According to the Official List about 95% of the ‘best books’ have been written by American, Canadian, British or Irish writers - and I’m not sure who the Canadian’s are.
Interesting game for me is to equate popularity lists. I see The Great Gatsby as Stairway to Heaven, Ulysses as St Pepper…
Well I couldn’t believe Confederacy of Dunces wasn’t on somewhere. Obviously picking the “best” books is subjective, but I’d have to agree with the comment that there’s too much Conrad. I read Secret Agent, it was good but I don’t think top 100.
The list only includes books written originally in English.
I agree, a Scientologist must have spammed their reader poll. Three Hubbard books in the top 10. Battlefield Earth is an ok book (not great, but ok). The Mission Earth series was mildly amusing for the first three books, but beyond that is pure trash. Fear isn’t very good either.
brandocet - that would make sense. Looked at the site again and that fact didn’t leap out at me although it does say on the linked page that the Reader’s List is of novels published in the English language.
On reflection, I’m sure you must be right but why restrict it in that way ?
You could do worse than to read something else by Nabokov, if you haven’t already. Pnin has one of my all-time favorite bits of English prose, and Pale Fire is quite good. And I think you’d have a better understanding of Lolita having read another of Nabokov’s works first.
FWIW, I’ve read thirty of the board’s list, and twenty-two of the “reader’s” list.
15 on the board list, 24 on the readers’.
Yeah, the board list is problematic, (remember the shitstorm of criticism when it was first published?) But reading the readers’ list convinced me that the board list was actually pretty okay. At least none of the books on there were total junk.
But I wanna know where The Phantom Tollbooth is!
I’ve read 8 on the first list & 23 on the second. Some serious Charles De Lint fans hijacked the reader’s poll. He had 8 on there. Who here has even heard of him except me? I admit he is one of my favorite authors, but even I will admit his books aren’t that good. I think both lists are a bunch of bologna, did you notice that to get on there they all had to be published by Random House? Hmmmm…
15 on the first list and 31 on the second list. Those damn nuns made us read a lot. Does passing out and drooling over a copy of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged count as reading it through osmosis? 
That was a pretty embarassing moment in English Lit.
Hm. 16 on the board’s list, 27 on the people’s list. And even if the people’s list is crap, I was still pleased to see H.P. Lovecraft on there.
12 and 25. Not including Hubbard or de Lint.
It does look like somebody spammed that list.
I guess I should read something other than mysteries when I read fiction.
That list sucks. I’t too random. Where’s Madame Bovary? Anna Karenina? A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? I hate Ayn Rand, too, which helps.
Anyway, I’ve read the following:
1,2,3,4,5,6,10,13,18,19,20,28,41,45,55,64,66,67,74,78,85, and 96.
IMHO, 96 (Sophie’s Choice) is the best on the list, followed by A Farewell to Arms.
On the other list, I’ve read:
4,5,6,11,13,16,18,19,22,23,24,25,28,29,31,33,34,37,42,53,63,69,74,79,81,84,90,91, and 94.
94 and 57 are the best on this list, my favorites.
Invisible Man is another excellent one on both lists, I just finished it about a month ago.
I recommend reading Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron. It’s a tough read (afterward, I didn’t read another book for a month - a record for me) but once you get into the thick of the book, it drags you up and down and rips your heart out.
I’ve read 12 on the board’s list and 17 on the readers’ list.
People who were asking why certain novels aren’t on the list should note that it was confined to 20th century novels originally published in English.
Clearly the readers’ list was spammed by Scientologists and probably also by De Lint readers. Possibly it was also spanned by Heinlein readers. Other than that though, it’s a pretty reasonable set of choices.
Actually, a lot of us were pranksters protesting the bad taste of the original board - I mean, how many crap “macho” novels by Hemingway could they cram on there?
I’m just annoyed that we couldn’t get William Shatner on there , so I guess we’ll have to settle for the two worst novelists of the 20th century - Rand and Hubbard. What a hoot!
While I did spam the list, I’ll defend the inclusion of a De Lint novel. The man has a great way with words and characters and creates a world that lives on the page. Great stuff, especially since it helps me combat my ignorance of Canada.
I totally agree, but 8 is kind of a lot, don’t you think?
Well, true. 1 would be sufficient.
If I had time, I would read them all. So far, I’ve read about 5 or 6 on both lists. School, for some reason, doesn’t cover a great many of those books as part of curiculum. At one point in time, I read the diary of George Orwell, and it has made me want to read the fiction works of his. That point in time being at least 5 years ago.
True, but that doesn’t excuse them from not including some of the great recent fiction, for example Sci Fi (which I don’t read much, but still should merit inclusion. Some of what I’ve read is at least as good as, say, Lord of the Flies) and PoMo (which I’ve recently started appreciating, and couldn’t believe they left out). Thats whole genres they left out. They had what, 4 Conrads and 4 Forresters, and still had no room for anything by Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis, etc. For all the Heinlin, Rand, De Lint, and Hubbard spam in the other list, at least they had Gravity’s Rainbow.
What I want to know is how come they disqualified my 3000 votes for J.K. Rowling books? All that work for nothing. 
I read 8 on the board’s, 11 on the reader’s .
Hunseker wrote:
> True, but that doesn’t excuse them from not including
> some of the great recent fiction, for example Sci Fi
> (which I don’t read much, but still should merit
> inclusion.
I was only replying to some people who were (I thought) asking about the absence of certain novels which couldn’t be on the lists because they only included novels originally published in English. As to the absence of certain genres, I think you’re right. The board’s list is actually pretty good, I think, if you take into account the fact that they don’t like science fiction and post-modern fiction and that they are a little prejudiced toward the first half of the century. The readers’ list is pretty good if you ignore the books included only because the poll was spammed by Scientologists, Objectivists, and Heinlein and De Lint fans. These lists aren’t much better or worse than most such lists.