiet in bed?
>No, she Isa Moner

...

how do I get a moner gf

From the selection you posted you might like pride and prejudice. It is very well plotted.

I like me a good mystery. Cruise by harlan cobens books and pick a standalone.

wow she is veryy pretty very pretty girl like a little doe cute thing

OP here. I forgot to mention that I have recently read some of the novels of Taymond Chandler and was surprised with how poetic his work is. He creates several similes that are sometimes funny, sometimes witty, and sometimes extremely beautiful or strange. Also, his dialogues are wonderful: they seem like Shakespearean comedy.

I remembered that because you mentioned the mystery tradition.

Raymond Chandler. Sorry, it was a tipo.

East of Eden

>timshel

A nice book, but not a masterpiece. It’s way to artificial, the characters don’t seem very lifelike. For example, the end of Katty hasn’t anything to do with the character that has been portrayed as a sociopath up until that point. Also, Samuel: he is way to clever and ingenious and saint-like for the kind of life he had lived and he experiences he had.

The Cyrus character is terrible (nothing in him seems real, not even his fate). And the Cain and Abel thing....it’s just too naive, too heavy-handed, even childish.

When one compares this novel to the likes of Tolstoy and Chekhov and George Eliot one can’t help but feel that Steinbeck - in spite of all his great efforts, good nature and good heart - was quite unaware of how people are. He writes about symbols and paradigms, not about human beings.

shut thefuck up

I thought the characters in Of Mice And Men were believable.

Don Quixote

Do you mind pointing what you thought it was so special about Don Quixote? I tried to start reading it some 2 or 3 times but never made past some 50 pages. The prose is so crude and archaic, so unglued and inelegant that I am always put off by it.

However, I know that certainly there are many wonders in this work that I am missing because I am unwilling to keep reading. Borges loved the book despite mentioning that it’s prose was harsh and primitive, so I know I need to read it eventually.

I just feel shocked to see how provincial, rustic and uneducated Cervantes writing is when compared to the one of his contemporary, Shakespeare, whose language was rich, ornamented, cosmopolitan and varied. It seems that Shakespeare was a man who was constantly reading new publications, while Cervantes never studied more than some elementary Latin works, a bad translation of the Bible, some of the Spanish poets of his day and folk balads.

So please, tell me: what is so great about Don Quixote? The characters? What makes them so humane? And the long debates between Quixote and Sancho: could you point out some examples of great writing in such dialogues?

Jesus, you have the taste of a corpse. I've read War and Peace in the past but i'd take it more like a treatise on political philosophy rather than like a novel to read for leisure.
I've read most of Marquez work (i'm spanish), and of all his work, i'd advise to read One hundred years of solitude last. Despite being a great literary work, it's the description of an unending family tree. And i'd advise against reading the Autumn of the patriarch.

Read The Tin Drum from Günther Grass, i assume there must be good translations to english. Its baroque literary aesthetics and its narrative structure build a world of their own (even more considering that it's a german novel written short after the world war II). It's a beautifully fine working simbolic machinery and a really original one too.
Sorry for the mediocre english. xoxo.

Don Quixote is great because it nails a certain very fundamental archetype, like Sherlock Holmes. (Interestingly it's similar to the Sherlock Holmes stories in that it creates a PAIR of characters. Holmes wouldn't be nearly as good without Watson and Watson would be nothing without Holmes. Same with DQ and Sancho Panza.)

It's a bit like the original (1933) King Kong. By today's standards, the special effects are pretty bad. It's jerky and crude. But this doesn't matter, because the basic idea (huge ape, climbs up Empire State Building with blonde, gets shot, falls off) has such elemental appeal that we forgive the crudities of execution.

THAT'S JUST WHAT HE SAYS

...

The Magic Mountain
Crime and Punishment
Infinite Jest

Thank you. That was a great point (the King Kong one): short and on spot.

I will read the work to the end. I really hope to learn a great deal of how to write with this enterprise.

my god she is aesthetic
just caught myself casually staring into her full-size-image's eyes for like the last, i dont know, 30 seconds? could have been 2 minutes maybe.
god i need to get laid

I know that feel. She is exactly the kind of girl I find most attractive. It is somewhat painful and sad to know that such girl exist and I will never insert my penis deep inside her.

