Another non-fiction nomination…
Man’s Search For Meaning (Viktor Frankl)
::Algernon looks around::
Doesn’t anyone else read business books??? They are quite influential within their own domain.
I need to add…
The Peter Principle (Laurence Peter)
A Passion For Excellence (Tom Peters)
::slinks away::
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People–Covey
The Dilbert Principle–Adams
Seconding or thirding some to get them on the list:
Things Fall Apart – Achebe
The Diary of Anne Frank – Frank
The Handmaid’s Tale – Atwood
Goodnight Moon – Brown
To Kill a Mockingbird – Lee
How the Grinch Stole Christmas – Seuss
The Cat In The Hat --Seuss
Farenheit 451 – Bradbury
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo
To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Ender’s Game (& sequels) - Orson Scott Card
Geek Love - Katherine Dunn
Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan
The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
Repeats of what lots of people said.
The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo
Dune - Frank Herbert
Has this one been nominated yet?..
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
Also, I see that several “collected works” volumes have been nominated. If those are eligible, then I nominate:
The Complete Stories - Flannery O’Connor
More non-fiction:
Undaunted Courage - Stephen Ambrose
Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn - Evan S. Connell
The Civil War, A Narrative (in three volumes) - Shelby Foote
With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln - Stephen B. Oates
To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown - Stephen B. Oates
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II - Stephen Ambrose
And I’ll second (or third or whatever):
USA - John Dos Passos
The Devil’s Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce
So anyone want to go back and do the math to see what our list looks like so far?
Mostly repeats, some already thirded:
Slaughterhouse V
Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Gatsby
Any Pynchon (has anyone been more influential post-WWII?)
Ulysses
On the Road
Lolita (Nabokov is possibly more influential than Pynchon)
Portnoy’s Complaint
Name of the Rose
And to add:
Sophie’s Choice, Styron
Child of God, McCarthy
I can’t believe that nobody has mentioned the collection of stories that created the ubiquitous 3 Laws of Robotics: I, Robot, Asimov
As I Lay Dying, Faulkner
Lord, could I go on and on!
And nobody has nominated Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu?
Ulysses, James Joyce
**Native Son **, Richard Wright
Black Boy
Every William Faulkner novel, starting with Light in August****The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
I did. See above post. I used the english-translation title: IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.
So that makes two votes. But how can poor Proust compete with
Ayn freaking Rand? (just how many votes did that crypto-fascist nutjob get anyway?)
Nope. GRAVITY’S RAINBOW is hands-down the most influential post-WWII novel. But you should probably specify a particular book rather than his whole oeuvre. Pynchon’s most influential books are V, GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, and THE CRYING OF LOT 49 but MASON & DIXON and VINELAND have had minimal influence and are usually regarded as Pynchon-lite, the work of a once-master whose creative powers seem to be dwindling in his old-age.
BTW, I put V and GR on my list. But I vote for THE CRYING OF LOT 49 too. This amazing little novel single-handedly created the paranoia-genre familiar to readers of DeLillo, J.G Ballard and Neal Stephenson.
Here are the votes so far (through Adam P’s post of 8-21-02 1:21 CDT). There are a total of 585 nominations, with the following 95 receiving at least 2 votes (the number of votes appears right before the title).
14 1984 - George Orwell
11 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
8 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
8 Lord of the Rings–Tolkien
7 Animal Farm by George Orwell.
6 Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
6 In Cold Blood – Capote
6 On the Road, Kerouac
6 Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)
6 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance–Pirsig
5 Brave New World - Huxley
5 Diary of Anne Frank – Frank
5 Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
5 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
5 Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck
5 Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer
5 Stranger in a Strange Land, fiction, Robert A. Heinlein
5 The Sun Also Rises–Ernest Hemingway
5 Ulysses - James Joyce
4 Atlas Shrugged (Rand)
4 Catch 22 (Heller)
4 Demon Haunted World (Sagan)
4 Hobbit–Tolkien
4 Invisible Man (Ellison).
4 Lolita - Nabokov
4 Lord of the Flies–Golding
4 Night – Weisel
4 Silent Spring - Rachel Carson:
3 A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, by Betty Smith
3 Farenheit 451 – Bradbury
3 Foundation Series–Isaac Asmiov
3 Godel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter)
3 Handmaid’s Tale – Atwood
3 Interpreation of Dreams, Freud
3 Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo
3 Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
3 Mein Kampf - Hitler (indeed influential)
3 Name of the Rose (Eco).
3 Native Son – Wright
3 Portnoy’s Complaint - Roth
3 Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
3 Second Sex (de Beauvoir)
3 USA - John Dos Passos
3 Winesburg Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
2 A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking
2 All Quiet on the Western Front – Remarque
2 An Incomplete Education (Jones, Wilson)
2 And The Band Played On (Randy Shilts)
2 As I Lay Dying, Faulkner
2 Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X/Alex Haley
2 Bonfire of Vanities - Tom Wolfe
2 Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson)
2 Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut
2 Civilization & Its Discontents Freud
2 Color Purple – Walker
2 Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy O’Toole
2 Devil’s Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce
2 Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care by Dr. Spock
2 Dune - Frank Herbert
2 Elements of Style - William Strunk and E. B. White
2 Executioner’s Song Norman Mailer:
2 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson)
2 Feminine Mystique (Freidan)
2 First Three Minutes Steven Weissberg:
2 Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
2 Gone with the Wind - Mitchell
2 Goodnight Moon – Brown
2 Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon:
2 Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
2 Guns of August- Barbara Tuchman
2 Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond)
2 How the Grinch Stole Christmas – Seuss
2 If On A Winter’s Night… Calvino
2 Illuminatus - Wilson & Shea
2 IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME–Proust
2 Journey To the End Of the Night (Celine)
2 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - James Agee and Walker Evans:
2 Little Prince (Saint-Exupery)
2 Little Red Book (or whatever its real title is) Mao Zedong’s
2 Moviegoer (Percy)
2 Naked and the dead - Norman Mailer
2 Poisonwood Bible–Kingslover
2 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce:
2 Second World War - Winston Churchill:
2 Selfish Gene by Dawkins
2 Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey)
2 Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman
2 The Trial (Kafka)
2 The Waste Land – Eliot
2 The World According to Garp by John Irving.
2 Things Fall Apart – Achebe
2 Tropic of Cancer (Miller)
2 Watership Down - Richard Adams
2 What to Expect When You’re Expecting–I don’t remember
2 White Noise - Don DeLillo:
Let’s see. An incomplete list…
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Heart of Darkenss, Joseph Conrad
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiel Hammett
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Civil War: A Narative, Shelby Foote
Tretiak, thank you for seconding Mr. Greene. I was beginning to worry that Graham wouldn’t make it.
In the true spirit of the pusuit of excellence, I’ll second The Killer Inside Me, which I find to be slightly superior to The Getaway, Pop. 1280, A Hell of a Woman and A Swell-Lookin’ Babe. Seriously, though, Thompson was a terrific writer who still managed to embody the “Pulp Fiction” of midcentury America.
Also, I don’t know how I could have missed these:
Invisible Man, Ellison
Night, Weisel
The Naked and the Dead, Mahler
U.S.A., Dos Passos and
**The Devil’s Dictionary, ** by Ambrose Bierce
I’d like to extend a huge “thank you” to Algernon for that compilation (how did you do that, anyway? Jut plenty of free time?), and in the interest of making things simpler, I’d like to make a few requests:
Let’s try to have a semi-standard format. Name of book first, then name of author. Put comments separately.
If a title starts with “the” or “a”, list it with that word at the end. Example: “Lord of the Rings, the”.
One book per line.
If a book has multiple forms of the title, use the form used previously in the thread, if any.
These suggestions should make it much easier to copy/paste and tabulate the results.
Also, to add a few more myself:
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
Brief History of Time, a, Stephen Hawking
Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcom X and Alex Haley
Dune, Frank Herbert
Little Red Book, the, Mao Zedong
Wasteland, the, T. S. Eliott
Watership Down, Richard Adams
Animal Farm, George Orwell
2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
Catcher in the Rye, the, J. D. Salinger
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne
Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the, C. S. Lewis
Yes, this is mostly things nominated by others, but there are a lot of things I didn’t think of until seeing them on the list.
You’re welcome Chronos. (for the reader’s edification, I replied to his inquiry on the how via email).
I’d like to reiterate his request for standardization of nominations. It was the only “painful” part of the compilation process (for example, in order to sort all the duplicate nominations together I had to swap the title and author when the author was listed first, and people were very inconsistent about whether or not “The” appeared in the title, so I simply eliminated it from most titles).
And I really didn’t intend for my preliminary results to be a thread killer. It seems the rate of nominations has dropped substantially since I posted them.
Keep 'em coming folks. We have a long way to go before we get 100 titles with three votes.
~grin~ Adam P, I know you already have the answer from my preliminary results, but to make it official, she has six nominations, four for Atlas Shrugged and two for The Fountainhead.
saoirse
The only other Jim Thompson I have read is Pop. 1280, and The Killer Inside Me is superior. But it is a hard book, not hard like Gravity’s Rainbow, I think, more like a punch in the stomach. After reading it I didn’t want to read another Thompson book right away.
Point of order: Didn’t we determine that The Interpretation of Dreams didn’t qualify? I move to strike it from the list.
I’ll cast a few more votes for books nominated by others, but which I omitted from my earlier posts:
As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
The World According to Garp - Irving
Trial, The - Kafka
Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care - Dr. Spock
Waste Land, The - T.S. Eliot
Power and the Glory, The - Greene
Gone With the Wind - Mitchell
Guns, Germs and Steel - Diamond
East of Eden - Steinbeck
Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Little Red Book - Mao
Angela’s Ashes - McCort
Good point spoke-. (regarding Interpretations of Dreams). Chronos, this should be disqualified due to the fact it wasn’t originally published in the 20th century. (I was mistaken to keep it on my preliminary voting list).
I’ll take this opportunity to vote for additional deserving books I have not yet voted for (even though they have plenty of votes to make the final list)…
Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Little Red Book - Mao
1984 - George Orwell
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Animal Farm by George Orwell.
Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
On the Road, Kerouac