Greatest novels poll on ILX

This is how Gear summed it up a little bit ago. The nominations are still pouring in. Alphabetized list pledged to follow.

Emile Zola - Germinal
Pat Frank - Alas, Babylon
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
The Valley of the Dolls
Saul Bellow - Seize the Day
The Man Without Qualities - Musil
James Joyce - Ulyssess
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
The Moviegoer
Franz Kafka - The Trial
Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
Thomas Pynhcon, V
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Vladmir Nabokov- Lolita
Jane Austen- Pride and Prejudice
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth
Don Delillo - Underworld
Toni Morrison - Love
Toni Morrison - Paradise
tristram shandy
the marquise of o--
Edith Wharton - summer
elective affinities - goethe
Vladimir Nabokov - pale fire
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Resentment - Gary Indiana
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce
The Quick and the Dead, by Joy Williams
Samuel Beckett's Trilogy
'Hunger' by Knut Hamsun
I Served The King of England - Bohumil Hrabal
They Came Like Swallows - William Maxwell
Loving - Henry Green
1984 - george orwell
winesburg, ohio - sherwood anderson
Heart of Darkness" by Conrad
Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
"Notes from Underground" - Dostoyevsky
The Wanting Seed - Anthony Burgess
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Stranger - Albert Camus
The Centaur in the Garden - Moacyr Scliar
The Last of the Just - Schwartzbart
Midnight's Children - Rushdie
hunter s thompson's 'the rum diary'
bukowski's 'factotum'
plath's 'bell jar'
suskind's 'perfume'
'The Fall' - camus
William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
Alexander Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
the third policeman by flann o'briennostromo by joseph conrad
the adventures of huckleberry finn by mark twain
coming up for air by george orwell
the new york trilogy by paul auster
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Nowhere Man - Aleksandar Hemon
"Fathers & Sons" - Turgenev
"A Minor Apocalypse" - Konwicki
"My Brother" - Jamaica Kincaid
"The Reader" - Bernhard Schlink
The Confidence Man - melville
great expectations by charles dickens
Kobo Abe for "Woman in the Dunes" and "Face of Another"
invisible man by ralph ellison
as i lay dying by william faulkner
3. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
4. Three Trapped Tigers - G. Cabrera Infante
5. The Cornelius Chronicles - Michael Moorcock
6. Midaq Alley - Naguib Mahfouz
7. Zero - Ignacio Loyola de Brandao
8. VALIS - Philip K. Dick
9. Hopscotch - Julio Cortazar
Jose Saramago's "Blindness"
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Ishmael Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo"
Enrico Brizzi- Jack Frusciante è Uscito Dal Gruppo
1. Cervantes, Don Quixote
2. Gaddis, The Recognitions
3. Faulkner, Light in August
4. Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
5. Vollmann, You Bright and Risen Angels
6. Selby, Last Exit to Brooklyn
7. Crews, A Feast of Snakes
8. Ballard, Crash
9. Camus, The Plague
10. Kennedy, Ironweed
11. Meltzer, The Night (Alone)
12. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
13. Amis, Money
14. Welsh, Trainspotting
15. Vollmann, Fathers and Crows
16. Warren, All the King's Men
17. Dos Passos, The U.S.A. Trilogy
18. Kafka, Amerika
19. Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
20. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
21. DeLillo, White Noise
22. Wright, Native Son
23. Nabokov, Bend Sinister
24. Fleming, Casino Royale
25. Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm
26. Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
27. Heller, Catch 22
28. Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Utopia--Moore
Gargantua & Pantagruel--Rabelais
Wuthering Heights--Bronte
The Mill on the Floss--Eliot
Madame Bovary--Flaubert
Hunger--Hamsun
Sister Carrie--
Mrs. Dalloway--Woolf
USA--Dos Passos
The Great Gatsby--Fitzgerald
A Farewell to Arms--Hemingway
Miss Lonelyhearts--West
At Swim-Two Birds--O'Brien
The Lord of the Rings--Tolkien
Gormenghast/Titus Groan--Peake
The End of the Road--Barth
Last Exit to Brooklyn--Selby
Childhood's End--Clarke
Dune--Herbert
The Book of Daniel--Doctorow
The Dead Father--Barthelme
Ceremony--Silko
Song of Solomon--Morrison
An Artist of the Floating World--Ishiguro
woolf - to the lighthouse
pynchon - crying of lot 49
kerouac - on the road
kerouac - big sur
joyce - portrait of the artist as a young man
Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert
Sister Carrie -- Theodore Drieser
Heart of the Matter -- Graham Greene
Appointment in Sammara -- John O'Hara
Flaubert's Parrot -- Julian Barnes
The Innocent -- Ian MacEwan
Lucky Jim -- Kingsley Amis
The Ice Age -- Margaret Drabble
The Cry of the Owl -- Patricia Highsmith
A House for Mr. Biswas -- VS Naipaul
The Horse's Mouth -- Joyce Cary
Gogol--Dead SoulsDe Assis--Epitaph of a Small Winner
Dickens--Bleak House
Tolstoy--Anna Karenina
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
Simone de Beauvoir - The Blood of Others
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Jennifer Johnson - Shadows On Our Skin
Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things
Michael Ondaatje - Coming Through Slaughter
Virginia Woolf - Orlando
Ursula LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness
look homeward angel thomas wolfe
roxanne daniel defoe
the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy douglas adams
The Tartar Steppe - Dino Buzzati
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Margaret Laurence - The Diviners
Robertson Davies - Fifth Business
tender is the night by f. scott fitzgerald
Amos Tutuola The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Margaret Atwood Cat's Eye
Juan Rulfo Pedro Paramo
Jorge Amado Tereza Batista, Home From the Wars
Betsy Byars The 18th Emergency
Julio Cortazar 62: A Model Kit
Max Beerbohm Zuleika Dobson
Haruki Murakami Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (someone had to)
Edgar Allan Poe The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home
Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix
James Baldwin - Another country
T Coraghessan Boyle - Tortilla Curtain
James M Cain - Postman always rings twice
Jaroslav Hasek - The good soldier Schweik
Jack London - Call of the wild
John Updike - Rabbit redux
Ian Fleming - Casino Royale
Harriet The Spy (Louise Fitzhugh).
Tanizaki's Diary of an Old Man
Camus "The Outsider
Larry McMurtry "The Last Picture Show," "Moving On," "All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers."
The History of The World in 10 1/2 Chapters - Barnes
Brideshead Revisited - Waugh
Middlesex - Eugenides
Appointment in Samarra - O'Hara
The House of Mirth - wharton
Heavy Weather - Wodehouse
God of Nightmares - Paula Fox
The Black Dahlia - Ellroy
gf says The Maltese Falcon - Hammett
Indian Nocturne - Tabucchi
Love in a Cold Climate - Mitford
Kundera - The Joke
Bret Easton Ellis - Less Than Zero
The Flounder - Gunter Grass
wise blood - flannery o'connor
franny and zooey - j d salinger
the sound and the fury - william faulkner
In Our Time - Hemingway
A Box of Matches - Baker
Berlin Diaries - Isherwood
Desolation Angels - Kerouac
Post Office - Bukowski
Busconductor Hines - Kelman
Baker "The Mezzanine"
For Whom the Bell Tolls - hemingway
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
Michael Herr -
Milan Kundera - Life is Elsewhere
Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman - Good Omens
Margaret Attwood - the Handmaids Tale
Good Omens [nice one!]
Nineteen Eighty Four [George Orwell]
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [Lewis Carroll]
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy [Douglas Adams]
The Bridge [Ian Banks]
Day of the Triffids [John Wyndham]
Imajica [Clive Barker]
Misery [Stephen King]
Clockwork Orange [Anthony Burgess]
War of the Worlds [H. G. Wells]
Ein Neverendingen Storyen [Michael Ende]
Dice Man [Luke Reinhardt]
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
Samuel Richardson - Clarissa

