The course claimed Pamela as the first English novel? That seems off, given not only Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels (and others) but also such seventeenth-century English prose fiction as Aphra Behn’s “Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave” from 1688.
The definition of novel as used in the course hewed closely to the etymology of the word (new), as a way to distinguish from other fictional forms it comes from - allegory, myth, tale, etc... - I vaguely recall we spent some time debating it, but really it was a rationale in order to draw a boundary around a particular curriculum.
The definition of novel as used in the course hewed closely to the etymology of the word (new), as a way to distinguish from other fictional forms it comes from - allegory, myth, tale, etc... - I vaguely recall we spent some time debating it, but really it was a rationale in order to draw a boundary around a particular curriculum.
What you said about The End of Vandalism is more or less exactly what I say about it to anyone who will listen. I reread that book every year or so. Drury does something with that novel that’s really extraordinary.
I'm reading Middlemarch now, for the first time, and finding it fairly good. The narrative technique is a bit old fashioned to my taste, with too much author exposition in place of action and dialogue, but the characters have real conflicts and interesting motives. I expect to finish it and not to regret having read it.
I would have picked Robinson Crusoe as an important early English novel. Though it struck me when I read it that the most important relationship in it was that between Crusoe and God, which is not what we now expect of a novel.
The distinctions become sort of arbitrary on these things. As I recall, that Crusoe was presented as autobiographical leads some to not see it as a novel, but in hindsight it looks a lot like a novel.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who liked those! I certainly didn’t think they were perfect, and I’m not sure whether McCarthy accomplished what he set out to do. But they were ambitious, really gutsy and (I think) utterly fascinating. I read The Passenger a second time and it held up well. I loved the way it started out like a thriller and evolved into … something far more interesting. And yes, you’re right about the dialogue - stunning in SM and merely outstanding in The Passenger.
As further evidence of the methodological failings of the list, a title needed to receive only three votes (from a pool of 172 voters) to make the top 100 titles, six votes to make the top 50, and 19 votes to be among the top ten. Even among the narrow pool of voters surveyed, there isn't a truly meaningful consensus around the books they consider the greatest.
Also, because the question posed to voters was so unbounded (they had the entire history of English-language novels from which to choose ten titles), the survey results are heavily biased by the composition of the relatively small set of voters surveyed (who overwhelmingly have backgrounds in literary fiction and not genre fiction with wider appeal). Despite that bias, most of the list is likely indistinguishable from statistical noise, given the very few votes most titles received.
The Guardian has provided a useful checklist for readers to identify a wide array of acclaimed literary fiction titles they might want to explore. It hasn't created a ranking of the "greatest" novels. It hasn't even identified criteria it thinks should define literary greatness.
There were 176 contributors and the novel ranked 50th had a mere 6 votes. Middlemarch had 56. I suspect a novel being ranked at the top of this list means a very different thing than for a novel being ranked further down. I'm sensing an agnosticism about the canon, even if the canon remains real enough.
The Guardian website made browsing the lists of individual contributors pretty frustrating, but I was intrigued to read Joshua Cohen's list. I've always sensed something of the literary trickster about him, and seeing that his top two are notorious for antisemitic stereotypes (I can't speak to the others on his list), I have to wonder if he was making some kind of statement. Perhaps this survey also reveals a high level of distrust of polling, even among our literary establishment.
Well I have always enjoyed starting fights among my very dorky friends by bombastically claiming Middlemarch to be the best novel written in English, so I was overjoyed to see it top the Guardian’s list! I think it’s up there not because it is a preciously described, dull Narrative Of English Life but because it is, to put it simply, psychological and devastating. Worth the investment of your time.
I also think Middlemarch can be considered the best English language novel. (If one wants to make such lists)
Other than that I thought the list was odd.
The list was supposed to include books translated into English but in reality only a few of the best known (and longest) non English language works made it.
Completely agree! Eliot's insights into how people ARE, the space between that and what they are trying to be, the ways they choose to give up on trying, or keep trying anyway, are breathtaking. I definitely would rank it number one. I learn more about what it means to be humana every time I read it.
lol no one is taking the bait to write their favorites!!
I'm not sure I can pull out 10 without doing some work I don't want to do but
1. Dog of the South by Charles Portis -- the funniest most annoying man ever
2. Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee -- I still haven't read Middlemarch through, but this epic of Koreans in 20th century NYC made me want to
3. Indelicacy by Amina Cain -- this book arrested me. Women make particular choices to get the lives they want that are almost, barely in their grasp.
