Most of the books in the Project Gutenberg top 100 I’ve read.
Most of the rest I’ve heard of and decided not to read. There’s a few where I only know the author. And then, in the top 20, there are
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and
‘The Awakening’ by Kate Chopin.
Two books I’ve never heard of, by authors I’ve never heard of, that, on examination, are not books or authors I am glad to have learned about.
The total number of downloads from Project Gutenberg is a of our modern level of literacy, and it wouldn’t be hard to push a book into the top 100. But what are these two books doing there?
Are they on a school curriculum? Do people think they are politically or socially important? Is it “Literature” which appeals to an audience of which I am not a member? Or what?
Those are the two most prominent American early feminist classics. They ought to be required reading for any course on American women’s cultural history. The Awakening is about a woman discovering her inner self and desires. The Yellow Wallpaper is about a woman whose inner self is practically destroyed by her husband. Both are indispensable literature.
The novel Herland and the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Gilman are moderately well known in literary circles recently. So is the novel The Awakening by Chopin. It’s not that surprising that they are on the list. The items on the list that I’m surprised by are The Romance of Lust, The Desert Healer, The Seven Conundrums, Legendary Tales of the Highlands, Mr. and Mrs. Sên, My Secret Life, The American Journal of Photography, Minna and Myself, and North of 36.
Both of them are described on Wikipedia as early examples of feminist literature which, yes, do form part of literature curricula.
I hadn’t heard of them before either, but I just read ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and I’d call it a good, thought provoking short story. The writing is a bit involved by modern standards, but a lot of nineteenth century literature is. Maybe a little too much melodrama? Victorians loved their melodrama - even good writers like Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens can lay the trowel on a bit, at times. But the main theme of it was the degree of control a woman could exert over her own life in the face of well-meaning (probably well-meaning) paternalism and dismissal of her actual experiences, and that was a thing that it was particularly important to write about at the time
If you don’t have an interest in the Victorian era, and particularly the position of women in the Victorian era, you are probably not the audience for these works.
I’m familiar with The Yellow Wallpaper, because I’ve subbed for high school English classes that were studying it. While the themes are certainly relevant, I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly gripping or otherwise entertaining story.
Melbourne, I would really like to know if you were familiar with The Romance of Lust, The Desert Healer, The Seven Conundrums, Legendary Tales of the Highlands, Mr. and Mrs. Sên, My Secret Life, The American Journal of Photography, Minna and Myself, and North of 36, all of which really surprised me. That assumes that you saw the same version of the list that I did. Take a look at the list you’ve linked to again. Notice that the list changes every single day, since it’s based on the downloads from the previous day. This is not remotely a long-term list of frequent downloads. The list isn’t really that important then.
Part of the reason you may not have heard of the “book” “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that it is, as noted, a short story. It’s often anthologized, but rather short to appear in a single print volume. But when it comes to public domain e-books, there’s no reason a popular short story (or essay, or other short work) can’t be “published” by itself, especially when it’s the most famous thing its author ever wrote.
Actually, there’s a book available at the moment called The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings by Gilman and another by Gilman called The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories. It’s not surprising then that a volume of Gilman’s works might be called The Yellow Wallpaper, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes a volume of short stories is called by the most famous short story in it.
Yeah, I wouldn’t either! Hoping it was a clumsy way of saying “Aside from the feminist angle…” rather than what it sounds like. If nothing else, it seems…odd…to divorce the story from the question of women’s treatment in that time and place.
Yeah, I interpreted it as meaning “even aside from…”, not “you shouldn’t care about…”. Though I’m sure that RealityChuck can clarify his own intentions.
I read The Awakening in a college literature class, and wrote a paper on it, so there’s that. Do college literature students still read books and write papers?
My daughter is in high school, she recently had to read The Yellow Wallpaper, and she’ll be reading The Awakening. I’d never heard of The Yellow Wallpaper, but I had heard of The Awakening and Kate Chopin. I did read The Yellow Wallpaper when she did only because as mentioned it’s a short story. I’ve never read The Awakening.
Never heard of them, hadn’t realised that I’d pointed to the wrong page, found the wrong page when composing the question.
I was looking at the more stable list —
when I thought of the question. I accidently found the 'top" daily when I went back to find it again.
The two books were the /only/ surprises in the all-time top 25 (although it’s surprising to see “Crime and Punishment” English edition, listed there with a Russian title). Moving on to the next all-time 25, their are 5 I haven’t read, including 1 author I’ve never heard of: Lucian’s True History by of Samosata Lucian. I’ve not read DeBoise or Douglas, but they aren’t in libraries here and weren’t known to my parents. (I did most of my reading when young). “Anonymous” I haven’t read, but one look at the title “The Romance of Lust” tells me exactly why it’s there. I’ve not read Montaigne, not in the library, not in the bookshops, and I probably won’t now – but now that it’s in Gutenberg, that’s just laziness on my part.
I hadn’t realized that I’d pointed you all to a daily download page. I might not have thought anything of it if I’d started at the daily download page.
The real list is obviously the result of all kinds of factors — “The Dolls House” is never going to go viral on youtube – I was just interested to see something I didn’t understand.
Thanks all for responding. You may all now tell me what you think of the other books
When I look at the list you actually used, Melbourne, the only books in the top 100 that I hadn’t heard of before are the following:
The Romance of Lust My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. Noli Me Tangere The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
It’s a little strange that they frequently give the untranslated title, but so what? It’s interesting that there are four books in the top 100 that I hadn’t heard of, but so what? I never thought that I knew about every well-known book. I don’t really find the list to be very interesting.
Well, interesting enough so that when specifically asked about it you constructed a reply:) But yes, you might have been more surprised to find titles your didn’t know on the first page, and perhaps as a reader who has read a lot of books you might have wondered why?
Well, for a long time I collected lists of what people considered to be the Great Books. Occasionally I would buy some of them to add to my library. It became clear to me that no matter how many such lists I collected, there was a very good chance that the next list I found would contain a book that I had never heard of before. I gave up collecting such lists because I wanted to avoid my apartment exploding from the piles of books. I still collect list of movies that people recommend. I’ve merged those lists into an alphabetical list of such movies. It now contains about 10,000 such films. Still though, when I add the movies in a new list that I’ve just found, there will be some I’ve never heard of before.
