I actually enjoyed Ulysses.
I actually don’t like Joyce at all, ha ha ha.
My father was a great fan and tried to get me to read “Portrait”, but I just couldn’t get into it. But I do have incredible respect for Joyce and for the people who appreciate his work.
Many, many years ago I read an essay or a chapter in a book by Robert Anton Wilson pointing out all the 23 and Illuminati references in Joyce’s work. There was far more malarkey and wishful thinking than truth in that piece, but it was very entertaining reading.
Not even Dubliners? 
Read most of “Portrait” and skimmed through my old man’s copies of “Ulysses” and “Finnegan’s Wake”. That’s it.
It’s been years since I last attempted to scale Mount Joyce, but I’m happy to try the “Dubliners” on your recommendation. Thanks for that.
It’s a bit more conventional. A series of short stories.
Some very excellent short stories - The Dead perhaps foremost among them (although I love Araby too).
I vote for 20 but have actually read Call of the Wild as well, so 21. And I’d say I got something out of almost all of them. Maybe not A House for Mr. Biswas, which was indeed pretty dire - although I read it because I adored A Bend in the River.
And yeah, Things Fall Apart should be on there as well as To Kill a Mockingbird, but this isn’t really a thread about the list, I suppose.
Very surprised there was nothing by Marquez either - or was this English only?
I’ve only read a few as sci-fi was my reading choice when I did the bulk of my reading. I’m actually half way through The Catcher in the Rye and non too impressed. I read Catch 22 last year after Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and I think they’re both genius works.
Interesting that more than four in five respondents have read 1984, Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm (at least one of them, anyways). I’m guessing they’re required reading for young, developing minds both sides of the Atlantic.
Interesting, as in a little worrying.
Bad poll. Need more choices. :dubious:
I guess I’m worse off than I figured; I haven’t even heard of many of these, never mind read.
Thirteen (13) for me, but if we could include “saw the movie” I would have a lot more!
Oh, and another WTF for no To Kill a Mockingbird.
To love Ulysses (guilty) you have to love parody, and get your head around all the forms being parodied. A lot of the time people look at Ulysses as indecipherable. It’s pretty clear once you get that Joyce was mind-freaking you about form while telling the story. I’d still say it’s not one to read once and assume you’ll “get it” like a beach-reading book about a mean serial killer or something.
Here’s my complaint: I assume a list like this will leave out something I think is great or stick in something I think is overrated, blah blah blah.
But how do they make the Alexandria Quartet one book? Come on, I lost 3 credits on that one. Plus, if you just read Justine you could probably tell yourself you got the whole story, and of course you did, just not everybody’s view of it. The whole point of the quartet was the extension of physical relativity to an interpersonal metaphor, which is revolutionary in literature, although to be fair it shouldn’t be.
In any event, I was also struck by how many works I had to stop and think about – some stories are repeated so often or referenced so commonly that you smack yourself on the head and say “Whoa! I never read that!” Pretty fascinating.
And 22 :(… I’d have thought more. How intimidating.
Same. You’d think at least 100 Years of Solitude, but I could go with several of his others too.
I think Sophie’s Choice got the hit movie bump and Henderson the Rain King got the Counting Crows bump here.
Right okay, not a thread about the list not a thread about the list not a thread about the list…
My copy of it is in one volume, but I doubt it’s been published that way for a long time.
Article on the making of the list: The Lowdown on the Literary List
I thought it was only six or eight, but I went back and counted and found 12. Each of my selections were among the more popular of the list (100 or more), with the exception of Kim and I, Claudius.
I must confess that the Great Books ™ don’t really speak to me. I’m happier with SF, historical fiction, mysteries (especially Dorothy L. Sayers, whose works SHOULD quality as Great Books), etc.
Misery loves company, so perhaps the eight other Dopers who also read the Alexandrian Quartet and I can form a support group.
Good to see The Maltese Falcon getting its due as one of the great works of literature of the twentieth century. One of those books it is good to “read” as well as “have read”.
I think of science fiction as the preeminent genre of the 20th, so I always want more sci-fi on lists like this.
A friend of mine actually recommended The Magus - maybe I will tackle that next.
Regards,
Shodan
Well that’s not exactly right, the whole point of the (x,y,z) novels is to give you three independent views of the same events, all of which are necessary to get the full picture of those events…Clea then adds (t). If all you read was Justine, there’s a lot more she doesn’t realize, and I recommend you go back again (if you enjoyed it at all).
I just read this a few years ago, and it’s great. Oddly the physical environment of the book reminded me of bits of the Alexandria Quartet, particularly Clea and Balthazar, but it’s thematically different and a lot darker.
I didn’t vote in the poll, but I’ve read all three and not as a young student. 1984 and Animal Farm I read on my own in my 20s. Lord of the Flies I just read a few months ago.
That was specifically the content of my post, Maser. As I stated – and as Durrell stated before me – the novels were specifically extensions of the implications of relativity from the physical world (as in theoretical physics) to the interpersonal world (the realization on the author’s part that the same basic principle pertains - that you can’t tell the story independently from one frame of reference/point of view and have it be valid from the others. That’s due to the parts of the story a given character is present for, and of course also due to different viewpoints of the various characters.
Read your Balthazar again, and this time don’t skip the preface 
Yeah, I know all that…I was responding to:
In the subsequent two books, there are chunks of time that aren’t even contemporaneous with Justine, IIRC both before and after.
Okay, and check (as in “yes I agree, I believe you do RC”)
That’s under the relativity rubric too. Well, this has been quite the heated agreement. So, having no mortal internet enemy, I’m kind of tired & will just say thanks for reading the Quartet. I’ve been reminded of them ever since Egypt’s last election.