4. Women Talking by Miriam Toews -- what Catharine MacKinnon might write if she were an anarchist novelist. The perspective and scenes and dialogue are so well constructed. I think of this book when people are praising The Handmaid's Tale, which I hate.
5. The New Life by Tom Crewe -- I'd love more novels written by historians, if Crewe were representative! A window on a time and place that feels familiar yet very far away.
Best novel lists always feel very Cosmo to me, even as I lobbied for A Fine Balance in the NYT best 21st century compilation.
I prefer the lateral, rhizomic pattern of books switching hands/downloads among friends - or bottom-column BTW nods to whatever’s on the bedside table.
Still. Some novels should form their own bookstore section labeled “Do Not Read Until After You’re 30. Perhaps Even 35 or 40.” Middlemarch and most of Dostoyevsky would sit among them - they only unfold fully for the reader with life experience and a feel for venality, vagaries of chance, dashed hopes, and the horizon of mortality in view.
I would have liked to see Murakami and Bolano somewhere on the list, as well as Infinite Jest and Omensetter's Luck.
Given the sheer quantity of books to choose from, it would have been nice to cap the number by each author at 1 or 2. I don't really need a list of every novel by Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens.
I agree with you on The Bluest Eye. I preferred it over Beloved, perhaps because it's so vastly underrated. I wouldn't say it was "better" only deeper and more meaningful. I usually stay out of conversations about Morrison because I don't "enjoy" her work as much as I am profoundly impacted and moved by it. That's what The Bluest Eye was for me.
I’m not sure what my own favorites would be, let alone my “best 10”, (is it logical to think my favorite books might be different from the books I rate as “top 10”?), but one book I return to again and again is Brat Farrar. I’ve read it 4 times now and STILL haven’t caught all the twists. (See also The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, but that’s so very very sad that I’m not sure I can stand to read it yet again just to appreciate LeCarre’s construction.)
I clocked in at 27 of the Guardian’s list, which I mention only to say: my count would be a lot lower if I counted only the books that I read and understood! Plus it was helped by the fact that I’ve read all of Jane Austen.
You’ve inspired me to go read The Talented Mr. Ripley, Pale Fire (one of my father’s favorite books), and …Middlemarch (thank you commenter who praised it).
Actually, in a way now I also want to return to Don Quixote (in Spanish). I started reading it at one point during my Spanish (self-)studies, and then stopped because I realized that rather than help me in my Spanish, it was more likely to teach me a bunch of antiquated words. But now I’m less self-conscious about accidentally using antiquated words in contemporary conversation. So, full speed ahead. Belike! Forsooth! Yea, verily!
About lists: every time I see one. I think of this brilliant essay by a film scholar friend of mine: https://www.anothergaze.com/elena-gorfinkel-manifesto-against-lists/. Lists will not save art, remake the canon, or fulfill the illusion you know everything that is there. To claim any list is "not to be taken seriously" because it doesn't include xyz is silly - no list can be taken seriously in that way. But they can be fun.
Also - no shame - I've never read Ulysses, but To the Lighthouse is an experience of the sublime you will cherish if you come to it in the right moment.
I could not get through The Road: I was completely bored with it. I'm also glad to see Pale Fire on your list! Nabokov lost me with Lolita, but gained a forever fan with Pale Fire. I became obsessed and wrote several papers on it in grad school. I also have yet to read Middlemarch, but as soon as I heard it was funny I became more intrigued. However, I differ on your assessment of Don Quixote--I would absolutely include it in my list. I found it really entertaining, philosophical, full of novelistic and comedic tropes (odd couple character pairings, metafiction, heterogeneity, frame narratives, etc) and even the presumably more autofictional parts were compelling--like the prisoner's tale. Perhaps it's because I'm such a fan of Latin American literature with so much influence from Don Quixote or because I lived in Istanbul while reading it and everything about that novel's history came to life for me there. Interestingly enough, the early "English" novel Robinson Crusoe has a lineage back to Arabic literature: it was heavily influenced by the 12th-century Arabic philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan.
The course claimed Pamela as the first English novel? That seems off, given not only Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels (and others) but also such seventeenth-century English prose fiction as Aphra Behn’s “Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave” from 1688.
The definition of novel as used in the course hewed closely to the etymology of the word (new), as a way to distinguish from other fictional forms it comes from - allegory, myth, tale, etc... - I vaguely recall we spent some time debating it, but really it was a rationale in order to draw a boundary around a particular curriculum.
