User talk:ReaderofthePack/List of novels considered the greatest

Books
Tabulating them here:


 * Don Quixote: Guardian, Brittanica, TOI,
 * Anna Karenina TG, Brittanica, The Atlantic, RD, TOI, CL, Independent, NYU, wh, ew
 * To Kill a Mockingbird: RD, RD, TOI, Time, cl, Independent, Guardian, NYT, Brittanica
 * The Great Gatsby: Brittanica, The Atlantic, TOI, CL, nyu, wh, ew
 * One Hundred Years of Solitude: Brittanica, The Atlantic, TOI, NYT, CL, ew,
 * A Passage to India: Brittanica, TOI,
 * Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: Brittanica, TOI, CL,
 * Beloved: Brittanica, TOI, NYT, CL, wh, ew
 * Mrs. Dalloway: Brittanica, TOI, CL,
 * Things Fall Apart: Brittanica, CL,
 * Jane Eyre: Brittanica, TG, wh
 * The Color Purple: Brittanica, CL, wh
 * Lolita: The Atlantic
 * In Search of Lost Time: The Atlantic, NYU,
 * Ulysses: The Atlantic, nyu
 * The Dubliners: The Atlantic,
 * The Sound and the Fury: The Atlantic, CL,
 * To the Lighthouse: The Atlantic,
 * Pale Fire: The Atlantic,
 * The Fellowship of the Ring/Lord of the Rings: NYT, CL,
 * The Hobbit: CL,
 * 1984: NYT, CL,
 * Atonement: CL, wh
 * Midnight's Children: CL, wh
 * Giovanni's Room: CL,
 * The Remains of the Day: CL,
 * On the Road: CL,
 * Little Women: CL, TG, wh
 * White Teeth: CL,
 * The Road: CL,
 * On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: CL,
 * Moby Dick: CL, TG,
 * The Sun Also Rises: CL, nyu
 * Wuthering Heights: CL, TG,
 * The Catcher in the Rye: CL, wh
 * Pride and Prejudice: CL, TI, wh, ew
 * Great Expectations: CL, wh, ew
 * Gulliver's Travels: CL, TG, nyu,
 * A Clockwork Orange: CL,
 * Catch-22: CL, wh
 * The Grapes of Wrath: CL,
 * Lord of the Flies: CL, wh
 * Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: CL, TG,
 * The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe: CL, wh
 * The Scarlet Letter: CL, TG,
 * Brave New World: CL, wh
 * Animal Farm: CL,
 * One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: CL,
 * Slaughterhouse Five: CL,
 * Valley of the Dolls: RD,
 * Pilgrim's Progress: TG,
 * Robinson Crusoe: TG,
 * Tom Jones: TG,
 * Clarissa: TG,
 * Tristam Shandy: TG,
 * Dangerous Liasons: TG,
 * Emma: TG,
 * Frankenstein: TG, wh
 * Nightmare Abbey: TG,
 * The Black Sheep: TG,
 * The Charterhouse of Parma: TG,
 * The Count of Monte Cristo: TG,
 * Sybil: TG,
 * David Copperfield: TG,
 * Vanity Fair: TG,
 * Madam Bovary: TG, nyu,
 * The Woman in White: TG,
 * Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: TG, wh
 * The Way We Live Now: TG,
 * Daniel Deronda: TG,
 * The Brothers Karamazov: TG, nyu
 * The Portrait of a Lady: TG,
 * Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: TG,
 * Three Men in a Boat: TG,
 * Dorian Gray/Grey: TG,
 * The Diary of a Nobody: TG,
 * Jude the Obscure: TG,
 * The Riddle of the Sands: TG,
 * The Call of the Wild: TG,
 * Nostromo: TG,
 * The Wind in the Willows: TG,
 * In Search of Lost Time: TG,
 * The Rainbow: TG,
 * Metamorphosis: nyu
 * Paradise Lost: NYU
 * Moveable Feast: NYU
 * As I Lay Dying: NYU
 * A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: NYU
 * Harry Potter 1: wh, ew
 * Handmaid's Tale: wh
 * Time Traveler's Wife: wh
 * I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: wh
 * The Kite Runner: wh
 * Of Human Bondage: wh
 * The Lovely Bones: wh
 * The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time: wh
 * Wolf Hall: wh
 * Girl with a Pearl Earring: wh
 * Birdsong: wh
 * The Bell Jar: wh
 * My Antonia: ew
 * Rabbit Quartet: ew
 * Charlotte's Web: ew

