Greatest novels poll on ILX

Fun, Gear!

This is how Gear summed it up a little bit ago. The nominations are still pouring in. Alphabetized list pledged to follow.

Emile Zola - Germinal
Pat Frank - Alas, Babylon
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
The Valley of the Dolls
Saul Bellow - Seize the Day
The Man Without Qualities - Musil
James Joyce - Ulyssess
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
The Moviegoer
Franz Kafka - The Trial
Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
Thomas Pynhcon, V
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Vladmir Nabokov- Lolita
Jane Austen- Pride and Prejudice
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth
Don Delillo - Underworld
Toni Morrison - Love
Toni Morrison - Paradise
tristram shandy
the marquise of o--
Edith Wharton - summer
elective affinities - goethe
Vladimir Nabokov - pale fire
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Resentment - Gary Indiana
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce
The Quick and the Dead, by Joy Williams
Samuel Beckett's Trilogy
'Hunger' by Knut Hamsun
I Served The King of England - Bohumil Hrabal
They Came Like Swallows - William Maxwell
Loving - Henry Green
1984 - george orwell
winesburg, ohio - sherwood anderson
Heart of Darkness" by Conrad
Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
"Notes from Underground" - Dostoyevsky
The Wanting Seed - Anthony Burgess
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Stranger - Albert Camus
The Centaur in the Garden - Moacyr Scliar
The Last of the Just - Schwartzbart
Midnight's Children - Rushdie
hunter s thompson's 'the rum diary'
bukowski's 'factotum'
plath's 'bell jar'
suskind's 'perfume'
'The Fall' - camus
William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
Alexander Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
the third policeman by flann o'briennostromo by joseph conrad
the adventures of huckleberry finn by mark twain
coming up for air by george orwell
the new york trilogy by paul auster
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Nowhere Man - Aleksandar Hemon
"Fathers & Sons" - Turgenev
"A Minor Apocalypse" - Konwicki
"My Brother" - Jamaica Kincaid
"The Reader" - Bernhard Schlink
The Confidence Man - melville
great expectations by charles dickens
Kobo Abe for "Woman in the Dunes" and "Face of Another"
invisible man by ralph ellison
as i lay dying by william faulkner
3. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
4. Three Trapped Tigers - G. Cabrera Infante
5. The Cornelius Chronicles - Michael Moorcock
6. Midaq Alley - Naguib Mahfouz
7. Zero - Ignacio Loyola de Brandao
8. VALIS - Philip K. Dick
9. Hopscotch - Julio Cortazar
Jose Saramago's "Blindness"
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Ishmael Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo"
Enrico Brizzi- Jack Frusciante è Uscito Dal Gruppo
1. Cervantes, Don Quixote
2. Gaddis, The Recognitions
3. Faulkner, Light in August
4. Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
5. Vollmann, You Bright and Risen Angels
6. Selby, Last Exit to Brooklyn
7. Crews, A Feast of Snakes
8. Ballard, Crash
9. Camus, The Plague
10. Kennedy, Ironweed
11. Meltzer, The Night (Alone)
12. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
13. Amis, Money
14. Welsh, Trainspotting
15. Vollmann, Fathers and Crows
16. Warren, All the King's Men
17. Dos Passos, The U.S.A. Trilogy
18. Kafka, Amerika
19. Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
20. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
21. DeLillo, White Noise
22. Wright, Native Son
23. Nabokov, Bend Sinister
24. Fleming, Casino Royale
25. Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm
26. Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
27. Heller, Catch 22
28. Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Utopia--Moore
Gargantua & Pantagruel--Rabelais
Wuthering Heights--Bronte
The Mill on the Floss--Eliot
Madame Bovary--Flaubert
Hunger--Hamsun
Sister Carrie--
Mrs. Dalloway--Woolf
USA--Dos Passos
The Great Gatsby--Fitzgerald
A Farewell to Arms--Hemingway
Miss Lonelyhearts--West
At Swim-Two Birds--O'Brien
The Lord of the Rings--Tolkien
Gormenghast/Titus Groan--Peake
The End of the Road--Barth
Last Exit to Brooklyn--Selby
Childhood's End--Clarke
Dune--Herbert
The Book of Daniel--Doctorow
The Dead Father--Barthelme
Ceremony--Silko
Song of Solomon--Morrison
An Artist of the Floating World--Ishiguro
woolf - to the lighthouse
pynchon - crying of lot 49
kerouac - on the road
kerouac - big sur
joyce - portrait of the artist as a young man
Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert
Sister Carrie -- Theodore Drieser
Heart of the Matter -- Graham Greene
Appointment in Sammara -- John O'Hara
Flaubert's Parrot -- Julian Barnes
The Innocent -- Ian MacEwan
Lucky Jim -- Kingsley Amis
The Ice Age -- Margaret Drabble
The Cry of the Owl -- Patricia Highsmith
A House for Mr. Biswas -- VS Naipaul
The Horse's Mouth -- Joyce Cary
Gogol--Dead SoulsDe Assis--Epitaph of a Small Winner
Dickens--Bleak House
Tolstoy--Anna Karenina
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
Simone de Beauvoir - The Blood of Others
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Jennifer Johnson - Shadows On Our Skin
Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things
Michael Ondaatje - Coming Through Slaughter
Virginia Woolf - Orlando
Ursula LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness
look homeward angel thomas wolfe
roxanne daniel defoe
the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy douglas adams
The Tartar Steppe - Dino Buzzati
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Margaret Laurence - The Diviners
Robertson Davies - Fifth Business
tender is the night by f. scott fitzgerald
Amos Tutuola The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Margaret Atwood Cat's Eye
Juan Rulfo Pedro Paramo
Jorge Amado Tereza Batista, Home From the Wars
Betsy Byars The 18th Emergency
Julio Cortazar 62: A Model Kit
Max Beerbohm Zuleika Dobson
Haruki Murakami Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (someone had to)
Edgar Allan Poe The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home
Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix
James Baldwin - Another country
T Coraghessan Boyle - Tortilla Curtain
James M Cain - Postman always rings twice
Jaroslav Hasek - The good soldier Schweik
Jack London - Call of the wild
John Updike - Rabbit redux
Ian Fleming - Casino Royale
Harriet The Spy (Louise Fitzhugh).
Tanizaki's Diary of an Old Man
Camus "The Outsider
Larry McMurtry "The Last Picture Show," "Moving On," "All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers."
The History of The World in 10 1/2 Chapters - Barnes
Brideshead Revisited - Waugh
Middlesex - Eugenides
Appointment in Samarra - O'Hara
The House of Mirth - wharton
Heavy Weather - Wodehouse
God of Nightmares - Paula Fox
The Black Dahlia - Ellroy
gf says The Maltese Falcon - Hammett
Indian Nocturne - Tabucchi
Love in a Cold Climate - Mitford
Kundera - The Joke
Bret Easton Ellis - Less Than Zero
The Flounder - Gunter Grass
wise blood - flannery o'connor
franny and zooey - j d salinger
the sound and the fury - william faulkner
In Our Time - Hemingway
A Box of Matches - Baker
Berlin Diaries - Isherwood
Desolation Angels - Kerouac
Post Office - Bukowski
Busconductor Hines - Kelman
Baker "The Mezzanine"
For Whom the Bell Tolls - hemingway
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
Michael Herr -
Milan Kundera - Life is Elsewhere
Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman - Good Omens
Margaret Attwood - the Handmaids Tale
Good Omens [nice one!]
Nineteen Eighty Four [George Orwell]
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [Lewis Carroll]
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy [Douglas Adams]
The Bridge [Ian Banks]
Day of the Triffids [John Wyndham]
Imajica [Clive Barker]
Misery [Stephen King]
Clockwork Orange [Anthony Burgess]
War of the Worlds [H. G. Wells]
Ein Neverendingen Storyen [Michael Ende]
Dice Man [Luke Reinhardt]
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
Samuel Richardson - Clarissa

