Top Ten

[polymorphikos]

That's right, it may be pointless and narrowminded, but let's face it; as a species humans like to categorise. So put all your powers of memory and criticism into play and give us (in no particular order) your top ten novels of all time.

Mine are:

1.Moby Dick,Herman Melville
Travels With My Aunt,Graham Greene
The Alien Sky,Paul Scott
Wuthering Heights,Emily Bronte
The Beach,Alex Garland
The Heart of Darkness,Joseph Conrad
1984, George Orwell
The Time Machine, H G Wells
Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne
Alice in Wonderland,Lewis Carrol

And about three hundred others

(I'll probably look back on this list in ten years and laugh, but c'est la vie)

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Novels, eh. Let's see...


In no particular order:

Martin Amis: Time's Arrow
For the absurdly obvious idea - writing the story backwards- and how well it is executed, and the telling overtones this gives to the choice of subject matter - the Holocaust itself, basically.

Albert Camus: The Outsider
A slim, economical novel about a man who is arrested for murder but executed for not crying at his mother's funeral.

William Golding: The Lord of The Flies
We're all civilised and modern. We wouldn't do all those terrible things that barbarians do, would we? Of course not! Run, rabbit, run...

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
And what exactly is a city? And what exactly is a dream?

Michael Moorcock: King of the City
'I wasn't. I am. I won't be.' Enough said.

John Banville: Ghosts
'Such suffering, such grief: unimaginable. No, that’s not right. I can imagine it. I can imagine anything.'

Scott Bradfield: The History of Luminous Motion
Cheap thrills or a significant testament? Read it and be haunted, whatever you make of it.

James Blish: A Case of Conscience
An atheistical SF writer plays out tricky theological dillemas between the stars. Too many people find the second half, with its future-dystopia, irrelevant or superfluous, simply because it was an add-on to the original short story. I beg to differ.

Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum
"I have understood. And the certainty that there is nothing to understand should be my peace, my triumph."
There is no secret knowledge! There is no secret! There is no knowledge! Really...

William Burroughs: The Naked Lunch
Not an easy read when taken on sequentially. I dip into it at random, mainlining precision doses of word virus.

 

[Foxbat]

Here's mine - again in no particular order:

In The skin Of A Lion -Ondaatje's finest book by a country mile - compelling, dreamlike, poetic

Moby Dick: one of my favourites too. From Hell's Heart, I stab at thee...that wordage just sends a shiver down my spine

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin: A little mentioned fantasy which has all the elements of magic and adventure - and something a little different to boot.

Dune: The Science Fiction (or fantasy..call it what you will) epic.

Frankenstein: Not the Gothic Horror that some think it is - a tale of somebody rejected for being different.

Jean de Florette/Manon Des Sources. If you've never read them....do it now!

Cross Of Iron: A classic anti-war novel

Lord Of The Rings: I'm not a huge fantasy fan, but there's always room for a nod in the direction of this seminal work.

All Quiet On The Western Front: another anti-war classic which humbles you as you read.

The Grapes Of Wrath: classic writing by a classic writer - it has probably the best opening lines of any book I have ever read.

 

[Esioul]

Good, I love categorising things.

No order to this:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye by J D Sallinger
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey by the same
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Bell by Iris Murdoch
The Faded Sun by C J Cherryh
On the Beach by Neville Shute
The Lives of Christoper Chant by Diana Wynne Jones (fave kids book)
Frost in May by Antonia White (and the sequals)

Damn, that's 11.

 

[littlemissattitude]

I'd love it if I could just roll out the list off the top of my head. No such luck. Going to have to think about this one. Give me something to do when I go to bed tonight and end up staring at the ceiling when I can't fall asleep. I'll report back when I've figured it out.

 

[Lacedaemonian]

Interesting to see so many books on your lists which belong to the genres of this web page.... I own Jean de Florette/Manon Des Sources on DVD and did not realise they were novels. Anyway my list:

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
Post Office - Charles Bukowski
Tales of Ordinary Madness - Charles Bukowski
Alexander (series) - Valerio Massimo Manfredi
The Silmarillion - JRR Tolkien
A Song of Ice and Fire - George RR Martin
Le Morte D'Arthur - Sir Thomas Malory.
Henry V - Shakespeare
Rigante (series) - David Gemmell