The Brothers Karamazov
Gravity's Rainbow
A Canticle for Leibowitz

It's funny

I would say Lolita, but you've already got that one covered. Frankenstein I think is a little overlooked because the prose is a little bit tedious, but the story is absolutely among the greatest.

she looks like a rat, a peruvian rat
>How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age, Sophocles, --are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master. His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers;

does appreciation for females stem only from sexual desire for you guys and in the event of its fulfillment do you no longer find yourself in the former state so then is the former state an implicitly sexual one because that seems very base to attribute those feelings to some extension of a biological imperative manifested in a manipulative desire then consumated in sexual objectification ohh so then she wouldnt be so pretty if only you could "insert your penis deep inside her" or get laid because her ostensible function has been fulfilled and you can move on- that is disgusting

The Fountainhead is terribly underrated imo. It's a fantastic read, to me.

i only clicked on that pic because i couldn't read the text in the thumbnail, and i was sure it was going to say "i showed you my dick. answer me."

Fake news

She looks like a little Pakistani boy that was forced to wear makeup and engage in prostitution

I would have to have sex to fully answer your question. But at the moment, women are basically divine creatures

Can I get that sexy boys number?

Book List:
Snooki A Life on Top
Pairs Hilton the View from Here
Kim Kardashian Back Cum 2049
Rebecca Black A Friday Memoir

oh well im gonna be honest because you might find it interesting but ive completely lost my sex drive because of drugs and medication its been six months now and i feel so much different i never think about sex and then i try and just be friends with a girl but they always want to have sex on the first few dates- ohhh but thats actually never happened i dont talk to girls at all not once thats just what i imagine i hear thats how tinder is and no i wouldnt fit in there the whole idea honestly disgusts me so much for both parties manipulation degradation and objectification why cant we be intimate friends and talk honestly and watch movies together

>god i need to get laid
But then you'll defile and lose your higher sensibilities.

I know the feeling. I have a co-worker that gets flushed in the face and worked up every time a fat/ugly UPS woman walks into the office, and afterward he talks about her like she was mata fucking hari. He, to me, is as to a retarded person. All I can feel is scorn. Why do men degrade themselves so? Why do they treat women like a wounded lamb in the eyes of a wolf? What is wrong with people?

put me in my place no joke not kidding tbqh desu desu senpai family
i admit she has value and beauty even outside of "pee pee insert"

One Hundred Years of Solitude is underrated

this

kekek

moar

we did it reddit

Stop giving me bones for a 16 year old!! Fuck off!!

OP made the great mistake of posting a hot girl as pic, and now Anons talk only about her looks. She is indeed an angel, but let's try to focus on the point of the thread.

Here are some helpful lists:

TOP TEN WORKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

1-Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
2-The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3-In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
4-Ulysses* by James Joyce
5-Dubliners* by James Joyce
6-One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7-The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
8-To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
9-The complete stories of Flannery O’Connor
10-Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

(I think it is a crime for Gatsby to be on that list, and I really think that One Hundred Years of Solitude should perhaps be number 1,or maybe In Search of Lost Time)

TOP TEN WORKS OF THE 19TH CENTURY

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

(It should be 1-War and peace, 2-Anna Karenina, 3-Checkhov)

TOP TEN AUTHORS BY NUMBER OF BOOKS SELECTED

1-William Shakespeare — 11
2-William Faulkner — 6
3-Henry James — 6
4-Jane Austen — 5
5-Charles Dickens — 5
6-Fyodor Dostoevsky — 5
7-Ernest Hemingway — 5
8-Franz Kafka — 5
9-(tie) James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf —

TOP TEN AUTHORS BY POINTS EARNED

1-Leo Tolstoy — 327
2-William Shakespeare — 293
3-James Joyce — 194
4-Vladimir Nabokov — 190
5-Fyodor Dostoevsky — 177
6-William Faulkner — 173
7-Charles Dickens — 168
8-Anton Chekhov — 165
9-Gustave Flaubert — 163
10-Jane Austen — 161

(Tolstoy and Shakespeare are both number 1)

brainpickings.org/2012/01/30/writers-top-ten-favorite-books/

The top 100 books of all time
Take a look at a list of the top 100 books of all time, nominated by writers from around the world, from Things Fall Apart to Mrs Dalloway, and from Pride and Prejudice to Don Quixote

1984 by George Orwell, England, (1903-1950)

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906)

A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880)

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910)

The Aeneid by Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC)

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)

Beloved by Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931)

Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957)

Blindness by Jose Saramago, Portugal, (1922-2010)

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935)

The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC)

