One of those 'Best ...' lists which may be of interest.

[KurriKurri]

I was cleaning out my desk earlier and found something I'd cut out of a Sunday paper several years a go. Thought it might be of interest to fellow readers, its one of those 'best.....' lists.

Best Journeys

On The Road - Jack kerouac
The Odyssey - Homer
The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
Three Men In a Boat - Jerome k Jerome
Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland - Carroll

Best Decadence

The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
Vile Bodies - Waugh
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Wilde
The Beautiful and the Damned - Fitzgerald
Against Nature - J K Huysmans

Best Rebels

The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X
The Outsider - Camus
Animal Farm - Orwell
Communist Manifesto - Marx
Les Miserables - Hugo

Best Science Fiction

The Time Machine - Wells
The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick
Invisible Man - Wells
Day of the Triffids - Wyndham
We - Yevgeny Zamyatin

Best Violence

Clockwork Orange - Burgess
Hell's Angels - Hunter S Thompson
A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens
Another Country - James Baldwin
In Cold Blood - Capote

Best Highs

Junky - William S Burroughs
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - De Quincey
The Subterraneans - Kerouac
Monsieur Monde Vanishes - Simenon

Best Subversion

1984 - Orwell
The Monkey Wrench Gang - Edward Abbey
The prince - Machiavelli
Bound For Glory - Woody Guthrie
Death of a Salesman - A Miller

Best Crimes

Maigret and the Ghost - Simenon
The Woman in White - Collins
The Big Sleep - Chandler
A Study in Scarlet - Conan Doyle
The Thirty Nine Steps - Buchan


That's page one, - after a cup of tea, I shall post the next installment

[KurriKurri]

Part 2.

Best Sex

Story of the Eye - Georges Bataille
A Spy in the House of Love - Anais Nin
Lady Chatterley's Lover - Lawrence
Venus in Furs - Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer

Best Villains

The Brothers Karamzov - Dostoyevsky
Heart of Darkness - Conrad
Diamonds are Forever - Fleming
The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
The secret agent - Conrad

Best Crazies

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Diary of a Madman - Gogol
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky
Notes From The Underground - Dostoyevsky

Best Lovers

A Room With a View - Forster
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Don Juan - Lord Byron
Love in a Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams

Best Heroes

David Copperfield - Dickens
Middlemarch - Eliot
She - Rider Haggard
The Fight - Norman Mailer
No Easy Walk To Freedom - Nelson Mandela

Best Tearjerkers

Of Mice and Men - Steinbeck
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Notre-Dame de Paris - Hugo
Jude The obscure - Thomas Hardy
The Old Curiosity shop - Dickens


Best Spine Tinglers

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Stevenson
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Castle of Otranto - Horace walpole
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

Best Minxes

Vanity Fair - Thackeray
Lolita - Nabokov
Baby Doll - Tennessee Williams
Breakfast at Tiffany's - Capote
Emma - Jane Austen

Nearly there - luckily I have no life time on my hands, and finely honed typing skills.

[KurriKurri]

The eagerly awaited Part the Third.

Best Adultery

Madame Bovary - Flaubert
Therese Raquin - Zola
Les Liaisons Dangereuses - Choderlos de Laclos
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Anna Karenina - Tolstoy

Best Debauchery

I, Claudius - Robert Graves
Hangover Square - P Hamilton
The Beggar's Opera - John Gay
The Twelve Caesars - Suetonius
Guys and Dolls - Damon Runyon

Best Action

Treasure Island - Stevenson
The Iliad - Homer
The Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas
From Russia With Love - Fleming
War and peace - Tolstoy

Best Laughs

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
The Diary of a Nobody - George and Weedon Grossmith
Pickwick Papers - Dickens
Scoop - Waugh
Lucky Jim -Kingsley Amis.



And there you have it - a fairly eclectic mix I thought, - but you will probably want to add your own mental after some of the choices. Enjoy

[Sallystyle]

Wow, thank you for doing this :)

I have lots to add to my list.

[auntierozzi]

Thanks for this Kurrikurri. I have been thinking about reading War & Peace and I will now I've seen it on your list. I might have finished it by the time the snow melts!!!

[peppertree]

thanks OP, very interesting lists though i can't understand why love in a cold climate makes the best lovers list, comedy perhaps!

[OneHolyCow]

Best action... Tolstoy?
...hears the old prince turn in grave..

Old desk huh, as in 1952?

[BOF]

I think I'm going to have a crack at War And Peace too- apparently it is being adapted for TV and will be amazing, so it would be good to be able to honestly claim I've read it.

[MiddleAgeMiddleEngland]

Thank you for that. I'm going to copy it down into my reading notebook later this evening. (Could probably do some high - tech copy/paste/print thingy but don't know how.

Some interesting ideas there!

[RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie]

Ooh lovely. I've read 50 of them, but it's given me some good ideas for further reading.

Thanks for that.

[drjohnsonscat]

on a rough count I make that 9 women authors in a list of 100..

[CoteDAzur]

How long ago was this list compiled, I wonder.

[KurriKurri]

Cote - it could easily be ten years, or even longer - as I say it was in my desk, I must have cut it out of the paper and put it away for future reference. - i.e now

I knew it would make for a certain amount of eye rolling, - but that is half the fun of these lists IMO, it is good to be outraged at what is included and what is not!

[CoteDAzur]

I was thinking at least several decades.

Best decadence is Wilde and Fitzgerald? Best sci-fi is Wells? Best crime is Collins & Conan Doyle? It's the sort of list my grandfather would have compiled

[Hassled]

Oh I think Fitzgerald will always be the master of decadence.

Probably a sign of the time the list was compiled that the compiler felt able to put Lolita as a "minx" - she was a child.

And Marx as a "rebel"? Really? The Communist Manifesto wasn't intended as a work of fiction :o.

[KurriKurri]

Hassled - I also baulked at the use of the word minx regarding Lolita - but thought I'd be true to the original article and print it as written.

I stupidly threw the article away having typed it all out here and c&p into word. So I don't know the author of the article - or whether male or female.

I think a case can be made for Wells as a writer of Sci Fi, and certainly for Collins and Conan Doyle in crime - they are wonderful authors, and possibly neglected.

I quite like the idea of Marx as a rebel - it's that beard that does it

[KurriKurri]

apologies - I meant 'great' writer of sci fi/crime etc, - obviously they were 'writers'

[CoteDAzur]

Wells was great in his time and possibly in the top 20 ever, but certainly not "the best" ever.

Philip K Dick is probably in the top 10 ever, although definitely not the best, considering the brilliant "new" generation of the last two decades. I read his Man In The High Castle. It was good but not even Dick's best novel, let alone one of the five best sci-fi novels of all time.

Also, it's been a while since I read Tale Of Two Cities but I had to when I saw it under "best violence". Maybe when one looks only at books of old, when there was little violence in print. The list is definitely compiled by someone who hasn't read anything written in the last few decades, imho.

[Hassled]

Have never read any Wells - I really must.

And and and - Guys and Dolls isn't even an actual book/story. The musical was based on a whole raft of short stories by Runyon (which I highly recommend) but there was never one called Guys and Dolls. It has made me reminisce to myself quite how beautiful Marlon Brando was in that film, though, so I'll forgive the list-writer.

And Kurri - you're quite sure you're not prepared to go through your bins for us? I want to know who came up with this so I can internet stalk them.

[KurriKurri]

Hassled - I will look into the depths of the recycling bin tomorrow