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Top 10 Best Novels of All Time
In 2005, Time Magazine held a readers' poll for the top 10 greatest novels of all time. Here's a list of what the results came out to be!
Best Novels of All Time
#1-5, descending
The Lord of the Rings. 3 Vol. Set
Lord of the Rings is timeless because it's the product of a truly top-shelf mind. Tolkien was a distinguished linguist and Oxford scholar of dead languages, with strong ideas about the importance of myth and story and a deep appreciation of nature. His epic, 10 years in the making, recounts the Great War of the Ring and the closing of Middle-Earth's Third Age, a time when magic begins to fade from the world and men rise to dominance. Tolkien carefully details this transition with tremendous skill and love, creating in the Lord of the Rings a universal and all-embracing tale, a justly celebrated classic.
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The Great Gatsby
Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
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Gone With the Wind
Published in the spring of 1936, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was an immediate and overwhelming success; millions of copies were sold in its first year alone. By the time the film opened on December 15, 1939, the anticipation and excitement were so great that the city of Atlanta declared the day an official holiday. Since then, more than 300 million people have seen the film and every year hundreds of thousands of copies of the novel are sold in dozens of languages.
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Beloved
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.
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Revolutionary Road
"So much nonsense has been written on suburban life and mores that it comes as a considerable shock to read a book by someone who seems to have his own ideas on the subject and who pursues them relentlessly to the bitter end," said LJ's reviewer (LJ 2/1/61) of this novel of unhappy life in the burbs. It is reminiscent of the popular film American Beauty in its depiction of white-collar life as fraught with discontent. Others have picked up on this theme since, but Yates remains a solid read.
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#6-10, descending
Brideshead Revisited
One of Waugh's most famous books, Brideshead Revisited tells the story of the difficult loves of insular Englishman Charles Ryder, and his peculiarly intense relationship with the wealthy but dysfunctional family that inhabited Brideshead. Taking place in the years after World War II, Brideshead Revisited shows us a part of upper-class English culture that has been disappearing steadily.
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Call It Sleep: A Novel
The most challenging passage for the narrator of this acclaimed novel occurs when ten-year-old David flees a family catastrophe. Guidall's empathetic handling of David's disjointed thoughts, and the meaning he brings to the fragments of harsh dialogue David hears, helps the listener experience the character's profound turmoil. While the rest of the novel is less impressionistic, Guidall delivers a virtuoso interpretation of David's family and friends, their New York accents and argot, and their use of Yiddish and Hebrew. In this way, a difficult, emotionally charged classic about a Jewish immigrant experience is made more accessible.
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.
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An American Tragedy (Signet Classics)
"Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) is nothing less than what it purports to be -- the harrowing story of a weak-willed young man who destroys himself, a villain who is also victim of the values of a deceptive, materialistic society. Dreiser patterned the story of Clyde Griffiths on a real-life murder that took place in 1906, a charming young social climber who killed his pregnant young girlfriend in order to romance a rich girl who had begun to notice him.
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The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin Classics)
When The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, America, still recovering from the Great Depression, came face to face with itself in a startling, lyrical way. John Steinbeck gathered the country's recent shames and devastations--the Hoovervilles, the desperate, dirty children, the dissolution of kin, the oppressive labor conditions--in the Joad family. Then he set them down on a westward-running road, local dialect and all, for the world to acknowledge. For this marvel of observation and perception, he won the Pulitzer in 1940.
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Best Novels of All Time: Did You Disagree?
Choosing a top 10 best list of novels is enough to spark an all-out battle. Below is a list of what is considered to be the greatest novels of all time. Which ones do you feel should make it to the top of the pile? Vote up (or down) - this will make for an interesting field study in itself! (If you've visited through a search engine, be sure to get a free Squidoo account to participate here!)
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald2 points
The Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien1 point
Farenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury1 point
East of Eden
1 point
Read Novels Online
Have you ever dreamed of being like JK Rowling, St more...1 point
Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell0 points
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh0 points
A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess0 points
A Catcher In The Rye
by J.D. Salinger0 points
Native Son
by Richard A. Wright0 points
Slaughterhouse-Five
0 points
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Mark-Nehs
This lens is delicious. Excellent List and book recommendations!! All the Best, Mark Posted October 22, 2007 |
I would suggest you have a look at "The Banjo Players Must Die"...
http://www.SanCairoDiCopenhagen.com/tbpmd.html
Posted September 02, 2007
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LindaJM
I love lists like this. Reading is something that to me is a lot like breathing. Posted August 02, 2007 |