I'm still doing this, I'm just waiting for Girolamo to finish the '80s film poll results!

I'm really excited about doing blurbs, also!

Shame on people for not voteing for the discworld series - the most entertaining books in existence.

while Atonement isn't bad, it's far from Ian Mc's best IMHO.

(I haven't read any of his books in years. I just don't see the point any more...)

So the Guardian made a list:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/may/12/the-100-best-novels-of-all-time

I've only read 21 of them.

I figure I've read all the 1000 best novels of all time. That's right, all 1000 of 'em! Because any novel I've read and enjoyed is by definition better than any novel I haven't read and therefore have not enjoyed. According to this impeccable logic, no novel that I haven't read could possibly be on a list of greatest novels. #makesyouthink

I've read about half of them I think. Some books I probably would have included that are not listed: Kim, Wives and Daughters, The Plague, The Last Chronicle of Barset, Villette, Riddley Walker.

That kind of exercise is always such utter fucking bullshit. Down with canons forever

Much more interesting to talk about - https://myreadersblock.blogspot.com/p/the-daily-telegraph-1899-list-of-best.html

interesting, to me, that the 1899 list had 4 dickens novels and there are all different from the 2026 dickens novels

27 for the new list, 13 for the old list

zero henry james in the old list.

What a fortunate coincidence that four of the five greatest novels ever written are English language.