I'll add more as I tabulate. ReaderofthePack (formerly Tokyogirl79)  (｡◕‿◕｡)  16:59, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm going to have to basically start with the lists that have a very limited amount of books listed, just to save my sanity and eyeballs. ReaderofthePack (formerly Tokyogirl79)  (｡◕‿◕｡)  18:57, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
 * My method here is to list the books from these short lists (about 10-20 or so listed) and then just add which source lists it as part of their greatest. Then after all that's done, someone can go back and look for the others from the bigger lists if they choose. My thought though is that if it's not listed on the smaller, more specific ones then they likely aren't listed in enough places to qualify. ReaderofthePack (formerly Tokyogirl79)  (｡◕‿◕｡)  18:58, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

Sourcing
Here's the sourcing I have thus far:


 * Reader's Digest
 * Times of India ✅
 * Time magazine (this is limited to things released since Time first published)
 * Country Living ✅
 * The Independent (Paywalled, can't access)
 * The Guardian (Got to 42)
 * The Atlantic ✅
 * New York Times ✅
 * Britannica ✅
 * Penguin
 * Daily Telegraph
 * NYU Local ✅
 * Random House
 * The Big Read (list, not the article, of course), American version
 * Woman and Home ✅
 * Entertainment Weekly, also this
 * Bokklubben World Library
 * Bokklubben World Library

I'll add to this as time permits. ReaderofthePack (formerly Tokyogirl79)  (｡◕‿◕｡)  17:07, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

Sci-fi specific

 * Penguin Random House
 * Wired
 * Esquire
 * Book Riot (List is most influential so maybe counts?)
 * NPR, both sci-fi and fantasy
 * Space.com
 * Thrillist

Fantasy

 * NPR, both sci-fi and fantasy
 * Esquire (This looks to be a non-paywalled version.)
 * Time
 * Paste
 * Wired
 * RD
 * ign

Horror

 * Paste
 * Esquire
 * RD
 * Elle
 * npr, says stories but also lists novels
 * Bookriot, debatable as it says most influential
 * Cosmo
 * TG
 * aarp
 * cbr
 * boingboing (done by site founder, so usable)
 * screen rant

Massive undertaking
Hi! I'm pinging all of you because of the recent discussion on the Starfaring article. I figured that you may or may not be interested in this article. Long story short, there's an AfD open for an article on a list of novels considered to be the best. The qualifications for being in the article were pretty loose, so I've started one myself. The requirement is that the novel must have been on at least six or more lists of novels considered to be the best, of course from places Wikipedia would see as reliable. While I was going through the lists I noticed that they were fairly general but predominantly didn't list much or anything from the fantasy, sci-fi, or horror genres. I've started compiling sourcing for these genres as well and didn't know if any of you would be willing to help sort through the lists. It's kind of tedious work, but it's also interesting at the same time.

One thing I'm noticing is that although the six or more sources thing may seem a little light, the overlap on these lists tend to be far fewer than you'd think. I haven't tackled the lists of 100 books just yet, other than the one I started thinking it was a list of the top 30-40, but even with those lists there's not a lot of overlap.