yes, I actually went back to a nominations process, just to make things a little simpler!

I'm a bit nonplussed that Absalom! Absalom! missed the list. How does Ironweed make it and not Absalom! Absalom!? Middlesex?

I might just scrap the nomination proceeding and ask everyone to just vote for whatever they want.

I'm still doing this, I'm just waiting for Girolamo to finish the '80s film poll results!

i think i've come 180 and actually now think the noms process is a good one in this case.

I agree, about noms.

I'm really excited about doing blurbs, also!

"Absalom! Absalom!?" !!

well based on an informal poll of two, I'll retain the nominations and add Absalom Absalom just 'cuz.

hstencil agreed to organize the noms into alphabetical order. It was late at night, I think, so perhaps he'd been drinking. I hope he still wants to do it. I'm going to get the list together tonight and send it his way. If he doesn't want to do it, I'll do it this weekend.

I cant believe that McEwan's 'The Innocent' got nominated but not 'Atonement'(It really is far better).

Shame on people for not voteing for the discworld series - the most entertaining books in existence.

Did anything ever result from this?

Imperfect satisfaction.

Endless Love (Scott Spencer)

it would have just been some bullshit klosterman book anyway

well he's "novel" I suppose. every generation has its Jonathan Livingston Seagull. does Kogan's book count as fiction hahaha.

while Atonement isn't bad, it's far from Ian Mc's best IMHO.

What do you think the best one is? I haven't read any.

I'm intrigued by the Discworld series, as I looked it up on Amazon and found a loving review by Donald Westlake.
At the back of my mind, or actually, at the front of my mind, is the assumption that someday I will be under house-arrest for petty insurrection and have time to read all the books that I have greedily accumulated. I have a lifetime's worth stacked beside my bed. I have NO BUSINESS sniffing around a 35-book series!
Fuckit. Bring it on.

_Guards, Guards_ is usually recommended as a jumping-on point.

Okay.

My Discworld start point was Small Gods, which I read as a follow-up to Good Omens. Which one has The Luggage?

Good Omens is a good starting point too, because its not a Discworld book, but if you enjoy it, you'll prbably enjoy Discworld.

Most of the Discworld books fall into one of three categories - Rincewind books, Witches books, or City Watch books - each with different casts and settings (though with some overlap). The first Rincewind book is the first Discworld book, the Colour of Magic (and the Luggage appears in the Rincewind books). The first Witches book is, I think, Witches Abroad, and the City Watch books start with Guards, Guards. Pratchett is generally thought to get better as he goes on, so it's best to start with the last of those loose series.

(I haven't read any of his books in years. I just don't see the point any more...)