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955)

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400)

The Castle by Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)

Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911)

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986)

Complete Poems by Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837)

The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)

The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849)

Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928)

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852)

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)

Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375)

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967)

Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936)

>a hot girl as pic
Any girl with short hair is not "hot", she's trash and deserves only ridicule.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321)

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616)

Essays by Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592)

Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875)

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832)

Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553)

Gilgamesh Mesopotamia, (c 1800 BC)

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919)

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870)

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745)

Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936)

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)

History by Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985)

Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952)

The Idiot by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)

The Iliad by Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC)

Independent People by Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998)

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994)

Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784)

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961)

King Lear by William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892)

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768)

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977)

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia, (b. 1928)

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880)

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955)

Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC)

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942)

The Mathnawi by Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273)

Medea by Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC)

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987)

Metamorphoses by Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC)

Middlemarch by George Eliot, England, (1819-1880)

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947)

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891)

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941)

Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300)

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924)

The Odyssey by Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC)

Oedipus the King Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC)

Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850)

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961)

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia, (b. 1928)

The Orchard by Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292)

Othello by William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986)

Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002)

Poems by Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970)

The Possessed by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817)

The Ramayana by Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC)

The Recognition of Sakuntala by Kalidasa, India, (c. 400)

The Red and the Black by Stendhal, France, (1783-1842)

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922)

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929)

Selected Stories by Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904)

Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930)

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962)

The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972)

The Stranger by Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960)

The Tale of Genji by Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (c 1000)

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930)

Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500)

The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927)

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941)

The Trial by Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)

Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989)

Ulysses by James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941)

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, England, (1818-1848)

Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957)

This list of the 100 best books of all time was prepared by Norwegian Book Clubs. They asked 100 authors from 54 countries around the world to nominate the ten books which have had the most decisive impact on the cultural history of the world, and left a mark on the authors' own thinking. Don Quixote was named as the top book in history but otherwise no ranking was provided

theguardian.com/world/2002/may/08/books.booksnews

Take your mental ilness some place else

Isabella Moner gives me an Isabella boner

In no order,
Lolita
Moby Dick
Faust
The Magic Mountain

woke

Why do people rate Lolita so highly?

>tfw no Casca gf

Be honest now, you people are hardcore Christians, aren’t you?

are you reading it in spanish?

if not, you asked some stupid questions

faust isnt a novel

What makes a novel "one of the greatest"?

Its content?
Historical significance?
The author?

>The prose
it's a translation, you can't really judge the prose off of that
>is so crude and archaic, so unglued and inelegant
Well, you simply must not be used to reading older works and translations of older works, then. Edith Grossman is an alright modern translator who polishes the prose to make it more modern, I read her translation and also another one which was slightly more archaic and actually translated a while ago, I forgot which, I enjoyed them both. Either way, the prose is not the main focus of Don Quixote and the reason it's so revered, so

> Borges loved the book despite mentioning that it’s prose was harsh and primitive, so I know I need to read it eventually.

is about right.

> I just feel shocked to see how provincial, rustic and uneducated Cervantes writing is when compared to the one of his contemporary, Shakespeare, whose language was rich, ornamented, cosmopolitan and varied. It seems that Shakespeare was a man who was constantly reading new publications, while Cervantes never studied more than some elementary Latin works, a bad translation of the Bible, some of the Spanish poets of his day and folk balads.

You're just not getting what Don Quixote is supposed to be and do. Cervantes didn't really care, I think, about having a lush, baroque, poetic, overly ornamental and beautiful style. Second, complaining that he's "provincial, rustic, and uneducated" sounds extremely snobbish in my opinion desu. Third, he even addresses this in his foreword, which is funny because it's almost as if he did it so that some 400 years later he could make fun of you personally from beyond the grave.

(cont. in next post)

>> For, how could you expect me not to feel uneasy about what that ancient lawgiver they call the Public will say when it sees me, after slumbering so many years in the silence of oblivion, coming out now with all my years upon my back, and with a book as dry as a rush, devoid of invention, meagre in style, poor in thoughts, wholly wanting in learning and wisdom, without quotations in the margin or annotations at the end, after the fashion of other books I see, which, though all fables and profanity, are so full of maxims from Aristotle, and Plato, and the whole herd of philosophers, that they fill the readers with amazement and convince them that the authors are men of learning, erudition, and eloquence. And then, when they quote the Holy Scriptures!—anyone would say they are St. Thomases or other doctors of the Church, observing as they do a decorum so ingenious that in one sentence they describe a distracted lover and in the next deliver a devout little sermon that it is a pleasure and a treat to hear and read. Of all this there will be nothing in my book, for I have nothing to quote in the margin or to note at the end, and still less do I know what authors I follow in it, to place them at the beginning, as all do, under the letters A, B, C, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Xenophon, or Zoilus, or Zeuxis, though one was a slanderer and the other a painter. Also my book must do without sonnets at the beginning, at least sonnets whose authors are dukes, marquises, counts, bishops, ladies, or famous poets. Though if I were to ask two or three obliging friends, I know they would give me them, and such as the productions of those that have the highest reputation in our Spain could not equal.

