As I said earlier, the list seems to be changing from time to time.
I am glad to see 2001 on there but I think a better book could have replaced Childhood’s End. Another of his books or one by another author could easily replace it.
Alas, yes… (I met Donaldson, and he was absolutely one of the nicest guys ever. But, oy vey, his protagonist is a pure-s shit, and I tossed his book aside after 100 pages when it was obvious that it stank.)
I found the Amazon site to be very reader-surly. I would welcome a plain text list.
Actually Amazon seemed to have created this list several years ago–and perhaps have modified since. Here is the list of 100 best books from Goodreads.
A whole lot of Harry Potter on that list, PastTense, which is a shame. I liked the series—especially before Rowling got editor-proof—but including three or four books, excludes a lot of objectively better books and authors.
We all bitch that The Colour of Magic is a bad Discworld book. I like it, but I’m an easy grader, and even I admit it’s one of the worst in the series. In your opinion everyone, which early Discworld book should have been included instead, as its representative for a list like this? I’d vote Night Watch as the best of the series, though Small Gods is a great contender too. Night Watch is a bit late in the chronology, and Small Gods doesn’t really tie into the other books. Mort? Equal Rites? Guards, Guards!?
Everyone mentions Ringworld, but no one ever includes The Mote In God’s Eye.
In the end, these “lists” are just the opinion of one person or, at most, a small group. I’d bet dollars to donuts that, if you gave the assignment to produce a given list to several different entities, all the lists would have significant differences. In that light, they really don’t mean a whole lot.
If I understand correctly how the Goodreads list that PastTense linked to was determined (i.e. it’s based on how many people voted for a particular book), books that a lot of people have read have a huge advantage. Under the circumstances, lots of Harry Potter is totally to be expected.
You get a very different list when you ask a small group of widely-read aficionados to decide what’s best than when you get a huge number of people to name the half-dozen books they’ve actually heard of.
Oh, I get that—see, The Hunger Games floating near the top of the list. It’s just mildly annoying. Ten years ago, it’d have been Twilight.
Best intro book? Pick 'em: Guards! Guards!, Mort, Wyrd Systers. Best overall: Nightwatch, wherein Pterry commits Literature.
I agree, perfect.
Yes, I agree, the list isn’t all bad…
Equal Rites, I think.
My issue with this is that they are combining sci-fi and fantasy as if they are the same genre.
That’s been that way my entire life. Use to be the bookstores (except for the giant stores in NYC & Chicago) would have one shelf or rack for Sci Fi & Fantasy. usually mixed together.
It’s a pet peeve of mine. Stop sullying the sci-fi section with fantasy!
I do think we’ve reached the point where both are popular enough to separate but you also have the problem of books like Glory Road or the Pern Series that could fit either genre.
I too would prefer a top 100 Fantasy Book list and a top 100 Sci-Fi list. But of course we know that isn’t reality yet.
They all describe magic, of one form or another. Cue the Clarke quote… If they’re good examples of the genre, they explore what it means, and what it could mean, to be human in a world with such magic.
One is a natural magic given without explanation, the other is not magic because the mechanism is revealed. I’m sure people will argue with that but that’s the difference to me.
But at it’s heart sci-fi explores the human condition because of a difference in the context of the human experience within the universe being described. I’m not sure if fantasy typically does that but I may be being unfair.
It’s easy to find lists with just fantasy and just science fiction, like The 25 Best Fantasy Books & Novels of All Time: Our Top Picks and Best Sci Fi Books of All Time: Top 50 of 2022 and All Time. Please note that this doesn’t mean that I agree with those particular lists. My point is that my doing a search on “list of best fantasy novels” and “list of best science fiction novels” (and various variants of those phrases) you can easily find many lists that contain just one or the other.