The definition of novel as used in the course hewed closely to the etymology of the word (new), as a way to distinguish from other fictional forms it comes from - allegory, myth, tale, etc... - I vaguely recall we spent some time debating it, but really it was a rationale in order to draw a boundary around a particular curriculum.
What you said about The End of Vandalism is more or less exactly what I say about it to anyone who will listen. I reread that book every year or so. Drury does something with that novel that’s really extraordinary.
I'm reading Middlemarch now, for the first time, and finding it fairly good. The narrative technique is a bit old fashioned to my taste, with too much author exposition in place of action and dialogue, but the characters have real conflicts and interesting motives. I expect to finish it and not to regret having read it.
I would have picked Robinson Crusoe as an important early English novel. Though it struck me when I read it that the most important relationship in it was that between Crusoe and God, which is not what we now expect of a novel.
The distinctions become sort of arbitrary on these things. As I recall, that Crusoe was presented as autobiographical leads some to not see it as a novel, but in hindsight it looks a lot like a novel.
The Passenger & Stella Maris (especially) are remarkable. The SM dialogue is astonishing
I’m glad I’m not the only one who liked those! I certainly didn’t think they were perfect, and I’m not sure whether McCarthy accomplished what he set out to do. But they were ambitious, really gutsy and (I think) utterly fascinating. I read The Passenger a second time and it held up well. I loved the way it started out like a thriller and evolved into … something far more interesting. And yes, you’re right about the dialogue - stunning in SM and merely outstanding in The Passenger.
As further evidence of the methodological failings of the list, a title needed to receive only three votes (from a pool of 172 voters) to make the top 100 titles, six votes to make the top 50, and 19 votes to be among the top ten. Even among the narrow pool of voters surveyed, there isn't a truly meaningful consensus around the books they consider the greatest.
Also, because the question posed to voters was so unbounded (they had the entire history of English-language novels from which to choose ten titles), the survey results are heavily biased by the composition of the relatively small set of voters surveyed (who overwhelmingly have backgrounds in literary fiction and not genre fiction with wider appeal). Despite that bias, most of the list is likely indistinguishable from statistical noise, given the very few votes most titles received.
The Guardian has provided a useful checklist for readers to identify a wide array of acclaimed literary fiction titles they might want to explore. It hasn't created a ranking of the "greatest" novels. It hasn't even identified criteria it thinks should define literary greatness.
I was forced to read Middlemarch once. Can't remember much about it because I was sleeping most of the time. Not thrilling.
There were 176 contributors and the novel ranked 50th had a mere 6 votes. Middlemarch had 56. I suspect a novel being ranked at the top of this list means a very different thing than for a novel being ranked further down. I'm sensing an agnosticism about the canon, even if the canon remains real enough.
The Guardian website made browsing the lists of individual contributors pretty frustrating, but I was intrigued to read Joshua Cohen's list. I've always sensed something of the literary trickster about him, and seeing that his top two are notorious for antisemitic stereotypes (I can't speak to the others on his list), I have to wonder if he was making some kind of statement. Perhaps this survey also reveals a high level of distrust of polling, even among our literary establishment.
Well I have always enjoyed starting fights among my very dorky friends by bombastically claiming Middlemarch to be the best novel written in English, so I was overjoyed to see it top the Guardian’s list! I think it’s up there not because it is a preciously described, dull Narrative Of English Life but because it is, to put it simply, psychological and devastating. Worth the investment of your time.
I also think Middlemarch can be considered the best English language novel. (If one wants to make such lists)
Other than that I thought the list was odd.
The list was supposed to include books translated into English but in reality only a few of the best known (and longest) non English language works made it.
Throwing in works in translation is a different list.
Completely agree! Eliot's insights into how people ARE, the space between that and what they are trying to be, the ways they choose to give up on trying, or keep trying anyway, are breathtaking. I definitely would rank it number one. I learn more about what it means to be humana every time I read it.
You’re absolutely right! “Every time I read it”—LOL. I read this book so often I always say it’s not just a novel it’s a lifestyle 😂
The last line is beautiful and devastating.
My favorite line ever anywhere
lol no one is taking the bait to write their favorites!!
I'm not sure I can pull out 10 without doing some work I don't want to do but
1. Dog of the South by Charles Portis -- the funniest most annoying man ever
2. Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee -- I still haven't read Middlemarch through, but this epic of Koreans in 20th century NYC made me want to
3. Indelicacy by Amina Cain -- this book arrested me. Women make particular choices to get the lives they want that are almost, barely in their grasp.