>So please, tell me: what is so great about Don Quixote? The characters? What makes them so humane? And the long debates between Quixote and Sancho: could you point out some examples of great writing in such dialogues?

Many things. First, it's one of the first, if not THE first, recognizable modern novel(s) in the Western world. So while we may not think it's so revolutionary to simply write a book in prose recounting the events in the life/lives of some main character(s) more or less chronologically, Cervantes pretty much kickstarted that. Second, despite the fact that it's one of the first modern Western novels, it also heavily uses irony and metafiction in such a way that it predated postmodern novels about 300 years later. Clever frame stories and joking/unreliable narrators and mixing high and low culture was already done by Cervantes hundreds of years ago.

(cont.)

getting over my shorthair desi ex was terrible

Next you want to talk about the characters and what makes them so humane. Well, first, emotions can't be reasoned about, so I can't make you feel what others have felt. Second, you claim you've read the first 50 pages or so every time you've tried, so how can I much tell you about what makes the characters humane if you've barely seen what they've done and what happens to them throughout the story? That aside, I can assure you that most novels I've read have trash characterizations compared to Don Quixote and Sancho. It's remarkable enough if an author creates one character worth remembering in a work, a truly archetypal character. Yet Don Quixote and Sancho are some of the uniquest and most archetypal characters of world literature. And not only are they unique and deep characters in themselves, but their friendship and conversations are themselves archetypal and add another layer. So not only is Don Quixote a great character in himself, and Sancho a great character in himself, but the relationship between them is itself an entire other layer and is itself one of the most famous and memorable relationships in Western literature

One particularly great effect Cervantes makes in Don Quixote is to have both Don Quixote and Sancho be two-faced, in a way. They both have their masks, and who they really are/what they really feel and think. If you had actually read it, I could tell you more without spoiling it. But, anyway, it's really touching and disconcerting, because Don Quixote and Sancho often act and speak from their masks for the comical and adventurous purposes of the novel, but there's flashes of something else at times, of an actual inner psychology of a real person apart from their "novelistic" selves, so realistic it's almost disconcerting. It's an adventure story about characters acting out an adventure story while secretly knowing, on some level, that it's all fake.

Some novels i still enjoy, as a bitter fuck who hasnt read fiction in two years, are
>Don Quijote
>Crime and Punishment
>Les Miserables
>The Hobbit

Because they're fun and the themes really make you think. (I read DQ and TH untranslated, btw; best literary experience)

as usual fpbp

ecclesiastes

Dude, Cephalus is portrayed by Plato to sound like an idiot. He isn't necessarily stupid, but he's definitely naive and old-fashion minded, in fact later in the book he's implicitly confuted by Socrates.

Stop citing him in order to sound smart and wise.

So many novels, so few hours in the day. (Miss Isabela Moner certainly is a pretty little thing, isn't she? Yes indeed.) Here's half-a-dozen recommendations off the top of my head.

>Catch-22
This is a very easy read. I yield to no-one in my disdain for self-righteous 1960-style anti-authoritarianism and I still LOVED it, so it must be pretty good. It's also a fun antidote for writing teachers who advise people to cut down on adverbs and use only the verb "said" when characters speak.

(Apparently Miss Moner's hairstyle is called a "pixie cut". I've often wondered about that term, but no longer. What could be more appropriate? Clearly what we're looking at here isn't a human being but some elfin woodland creature, forever on the brink of flight. I fear for her safety as she slips through Hollywood like a cyclist slipping between eighteen-wheelers. What she needs is someone to protect her. And by someone I mean me.)

>Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre is more accessible, but this is the real deal. Emily may have been the younger sister but she makes Charlotte seem just a little bit like a silly adolescent girl. OK, the phonetically-rendered Yorkshire-speak is a pain, but there isn't THAT much of it.

(What is there to say about those eyelashes? Some day, somewhere, Isabela is going to find someone on whom she wishes to bestow butterfly kisses from those lashes, and when that happens, even the butterflies will be jealous. I think I'll just leave this here.)

>Moby Dick
Yes, it takes some getting into. Yes, it's wildly uneven. Yes, it has whole chapters that are basically inaccurate encyclopedia entries on whales copied out verbatim. Yes, it does close its eyes to vast areas of the human experience. Yes, when Melville attempts humour he comes across like a JCB trying to solve a Rubik's Cube. But with all that said, is it one of the greatest novels ever written?
You'd better believe it.

(If you're wondering whether I noticed her eyes, then yes, I did, and all I have to say on this subject is that if King David had run into her in Jerusalem High Street and she'd given him a look like that as they passed, Bathsheba could have had her bath on his front lawn with a twelve-piece jazz orchestra and spotlights and he would have been so busy checking for a reply to his texts he wouldn't have looked up from his phone.)

[1/2]

>A Tale Of Two Cities
Dickens is there; he exists; you can't ignore him forever (although many of us have tried). A Tale Of Two Cities is short enough that you can get through it even if you don't love it. And Sydney Carton is pretty cool.

(Let's talk about Miss Moner's upper lip. It's in everyone's thoughts and the tension will only continue to build if we don't. Some people might look up "tremulous" and "sculptured" in a thesaurus and take it from there. I'm a simple soul. For me, that upper lip brings just one word to mind, and that word is YES, written across the sky in the sort of letters you might expect from an enthusiastic skywriter on double overtime with a glorious July afternoon to work with. Philip Larkin had a similar feeling about Sidney Bechet's clarinet solos, as I recall.)

>Emma
Jane Austen is hard to ignore - Ezra Pound didn't have a high opinion of many English prose writers and he thought she was a must-read. Pride and Prejudice is the obvious choice but Emma is better. Emma ought to be insufferable. She's arrogant, shortsighted, opinionated, meddling, thoughtless and (mostly) unrepentant. In fact, why we like her so much is a complete mystery.

(While we're about it, we should spend a moment on the groove between Isabela's nose and mouth. Of course, everyone on lit knows this is called the philtrum, but in case anyone doesn't, that's what it's called.
I've always liked this word and now I know why.
Where does the philtrum come from? Evolutionary biologists will probably have their own ideas but I prefer the folk tale which goes as follows:
All babies are created with knowledge of the ultimate secret of life. But at the moment they are born, God leans forward and presses his finger against their lips in admonition. DON'T TELL, He says.
If you believe this, the groove above Isabela Moner's top lip was made, not by genetically-activated protein-folding but by the gentle touch of God.
Lucky God, I say.)

>Lord Of The Flies
This is studied (or used to be studied) in schools in England, so it's somewhat fashionable to dislike it, but it's first-rate and very readable - if not wildly optimistic about human nature. We ain't all gonna make it, senpai.

(Has anyone else here noticed Isabela's collar-bones? That exquisite porcelain delicacy really brings out the protective instinct in a man. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if King Solomon had seen Transformers: The Last Knight he would have checked his hair in the mirror, sent a message to five hundred wives saying he'd been detained in a meeting and booked himself a first-class ticket on the next available flight to Los Angeles. There's just something about a girl like that that makes even the best among us start dreaming wistfully of chloroform, duct tape and a nondescript white van with stolen plates.)

Fröhliches Lesen.

[2/2]

i did not expect this to be a worthwhile thread. nicely turned around. i'll stop reading now.

OP here. You are a cool guy and I liked your suggestions

>10-Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
I think I liked Pnin better tbqh

you obviously lack any form of reading comprehension if that's your opinion of moby dick. embarrassing. back to plebbit ultra-pleb

Depends on in you're reading for literary value or leisure, I don't consider these "the greatest novels of all time" but here are some of my personal favorites/top novels I personally recommend:


The Count of Monte Cristo( My Favorite)
>An immensely Popular novel released as a series that enraptured all of europe and who's influence in western literature still resonates to this day, with many of it's themes and plot devices becoming staples of western literature. Also inspired my favorite movie, Oldboy(the korean verion btw). Plus it's just a good read, fantastic revenge story not light reading material, with 1000 pages of buildup, but 200 of payoff.

