Happy new year, everyone! I hope you guys had a good start into the year, and thanks everyone who has voted in the poll! In fact, I am quite happy that the new design seems to be popular. ^^
It’s been awhile since I last watched a movie, isn’t it? Well, partially this is because my rabid anime consumation has kicked in again, and partially it is because I truly don’t have much time for movies anymore. This is quite sad indeed. Instead, I have been talking with my father about Anna Karenina recently, when he mentioned a list of 100 best quotes from literature made by some chinese person. The list really is interesting, especially since my favorite book “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is on it.
Although my view really might be tilted due to the appearance of my favorite book, the list is also very interesting from the perspective of my “chinese-ness”. There is no chinese work in the list at all (probably intended like that), and it is quite a mirror of what chinese people consider the world’s masterpieces of literature. It is quite an amzing list with a lot of japanese, english, french, german and russian literature, but it also features some classics, some rather recent books and also covers some areas in the world that gets less attention (India, Latin America). Except for Horváth and Schnitzler (who ultimately only seem to matter for the german-speaking anyways), this list basically has everything I can currently think of if I had to make a canon of literature: Hemingway and Steinbeck, “Ulysses”, Goethe and Schiller, Homer and Platon, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, Camus and Sartre, Kafka, Dickens, Gogol, “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “La dame aux camélias”, “Madame Bovary” and “Le Rouge et le Noir”, “A Doll’s House” and “Lolita”…
And so, without further ado, here it is the list after the jump. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out some of the original titles and so it’s actually a list of 90 works. Also, I will bold the titles that I have read, or at least partially read.
1. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssee
2. Hamlet (Shakespeare)
3. Faust (Goethe)
5. Jane Eyre (Bronte, Charlotte)
6. My Childhood (Gorki)
7. Le Père Goriot (Balzac)
8. Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
9. Don Quixote (Cervantes)
10. Wuthering Heights (Bronte, Emily)
11. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
12. The Divine Comedy (Dante)
13. Pride and Prejudice (Austen)
14. The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
15. The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
16. The Man in the Case (Chekhov)
18. Poems by Byron
19. Sons and Lovers (Lawrence)
20. Poems by Heine
21. Le Tartuffe (Molière)
22. Short stories by O. Henry
23. The Mysterious Island (Verne)
24. Short stories by Maupassant
26. La Nausée (Sartre)
27. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Beecher-Stowe)
28. Die Verwandlung (Kafka)
29. À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust)
30. La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (Rabelais)
31. Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak)
32. Works by Bacon
33. David Copperfield (Dickens)
34. Kabale und Liebe (Schiller)
35. The Decameron (Boccaccio)
36. Andersen’s fairy tales
37. Dead Souls (Gogol)
38. The Good Soldier Schwejk (Hasek)
39. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)
40. Tom Sawyer books (Twain)
41. Paradise Lost (Milton)
42. The Thorn Birds (McCullough)
43. Ulysses (Joyce)
44. Catch-22 (Heller)
45. El Señor Presidente (Asturias)
46. The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
47. Works by Tagore
48. Jean-Christophe (Rolland)
49. Confessions (Rousseau)
50. Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
51. Leaves of Grass (Whitman)
53. Tropic of Cancer (Miller)
54. The Tale of Genji (Shikibu)
55. Canon of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle)
57. And Quiet Flows the Don (Sholokhov)
58. Im Westen nichts Neues (Remarque)
59. Snow Country (Kawabata)
60. Martin Eden (London)
61. Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus)
62. The Moon And Sixpence (Maugham)
63. Robinson Crusoe (Defoe)
64. On the Road (Kerouac)
65. Le Rouge et le Noir (Stendhal)
66. Eugene Onegin (Pushkin)
67. The Stranger (Camus)
68. An American Tragedy (Dreiser)
69. Cancer Ward (Solzhenitsyn)
71. Fathers and Sons (Turgenev)
72. One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Marquez)
73. A Doll’s House (Ibsen)
74. Rashomon (Akutagawa)
75. The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)
76. How the Steel Was Tempered (Ostrovsky)
77. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy)
79. The Godfather (Puzo)
80. La vie matérielle (Duras)
81. Gone with the Wind (Mitchell)
82. Gulliver’s Travels (Swift)
83. Die Blechtrommel (Grass)
84. Lolita (Nabokov)
85. Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo)
86. Moby Dick (Melville)
88. The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)
90. The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
91. La dame aux camélias (Dumas junior)
92. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
93. The Waste Land (Eliot)
94. 1001 Nights
95. A Clockwork Orange (Burgess)
96. Rebecca (Maurier)
97. Die Schachnovelle (Zweig)
98. I am a Cat (Souseki)
100. The Bible
So, what do you think of this list? Among those that I have not read (and I only read 27 of them after all), is there anything you would especially recommend? What other authors and titles would you rather consider “world literature masterpieces”?