Tough one for Woolf fans: ahead of Proust and behind Joyce.

xp the fact that Dream of the Red Chamber/Hong lou meng/Story of the Stone/whatever you prefer still rarely lands on lists like this is the maybe the most outstanding example of how shallow and ignorant the exercise is

The online chat about this has been more boring than the list itself, we need to get some of these ppl onto a message board so they can get how polls are really nbd

My big pet peeve is ppl affecting not to understand the methodology in order to whinge — if the guardian want to get ppl into reading why have they put “difficult” books so high? Why have they chosen to put x higher than y and leave Z out? They haven’t done either of those you fkn dope, they’ve asked 170-odd ppl for a top 10

(dgmw said methodology is p much guaranteed to produce an uninteresting list, if you look at the individual ballots tho the few that are more interesting — non-Anglo, experimental, genre stuff — look to be by graun staffers)

Ask famous established authors, get a famous established novel list - this is why the Sight & Sound critics list is more interesting than their directors' list. This is interesting as a statement of where the canon sits now, the shame is that is will instead be used as a definitive judgement, calling it "The 100 Best Novels of All Time" is really asking for trouble.

said methodology is p much guaranteed to produce an uninteresting list

Yep. I'm sure there would be some interesting outliers but I bet even on here a ballot poll would end up being unsatisfying. Have we ever actually done this? This thread seems to indicate that the original poll never happened.

obviously an accurate list is a chimera, no conceivable methodology could produce one and pretending this list fills the bill is just a bit of popular media clickbait. we all get this.

the only purpose of making such a list is precisely because it will produce curiosity, dissatisfaction and stir up a bit of meaningless controversy. we'll always get new ones because people like lists. the creators of the list get to indulge in politicking for their opinions. it gives the consumers of the list something to focus on, bicker about, and a chance to count how many of them they've read. it's mostly harmless. it's a modestly fun distraction. it's complete nonsense. after you've seen a few dozen such lists it gets somewhat tedious. that's why I chose to respond as frivolously as I did, above.

No one was wondering about that.

and you were brave enough to speak for all of them

One thing I'll say: we definitely do not get top100 novels lists as often as we do for films or music. And when we do they tend to hedge with "of the 20th century". Overall literature is less permeable to listmaking, I guess because there's still some sense that it is too serious a medium for such a frivolous act.

they should have called it "top 100 wordsmithery bangers"

xp you have to invest a lot more time in a book than in a film or an LP, that may have something to do with it.

Catch-22 vs Stoner

I decided to give "Frankenstein" a go, since I have it on my shelf and it's #30 on the list. It's enjoyable enough so far, and obviously the basic premise continues to fascinate, but as an example of 19th century gothic melodrama the writing itself is fairly clunky. See Wilkie Collins (who had two novels on the circa 1899 poll) for a more accomplished example.

Are you reading the 1/1/1818 first edition by homeschooled teen prodigy Mary, before Percy got his mitts on it (for elementary copy-editing, and maybe it was the both of them who tried to early-Victorian it, giving Victor attacks of conscience etc.)? That's the roughest or clunkiest and best. But if you want her as an effective pro, don't miss The Last Man(1826)!

I have the 1818 edition. I guess she was young and it was her first novel, so some clunkiness is to be expected. I just don’t know how it could be the 30th best novel ever written.

Recently read and had similar thoughts. I also felt the pacing of the book was very off. She moved quickly through some plot points that could have done with some development, and then lingered far too long on others. Overall great stuff for a 19yo. Age-adjusted judgement + lasting impact makes it worth canonising, insofar as one believes in canonising. Remove either of those qualifiers and yeah, it's standard fare

it sort of eats me up that season of migration to the north isn't on this list. it should be.

+ lasting impact

First of all, she might have felt Frankensteined/the "monster" herself, by her crazy brilliant parents, then by being stuck inside The Year Without A Summer with Byron, Polidori, and the bigamous Lord P., who gave her all those dying babies---

(Oh wait, they may not have actually gotten married 'til his first wife/baby mama killed herself/)

But yeah, Top 30 I dunno, except in what it means to me and apparently a lot of others, unlike, say, War And Peace, which is certainly monumental, and I had no prob with it, all those names, the length, no prob. But it wouldn't occur to me to put in my own top whatever (unless Russian novels only).

I do believe that if a book means a lot to a lot of people then it belongs on the list. On the other hand, I don't think allowances should be made for the age of the author. If it was a list of best novels by authors under 25 then fine, but this is supposed to be best without qualifications. The fact that the book has had lasting impact or is a very old book is also ultimately tangential. Best should mean best now, not best at some point in the past. If a lost novel written by Mary Shelley was found in a drawer somewhere (for sake of argument) and it was brilliantly written and compelling, then that could be one of the greatest novels of all time, even though it had zero historical impact.

I think the most empirical and objective way to make a list like this, which of course is impossible to do, would be to take a large number of people who have read a large number of novels but not the nominated books, let them read all of the nominated books for the first time, ideally without any outside influence of critical commentary, historical or biographical information about the author, etc. And then let them judge based on how the books impact them under those conditions.

I'm more taken w lasting impact on meee, which requires a lot, because I'm jaded.

Not meaning you're wrong.

No, I agree with you. That's another worthwhile metric. Not sure how that would fit into my thought experiment. Maybe the judges should read each work twice with a couple of years in between.