Brothers Karamazov
>Wikipedia sums it up well: The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel set in 19th-century Russia, that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, judgment, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia, with a plot which revolves around the subject of patricide. Dostoyevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, which inspired the main setting.[1] Since its publication, it has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.

The Divine Comedy
>Referred to as the Summa Theologica in verse form for good reason, one of the greatest works of world literature, it uses the story of a man's journey through the afterlife as an allegory for the soul's journey towards god, and in a broader sense mankind's journey towards god. This novel will point you towards understanding ancient philosophies and literature. Inspiration for countless artistic interpretations as well as music.

Atlas Shrugged
>In my opinion boring, preachy, drags on, but it is one of the most influential books in recent history, with considerable impact on libertarian thought and sentiment surrounding capitalism and the free market in the U.S. being cited as second to the bible in regards to the influence it has had in the lives of those surveyed. It justifies capitalism because superior people will provide superior results, therefore deserve to live a better life than you because they are better than you. also, Paul Ryan.

The Grapes of Wrath
>The opposite of Atlas Shrugged, set in the great depression, lays out the plight of the poor and sent shockwaves through society at times even being banned and burned, it is still regarded as one of the best english language novels.

Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus)
>said to be the most enduring and timeless
dramas ever written, the epitome of greek drama

Confederancy of Dunces
>Muh pulitzer prize. Why not read it, it's a fun read, essentially a modern day don quixote and /Pol/tard wrapped up in a weird little story

Catch-22
> Regarded as another great novel, set in ww2 catch 22 highlights the absurdity of war in a series of stories and misadventures. Also a fun read so why not.

Blood Meridian

>Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus)
>>said to be the most enduring and timeless
>dramas ever written, the epitome of greek drama

I aways wonder why Sophocles is considered superior to Aeschylus. Aeschylus language is true poetic fire, he is almost like Shakespeare (it's actually one of the few writers with the same bold use of language and imagery as Shakespeare, and I think that, had he been born in the Elizabethan era, he would be the greatest rival of the bard), yet 2000 years before Shakespeare.

There is no equivalent to his sublime language in any of the Greek and Latin writers, he was a single case, and it was not only his language: he also knew how to handle plot and dramatic tension.

I guess Sophocles is more balanced, organized, well-structured and reaistic than Aeschylus, but I can hardly see him as better.

I hear Aeshcylus is great in attic, and in the Lattimire translation I read he was a lot better than Sophocles. Do you have any translation reccs? I know there's got to be one that takes poetic liberties like Popes Homer or Shelley's Plato, but I can't find it

>Divine Comedy
>Novel
>Referred to as the Summa Theologica in verse form for good reason
Absolutely disgusting. Get out of my board.

Have you read any of his other work? I liked transpatent things a lot, and Despair was similar to Humbert narrator, Sebastian Knight was good, but Laughter in the Dark was just mediocre; haven't read Pnin

I have read him in Portuguese mostly, but also in English, in this translation (there are 16 plays in this volume): it was very good.

>Starship Troopes - Heilein
People say a lot of garbage about this book, majority is leftist falacy. Starship Troops is much more than a simples sci-fi novel. Heinlein wrote here several viewpoints about how life and how one becomes a soldier (thats why at one time it was a must read in military academys and until this day several people on the military recommend it). The book tells much about the sacrifices one make to become something greater then simple individual and enter a group, also about how voting rights shouden't be something given, but earned, after you made your share for the collective.
Although Heinlein often said that he didnt writte books about anwsers, after reading, re-reading and living day-to-day, I can only agree more and more with some of the things that make the Federation exist.
It also showed how using force isen't something to be look down upon. But truth be said, Clausewitz said this too in On War, althought Clausewitz is much harder and bigger then Starship Troopes.
I will just put one because I am kinda tired now. Maybe I come back to say some more.
Starship Troopes is a great book about one individual endeavor to be his best, for the best

It also is about liberty. The liberty of someone making his own choices with his own autonomy. Is a great book in general.

calm down, m8

this seems nice

>Dude, Cephalus is portrayed by Plato to sound like an idiot.
Jesus fucking christ you're such a pseud it hurts. The very fucking opposite is true, LOOK AT THIS FUCKING NAME. Cephalus is introduced as a reference for Plato, a venerable old father figure, who is CEREBRAL, he is meant to make Socrates look good by associating with someone so deeply respectable. Holy fuck, the absolute state of Veeky Forums these days.

This and Anna Karenina

>muh atypical exposition