Books I have read:
8. Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
11. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
12. The Divine Comedy (Dante)
15. The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
28. Die Verwandlung (Kafka)
39. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)
40. Tom Sawyer books (Twain)
44. Catch-22 (Heller)
75. The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)
82. Gulliver’s Travels (Swift)
86. Moby Dick (Melville)
90. The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
92. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
Wait, wait, if you ignore the Kundera (since I recommended it to you), all the books you have read are english and russian plus Kafka and the Divine Comedy! Amazing XD
Btw, I have heard that it’s quite a hassle to work yourself through the Divine Comedy, while the Decameron is supposedly much more fun, is that true? X3
The decameron is about sex. ’nuff said.
The number of books I have read on this list is embarassingly low.
I still want to know what you have read! XD
But yeah, the Decameron seems to be a lot of fun, I remember having read one quite perverted and amusing story from it: it’s Novel X in this version, or chapter 7 in this german version. ;)
*Sigh* I’ve read very few of those. Catch 22, The Catcher in the Rye, Tom Sawyer and Die Verwandlung are the only ones I think. A friend of mine is reading the Godfather at the moment and says it’s even better than the film adaptation, so I’ll probably read that.
There’s a real emphasis on the classics but less of more modern works – I’d say a mention of J K Rowling would be a bit premature but I was really expecting more sci-fi. Something by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick ought to be represented, mainly for their influence on popular culture and how their works have proved to be so prophetic in many cases. It’s a shame but I can’t think of any well-known Chinese authors at all – any ideas on some good names to start off with?
At any rate this is a nice list to give me ideas on what to read next!
Oh my, the lack of science-fiction is a great observation! Well, I think for this list, it actually makes a lot of sense. First of all, it’s not a list of most influential books (much less on modern pop culture), but originally a list of “best quotes from literature”. And so, it is unlikely for a fantasy of sci-fi book to enter this list to begin with, because they are from another universe. Another reason is that for the chinese readership, both fantasy and sci-fi are ‘lower class literature’, even when we are speaking about the likes of “1984”. It is also rarely read in China, perhaps “1984” is the only book my parents would know. But if I had to make such a list myself, I am sure there would be quite a few science fiction titles. ;)
Also, don’t worry about not having read many of those titles, I doubt anybody I know would have read the majority of them; to me, classics are mostly those books that everybody knows of but nobody reads. (The Bible, anyone? Haha.) I wouldn’t even necessarily recommend any of these books, as I believe a lot of them would be headache- and yawn-inducing (“Jane Eyre”? Argh), but perhaps some of them would strike your fancy; I’d be interested in what you think about them. ^^
And unlike you, I have actually thought that were surprisingly many modern works, hahaha. To me, a “modern work” is everthing after 1945 and the list is full of them. Most other lists of literature canons barely feature those post-1945 books at all.
I’m sorry that I don’t know any Chinese authors either. I am not even sure if there even are good modern authors at all, ahaha.