{"id":4850,"date":"2012-02-06T21:54:32","date_gmt":"2012-02-07T04:54:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bspcn.com\/?p=4850"},"modified":"2012-02-06T21:54:32","modified_gmt":"2012-02-07T04:54:32","slug":"the-greatest-books-of-all-time-as-voted-by-125-famous-authors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/2012\/02\/06\/the-greatest-books-of-all-time-as-voted-by-125-famous-authors\/","title":{"rendered":"The Greatest Books of All Time, as Voted by 125 Famous Authors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by\u00a0theatlantic<\/a><\/p>\n

Tolstoy holds a 11-point lead over Shakespeare in these literary opinion polls.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\n“Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan\u00a0once said<\/a>. This intersection of reading and writing is both a\u00a0necessary bi-directional life skill<\/a>\u00a0for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their\u00a0personal libraries<\/a>.\u00a0The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books<\/a><\/em>\u00a0asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers\u2014including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates\u2014”to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time- novels, story collections, plays, or poems.”<\/p>\n

Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list\u2014so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point.<\/p>\n

In introducing the lists, David Orr offers a litmus test for greatness:<\/p>\n

“If you’re putting together a list of ‘the greatest books,’ you’ll want to do two things: (1) out of kindness, avoid anyone working on a novel; and (2) decide what the word ‘great’ means. The first part is easy, but how about the second? A short list of possible definitions of ‘greatness’ might look like this:1. ‘Great’ means ‘books that have been greatest for me.’<\/p>\n

2. ‘Great’ means ‘books that would be considered great by the most people over time.’<\/p>\n

3. ‘Great’ has nothing to do with you or me\u2014or people at all. It involves transcendental concepts like God or the Sublime.<\/p>\n

4. ‘Great’? I like Tom Clancy. “<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From David Foster Wallace (#1:\u00a0The Screwtape Letters<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by C.S. Lewis) to Stephen King (#1:\u00a0The Golden Argosy<\/a><\/em>, a 1955 anthology of the best short stories in the English language), the collection offers a rare glimpse of the building blocks of great creators’\u00a0combinatorial creativity<\/a>\u2014because, as Austin Kleon put it, “you are a mashup of what you let into your life.<\/a>”<\/p>\n

The book concludes with an appendix of “literary number games” summing up some patterns and constructing several overall rankings based on the totality of the different authors’ picks. Among them (*with links to free public domain works where available):<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Top Ten Works of the 20th Century<\/strong><\/div>\n

1.\u00a0Lolita<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Vladimir Nabokov<\/p>\n

2.The Great Gatsby<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by F. Scott Fitzgerald<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0In Search of Lost Time<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Marcel Proust<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0Ulysses<\/a><\/em>* by James Joyce<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0Dubliners<\/a><\/em>* by James Joyce<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Gabriel Garcia Marquez<\/p>\n

7.\u00a0The Sound and the Fury<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by William Faulkner<\/p>\n

8.\u00a0To the Lighthouse<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Virginia Woolf<\/p>\n

9.\u00a0The complete stories of Flannery O’Connor<\/a><\/p>\n

10.\u00a0Pale Fire<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Vladimir Nabokov<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Top Ten Works of the 19th Century<\/strong><\/div>\n

1.\u00a0Anna Karenina<\/a><\/em>* by Leo Tolstoy<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0Madame Bovary<\/a><\/em>* by Gustave Flaubert<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0War and Peace<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Leo Tolstoy<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Mark Twain<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0The stories of Anton Chekhov<\/a><\/p>\n

6.\u00a0Middlemarch<\/a><\/em>* by George Eliot<\/p>\n

7.\u00a0Moby-Dick<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Herman Melville<\/p>\n

8.\u00a0Great Expectations<\/a><\/em>* by Charles Dickens<\/p>\n

9.\u00a0Crime and Punishment<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Fyodor Dostoevsky<\/p>\n

10.\u00a0Emma<\/a><\/em>* by Jane Austen<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Top Ten Authors by Number of Books Selected<\/strong><\/div>\n

1. William Shakespeare \u2013 11<\/p>\n

2. William Faulkner \u2013 6<\/p>\n

3. Henry James \u2013 6<\/p>\n

4. Jane Austen \u2013 5<\/p>\n

5. Charles Dickens \u2013 5<\/p>\n

6. Fyodor Dostoevsky \u2013 5<\/p>\n

7. Ernest Hemingway \u2013 5<\/p>\n

8. Franz Kafka \u2013 5<\/p>\n

9.\u00a0Tied:<\/strong>\u00a0James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf \u2013 4<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Top Ten Authors by Points Earned<\/strong><\/div>\n

1. Leo Tolstoy \u2013 327<\/p>\n

2. William Shakespeare \u2013 293<\/p>\n

3. James Joyce \u2013 194<\/p>\n

4. Vladimir Nabokov \u2013 190<\/p>\n

5. Fyodor Dostoevsky \u2013 177<\/p>\n

6. William Faulkner \u2013 173<\/p>\n

7. Charles Dickens \u2013 168<\/p>\n

8. Anton Checkhov \u2013 165<\/p>\n

9. Gustave Flaubert \u2013 163<\/p>\n

10. Jane Austen \u2013 161<\/p>\n

As a nonfiction loyalist, I’d love a similar anthology of nonfiction favorites\u2014then again, famous writers might wave a knowing finger and point me to the complex relationship between\u00a0truth and fiction<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bonus: This guy was elected President of Finland yesterday, first morning after elections.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Written by\u00a0theatlantic Tolstoy holds a 11-point lead over Shakespeare in these literary opinion polls. “Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan\u00a0once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a\u00a0necessary bi-directional life skill\u00a0for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their\u00a0personal libraries.\u00a0The Top […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4850"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4850"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4851,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4850\/revisions\/4851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}