4. Women Talking by Miriam Toews -- what Catharine MacKinnon might write if she were an anarchist novelist. The perspective and scenes and dialogue are so well constructed. I think of this book when people are praising The Handmaid's Tale, which I hate.
5. The New Life by Tom Crewe -- I'd love more novels written by historians, if Crewe were representative! A window on a time and place that feels familiar yet very far away.
Dog of the South was very very close to making my list of 10.
Best novel lists always feel very Cosmo to me, even as I lobbied for A Fine Balance in the NYT best 21st century compilation.
I prefer the lateral, rhizomic pattern of books switching hands/downloads among friends - or bottom-column BTW nods to whatever’s on the bedside table.
Still. Some novels should form their own bookstore section labeled “Do Not Read Until After You’re 30. Perhaps Even 35 or 40.” Middlemarch and most of Dostoyevsky would sit among them - they only unfold fully for the reader with life experience and a feel for venality, vagaries of chance, dashed hopes, and the horizon of mortality in view.
Catch 22, Brothers K, Left Hand of Darkness, Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, Slaughterhouse 5, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Huckleberry Finn
I would have liked to see Murakami and Bolano somewhere on the list, as well as Infinite Jest and Omensetter's Luck.
Given the sheer quantity of books to choose from, it would have been nice to cap the number by each author at 1 or 2. I don't really need a list of every novel by Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens.
I agree with you on The Bluest Eye. I preferred it over Beloved, perhaps because it's so vastly underrated. I wouldn't say it was "better" only deeper and more meaningful. I usually stay out of conversations about Morrison because I don't "enjoy" her work as much as I am profoundly impacted and moved by it. That's what The Bluest Eye was for me.
Well put. I locked into the book in just such an immediate and profound way that I almost couldn't handle it.
I’m not sure what my own favorites would be, let alone my “best 10”, (is it logical to think my favorite books might be different from the books I rate as “top 10”?), but one book I return to again and again is Brat Farrar. I’ve read it 4 times now and STILL haven’t caught all the twists. (See also The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, but that’s so very very sad that I’m not sure I can stand to read it yet again just to appreciate LeCarre’s construction.)
I clocked in at 27 of the Guardian’s list, which I mention only to say: my count would be a lot lower if I counted only the books that I read and understood! Plus it was helped by the fact that I’ve read all of Jane Austen.
You’ve inspired me to go read The Talented Mr. Ripley, Pale Fire (one of my father’s favorite books), and …Middlemarch (thank you commenter who praised it).
Actually, in a way now I also want to return to Don Quixote (in Spanish). I started reading it at one point during my Spanish (self-)studies, and then stopped because I realized that rather than help me in my Spanish, it was more likely to teach me a bunch of antiquated words. But now I’m less self-conscious about accidentally using antiquated words in contemporary conversation. So, full speed ahead. Belike! Forsooth! Yea, verily!
About lists: every time I see one. I think of this brilliant essay by a film scholar friend of mine: https://www.anothergaze.com/elena-gorfinkel-manifesto-against-lists/. Lists will not save art, remake the canon, or fulfill the illusion you know everything that is there. To claim any list is "not to be taken seriously" because it doesn't include xyz is silly - no list can be taken seriously in that way. But they can be fun.
Also - no shame - I've never read Ulysses, but To the Lighthouse is an experience of the sublime you will cherish if you come to it in the right moment.
I could not get through The Road: I was completely bored with it. I'm also glad to see Pale Fire on your list! Nabokov lost me with Lolita, but gained a forever fan with Pale Fire. I became obsessed and wrote several papers on it in grad school. I also have yet to read Middlemarch, but as soon as I heard it was funny I became more intrigued. However, I differ on your assessment of Don Quixote--I would absolutely include it in my list. I found it really entertaining, philosophical, full of novelistic and comedic tropes (odd couple character pairings, metafiction, heterogeneity, frame narratives, etc) and even the presumably more autofictional parts were compelling--like the prisoner's tale. Perhaps it's because I'm such a fan of Latin American literature with so much influence from Don Quixote or because I lived in Istanbul while reading it and everything about that novel's history came to life for me there. Interestingly enough, the early "English" novel Robinson Crusoe has a lineage back to Arabic literature: it was heavily influenced by the 12th-century Arabic philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan.