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They're the greatest

MARTIN LEVIN

mlevin@globeandmail.com

Latest comment posted at 12:58 PM EDT 05/09/08

Each week in 2008, Globe Books presents the latest instalment in the series, the 50 Greatest Books. ...Read the full article

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  1. John Robertson from Canada writes: I hope your list of the 50 greatest books published in english is more direct than your introductory comments. Not everybody is going to agree with your lists, and I doubt if I've even read 10 from your list. When you suggest you are pondering the Koran and the Bible this tells me right away we may not even be on the same page let alone book. I don't consider either of rhese to be 'books' in the same manner as 'Principles of Calculus' is not a book.
    The head caption of your article in the G&M made me think this might be interesting and fun, so I took a look in..........I will look for your list of the 'best 50' and decide what I will do from there.
  2. The Bubble from Canada writes: Is this non fiction?
    Anything by Anthony Burgess (Any Old Iron is a real gem)
    Papillon
    Dante's Inferno
    The Doors of Perception
    Jack the Giant Killer (my first book 1966)
    Maybe one by Robertson Davies Fifth Business
    Northrop Frye The Great Code
    Understanding Media
    The Real Thing (history of coca cola)
    The Mysterious Island Jules Verne
    The grapes of wrath
    The stone angel
    The Handmaids tale
    The Oxford Compendium of Wordsworth
    Great Expectations
    Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn
    There's too many.
  3. Deborah Daudin from B.C., Canada writes: To select the 50 greatest books in the English language seemed to be a good idea for encouraging interested people to comment and write about their favourite book(s). However, I found the wording of the title misleading - that is, by saying the 50 greatest books published in English, my first assumption was that the choices would be made among those books originally published in the English language.
    As the initiative is coming from an English-language newspaper, wouldn't that have been an easier way to approach the subject? In the first place, it would have narrowed the choices, something which seems to be quite a challenge already. There is plenty of opportunity for other cultures to pursue a similar quest if they so choose. In the second place, how can we (native English speakers) presume to choose books that have been translated into English from other languages - the merit largely lies with the translator's talents.
    I do have an all-time favourite book to submit, and that is Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage.
  4. J V M from Canada writes: If you don't include something by Milan Kundera (preferably 'Immortality' or else 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' which is more popular due to the film) I will be horribly disappointed. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (preferably 'One Hundred Years of Solitude') should be there too. And David Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas' which is, in fact, originally in english.

    Well, I can't imagine picking only 50 books but I'll toss those in anyways.
  5. John Williams from Ajax, Canada writes: Its a great idea, thanks G&M for some decent content. Hopefully some people will respond, but I fear your click-rate might be 100th of other areas.
    If you want to increase the click-rate, include some books about Celebrity teen porn lesbian sex videos. That will get more clicks.

    But seriously, its a fun idea, and I for one will check it out each week, and see what it has to say.

    Off the top of my head....the best book I have ever read...hmmm...I would say one of the most powerful books of all time is....

    BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL by Nietzsche

    There are dozens of IDEAS in that book that will blow your mind, if you have one.
  6. Owen Michaels from Toronto, Canada writes: Since this list is for the 50 greatest English books, I think it should be a reading list for Canadians that will enrich our lives, and make us live a bit more intensely because of it. My vote is for 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'. This is undoubtedly the most important book ever written. I'm sure it won't receive many votes, because no one reads it. No book has ever received the controversy as Darwin's, precisely because the theory is so solid and coherent. People of faith refuse to be educated, and the world is worse off because of it.
  7. Chuck the Canuk from east coast, Canada writes: What a pompous, egotistical bunch of crap. It reminds me of the British accented 'Lord' or other 'uppity snobbish person' saying, 'what will we tell the uneducated masses to read now, my dear'? Rubbish. Your list of 'books' will no doubt be religious, and Darwinistic, and so serious that they border on depressive. You should have a list for every category. Period. No ifs ands or buts. The Bible, the Qur'an. classics, religious, non fiction, political, self help, fiction, sci fi, etc each deserve a list. There is no definitive 'list'. This article is only created to spark online debate and sell papers, not to really give the world a list of great books.
  8. Osman Aboul-Nasr, Proud Canadian from South Carolina, United States writes: Chuck the Canuk from east coast, Canada, you pre-judged the posts. The list is so diverse and rich, you should check the posts in the companion article. It really is worthwhile. The Bible was mentioned once or twice, and the Koran nonce. Darwinistic books were not mentioned, even though Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was listed once. Over 400 single titles, really wonderful. Please take the time, you will not regret it.
  9. Lemmy Nothor from Canadian living in sunny Barcelona, Spain writes: I see from the title of the article that it isn't only English books.
    On top of my list, would be Louis Ferdinand Celine, Voyage au bout de la nuit, and Mort a credit.

    And also Gaston Bachelard.
  10. Paul Jones from kitchener, Canada writes: "The Last Light of the Sun"
    -Guy Gavrial Kay
  11. Edmund S from Canada writes: This is a sort of Philistine ritual. I understand the intent of these 'Best Of' exercises, but don't get why they end up being so stuffy and Judeo-Christian. Also, the lack of Canadian selections here is really disappointing. We really are a self-defeating people. Is "Remembrance of Things Past" really a good read, or do people with college degrees just feel obligated to throw that on their list to demonstrate how erudite they are? Very pretentious. The average person looking for something to read on coffee break, by the fireplace with a glass of wine after a hard day at the office is not going to enjoy The Grapes of Wrath, anything by Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Voltaire, Tom Paine, James Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, or Goethe. Yeah, these are really influential from a Western perspective but c'mon, is anyone besides english and philosophy grad students going to read this stuff?? Anglo-Western fiction for the regular joe: St Urbain's Horseman - Mordechai Richler How to Be Good - Nick Hornby The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick (thank goodness this appeared on some people's list) Catcher in the Rye - Salinger (not pretentious, anyone can read this) White Teeth - Zadie Smith The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown Elizabeth and After - Matt Cohen Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis The Life of Pi - Yann Martel Lullabies for Little Criminals - Heather O'Neill The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon The World According to Garp - John Irving Russia House - John LeCarre The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut Fifth Business - Robertson Davies Colony of Unrequited Dreams - Wayne Johnston The Last Crossing - Guy Vanderhaege The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald Another Roadside Attraction - Tom Robbins Fugitive Pieces - Ann Michaels Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald Good stories, readable, many Canadian titles and no obvious pretensions.
  12. E Maclachlan from Canada writes:
    Really the 50 greatest books is a huge endeavor, even deciding what is a book is difficult.

    Shakespeare never wrote books, not did Homer, Euripedes, Aristophanes or many of the great poets and playwrights.

    To even consider a Canadian book in this wide category is pretentious when it is competing with the Bible, Dante, Herodotus, Chaucer or books of great ideas such as those of Rousseau or Locke or...

    Why not the 50 greatest novels? Then we might have a couple of legitimate Canadian entries, and not have to argue whether the Koran is great literature, or that it even makes sense.
  13. Farenheit 451 from Vancouver, Canada writes: I hate to burst your bubble but even a passionate reader is going to think twice about reading Ulysses or In Remembrance of Times Past. Is this supposed to be English 101 revisited? How about some selections that will really INSPIRE people to read more, or to start reading for the first time?

    Reading posts on what the general public would select as some of their favourite books is 100% more interesting than the actual books that have been selected.

    What does that tell you?
  14. mary daley from St Johns,nl, Canada writes: I have read my entire life, have read all the books by other entrants.
    I would like to add more recent reading delights !
    Hosseini...both ' The Kite Runnner ' and " A Thousand Splendid Suns'
    Kingsolver ' The Poisonwood Bible '
    PLUS a novel by a young writer from NL ' Right Away Monday ' by Joel Hynes.
  15. alan smithee from Canada writes: Re: Edmund S
    Wow, you're awesome bud. The guy who accuses people who enjoy literature that has stood the test of time (and will continue to do so) as "pretentious", calls people philistines (seriously who calls people philistines except those coated with industrial-strength pretentiousness) and opines about reading by the fireplace with a glass of wine after a hard day at the office. You sound like the head cheerleader of pretentiousness movement! Not that you don't have a lot of amazing selections on your list but come on, you think that most of the writers on your list don't appreciate Dostoevsky or Shakespeare et al? Yes, Proust and Joyce can be impenetrable but it's really not that hard to read ,say, Crime and Punishment, and to call someone like Dostoevsky or Shakespeare pretentious is laughable. You put Fifth Business on your list. Would you like it if people summarily dismissed Robertson D because his writing is filtered through the lens of someone whose life experience was rooted in the ahem humble life of a UCC student? I don't see Bukowski, Pahlaniuk, Clevenger, Easton Ellis etc. etc. on your list..... those are just a few of the writers that are in reality ignored by the literary establishment but are responsible for motivating people to pick up a book these days. Mr. Levin can claim that Shakespeare only wrote "at very minimum a half-dozen works of genius" but the reality is that all his works have more scope and vision than almost every other work espoused on this post.
  16. martin heavisides from Toronto, Canada writes: 50 Greatest Books One advantage of books over films, when choosing a top 50, is the established tradition of the omnibus or survey volume, so rather than choose one book by writers I think have produced more that belong on the list than not, I'll simply begin my list with the complete works (rarely, even for the most prolific, a larger single volume than, say, a College Survey Course on the Renaissance or the Middle Ages) of (as with the Globe and Mail list, in no particular order): 1. Ben Jonson 2. Jonathon Swift 3. Geoff. Chaucer 4. Wm. Blake 5. R.A. Lafferty 6. Francois Villon (a slim volume, but a memorable testament) 7. Peter Barnes 8. Dostoyevsky 9. Alasdair Gray 10. Pedro Calderon (this I'm taking a little on faith: everything I have read by Calderon de la Barca is first rate even in translation, and I see no reason to imagine him slipping elsewhere) 11. Thomas Middleton 12. Emily Dickinson (the poems, I'm not familiar enough with the letters) 13. Slavomir Mrozek (see parenthesis to item 10) 14. George Tabori (see 10, 13) 15. Dennis Potter 16. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes (I'm grouping them because all belong, I don't want to lose four spaces, all left behind only a fragment of their body of work)
  17. martin heavisides from Toronto, Canada writes: 17. Marie Claire Blais 18. Roch Carrier 19. Anna Karenina, Tolstoy (I'm not joining the AK side of Anna Karenina v. War and Peace, merely acknowledging that I've yet to finish WAP and don't want to judge it prematurely. I'm sure Tolstoy's holding his breath) 20. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Cholderlos de Laclos 21. Those Gentle Voices, George Alec Effinger 22. Brothers of the Head, Brian Aldiss 23. Don Quixote, Cervantes (parenthetically though, I don't understand how this could be the consensus Greatest Book ever written, as I've heard claimed. Book I, if it survived on its own, would be remembered as a minor classic, severely flawed. Book II raises its stature immeasurably, but doesn't quite sprinkle its gold dust over everything that went before) 24. The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence 25. The Adding Machine/Street Scene/Counsellor at Law/See Naples and Die, Elmer Rice 26. Celestina, Fernando de Rojas 27. Euthyphro/Crito/Apology/Letter from Prison, Plato 28. The Count of Monte Cristo/The Three Musketeers, Dumas 29. The Man Who Laughs/Les Miserable, Victor Hugo (mind you, 200 pages could disappear from Les Miserable to everyone's benefit and no one's annoyance, and Hugo could stand being a little less promiscuous in assembling his lists. He assigns a half-sinister Duke in The Man Who Laughs membership in every English aristocratic club of the day, including Swift's Scriblerus Club--which was a writer's workshop essentially, with no aristocratic pretensions of any kind. I don't think John Gay had even been knighted at the time he workshopped Beggar's Opera with them.)
  18. martin heavisides from Toronto, Canada writes: 30. The Iliad, Odyssey, Homer (?) 31. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne 32. The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal 33. The Golden Notebook/Shikasta, The Four Gated City, Doris Lessing 34. Collected Stories, Mavis Gallant 35. Collected Stories and Plays, Anton Chekhov 36. The Thousand Nights and a Night 37. Collected Stories, Grace Paley 39. Running in the Family/In the Skin of a Lion/There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do, Michael Ondaatje 40. An Angel at My Table/To the Is-Land/Owls Do Cry, Janet Frame 41. Complete Poems, W.B. Yeats 42. Stallion Gate/Rose/Red Square/December 6, 1944, Martin Cruz Smith 43. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais 44. Maxims, La Rochefaucould, Aphorisms, George Christoph Lichtenberg 45. Faust, Goethe 46. The Pictue of Dorian Gray/Fairy Tales/The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde 47. Beyond Good and Evil/Gay Science/Genealogy of Morals/Twilight of the Idols/Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche 48. Books of Bale/Silence Among the Weapons/The Bagman, John Arden, Whose Is The Kingdom?, John Arden/Margaretta d'Arcy 49. Complete Works, Dr. Seuss 50. Complete Works, Lewis Carroll (I've had to submit this list in three threads because of length limits per comment thread. Lucky I didn't go overboard commenting on individual works.)
  19. V. Gr from Canada writes: Is this a compilation of books just originally written in English, or can they be translations (such as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina)?
  20. j wilson from vancouver, Canada writes: Edmund S, I would say the pretensions are yours.
    The Grapes of Wrath, not "enjoyable" enough for the masses, but Gatsby is? Voltaire doesnt make the grade?
    Dan Brown does?
    ...
    Ah, I've just read director Alan Smithee's post. Good enough. I second his comments.
  21. L.B. MURRAY from Canada L.B. MURRAY from Canada from Canada writes: -
    A la recherche du temps perdu... 3000 pages... Proust.... still my all-time favourite...

    ''In Search of Lost Time'' is the English translation.

    -
  22. L.B. MURRAY from Canada L.B. MURRAY from Canada from Canada writes: martin heavisides from Toronto, Canada writes: 17. Marie Claire Blais 18. Roch Carrier 19. Anna Karenina, Tolstoy (I'm not joining the AK side of Anna Karenina v. War and Peace, merely acknowledging that I've yet to finish WAP and don't want to judge it prematurely.....
    _____________

    Roch Carrier's ''La guerre, yes sir'' is on my top 10 list. During my teenage years, Voltaire and his vitriolic outbursts were my inspiration... of course, Voltaire was one of those books ''a l'index'', meaning ''verboten'', ''forbidden'' in snow-white Christian, Anglican or Catholic circles... Other favourites were Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle and his ''Memoires de guerre''... also Moliere's
    ''Fourberies de Scapin''... oh well, it's all a matter of taste...

    -
  23. Dan Thomas from Canada writes: Lists for some and none for others! Seriously though, all that will happen is people will look at the list and say; "hey! my favourite book isn't on the list! These people wouldn't know good literature if they tripped over it." Lists suck, all they do is cause disagreements.
  24. Strongarmlouis Rules from Canada writes: The book that outshines all in translations alone, would be the Bible; but various writers over 1500 years would make its inclusion in your article as needing an asterisk (like Roger Maris' 61 homeruns in 1961). One writer, I feel, would put Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables", as the choice.
  25. R E from Scarborough, Canada writes: "Curious George Takes A Job" instilled a strong work ethic in me at an early age. I am the hardest working kyte flyer at the beach, techniques learned from "Curious George Flies A Kyte". Move over Steinbeck...
  26. GK Cheese from Canada writes: ...or how about a writer who greatly influenced other great writers such as William Blake, August Strindberg, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Immanual Kant, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Baudelaire, Balzac, William Butler Yeats, Sheridan Le Fanu and Carl Jung. The theologian Henry James Sr. was also a follower of his teachings, as were Johnny Appleseed and Helen Keller.

    Emmanual Swedenborg is also thought by many as the primary force of the modern scietific revolution.
  27. Antonio San from Canada writes: Hilarious! So where is this week's entry "Lolita" by Nabokov? Where is the comment section for it? Ahhh the freedom of expression Globe and Mail way... hypocrites!
  28. Emma Hawthorne from Canada writes: I'd like to nominate "The Catty Review" from this week's Globe as the funniest book review I have ever read.
  29. mike cardin from ottawa, Canada writes: Which Faulkner story will make it? Should be at least three: Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and The Fury; The Wild Palms.
  30. Dan Shortt from Toronto, Canada writes: What's happening with the 50 greatest books? I thought there was going to be one per week. There hasn't been a new book showing on-line for weeks now!
  31. Micheline Calvert from Canada writes: Since nobody has mentioned it yet, here is my modest submission: "Les Fables de la Fontaine" drawn largely from Aesop. Yes, it has been translated in English and you can also read it home at night with a glass of wine.
  32. Gogh Forit from Canada writes: Absolutely impossible to limit the "greatest" books to fifty selections. It's like asking people to name their fifty favourite strawberries.
  33. S D from Resolute Bay, Canada writes: Why waste your time including nonsense books like the bible when they are so wholely debunked by books like "The Da Vinci Code".
  34. NotASpoiledAthelete - from Canada writes: The greatest books ever written will never see the light of day on these lists because we'll be too busy debating the qualities of our adult reading experiences, and forget that the greatest books ever written were those that got us excited about reading as children.

    Without those books, books that gave us the desire to keep reading & to explore the world of literature - all other works would be nothing but glorified paperweights (that are still more expensive in Canada than in the U.S. I might add).

    So I nominate anything by Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstein.

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