If any of you want to help with the more general list that would be amazing, especially if you're able to check foreign language sourcing. English language sources are going to be far more likely to choose content that was originally written in English or has a well known English translation. I would like to minimize the language bias as much as possible here. ReaderofthePack (formerly Tokyogirl79)  (｡◕‿◕｡)  15:35, 31 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I figure for the more specific genres we'd make a separate list? We can add it into the main list as well, but I like the idea of showing that these were named on specific genre lists. ReaderofthePack (formerly Tokyogirl79)  (｡◕‿◕｡)  15:36, 31 July 2022 (UTC)
 * OK, I have to chuckle a little at how much variety there is sourcing-wise for the horror genre. Fantasy and sci-fi were more limited, but it's kind of surprising that you have AARP and Elle doing horror lists. ReaderofthePack (formerly Tokyogirl79)  (｡◕‿◕｡)  16:08, 31 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Of course I'd prefer better sourcing than that, but they'd still generally be seen as RS. ReaderofthePack (formerly Tokyogirl79)  (｡◕‿◕｡)  16:09, 31 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I still have my doubts whether such a list would be encyclopedic (hence my comment at Articles for deletion/List of novels considered the greatest, which I note just ended up deleted), that said I agree it is an interesting project and can be done in userspace. At minimum, any RS saying this can be added to corresponding articles on books (and we can discover some books in need of stubbing). Since this is about novels, I assume that academic, non-fiction books are out of scope? Anyway, for now some RS lists: Bokklubben World Library and its see also with a bunch of links seems to be quite relevant and I don't think it was considered? How about Ranker? And Goodreads (this)? My concern is also systemic bias, for a lot of what we have here, isn't it "list of English or translated-to-English novels considered the greatest"? Crime and Punishment, War and Peace...? Goodreads has those, at least, but it also has zero Asian literature. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, The Tale of Genji... and so on I also looked at Polish Internet; the Guardian list is often reported, followed by NYT.
 * This led me to an interesting academic article, in Polish (but we leave in the era of easy machine translation, Google Drive will translate this pretty well and it's reading I recommend: link), a pretty thoughtful article on "is there such as thing as canon of Polish classical literature", and also a critique of  The Western Canon (Q: Why is there so little Polish literature in Bloom's canon? A: "He simply does not know our literature, just a few names he has heard of. Of course, you can't blame him for not knowing it, because he can't know everything, but you can for pretending he knows everything. Almost all British poetry of the 19th century was squeezed into the canon, so according to such criteria, not only Mickiewicz, Słowacki and Norwid would fit there, but also Malczewski, Lenartowicz and Asnyk [IF they were British]. And if Krasiński was German and Prus was French, Undivine Comedy and the Doll would have been in every European canon long ago. Nobody pays attention to Polish literature of the 19th century because we did not exist as a state then. The political aspects of canonization should never be forgotten". This is hardly the only academic article on this, more on the Polish literary canon is here: . I'll also ping User:Nihil novi who may enjoy reading this discusison.
 * Perhaps more similar to what you started is the list of 100 most important Polish books published in 2018 by Polish Radio here/here; a bit surprisingly the winner is a SF book (Lem's Solaris (novel)). . Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 16:53, 31 July 2022 (UTC)
 * PS. Western canon is a good way to frame what I am talking about (i.e. what I see above is the List of novels considered the greatest in the Western canon, which frankly seems the same as simply List of novels in the Western canon. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 08:55, 1 August 2022 (UTC)


 * I'm going by fiction, but the thought of an article or list including both (or at least one for non-fiction) did cross my mind. I'm honestly also worried about the encyclopedic-ness of it as well. One thing I'm repeatedly running into here is that while I can find lists for the general and specific genres, the sources are all pretty random. Almost none of them are book specific sites and of those, many would cause people to raise an eyebrow and question what makes them (not the person, but the outlet) able to make a list of this nature. I mean, NYT does give info on how they made their list and even if they didn't, it's still generally well thought of enough to where I could make an argument for using their list. Cosmo? Well... AARP and Elle are harder to do. Either could be seen as a RS, but it's sort of squiffy. I can see where six sources would be doable for video games since the sites used for those usually either only focus on video games or focus on them so heavily that they could be seen as reliable for that subject matter. I figure Goodreads can be excluded since it's created and edited by volunteers, so it's more or less raw data even though the list is pretty identical to most of the lists I came up with. Ranker I'm leery of for the same reasons, more or less, although with that the additional reason would be that their lists are usually dynamic.
 * And that's not even considering exactly what you said, the bias of such lists. It reminds me of an article I recently worked on - it was for a book listing what the author claimed were the most influential/important books of all time. Multiple people ripped it apart for featuring stuff written predominantly by white men and for all the books being by English people. We could try to resolve it by looking for lists in different languages or put out by sourcing in the specific countries or areas, but that still wouldn't completely resolve the issue. One thing I noticed was that the Times of India's list was pretty much indistinguishable from a list put out by an outlet in the UK or US.
 * I figure that for now we can make the list and then open it to community consensus whether or not it should be live. I can see the merit in having it as a userspace draft even if the consensus is not, as it can be used to make stub articles or just a list of commonly regarded novels that may or may not need expansion. This does bring up an interesting idea though: would it be doable to put together an article about the concept of "greatest/best/etc" lists? I found a couple of articles criticizing specific lists, but it seems like it would be OR to add that to an article on the general concept. It feels like this should be an article somehow, but the concept is kind of nebulous. It's about these types of lists but it's really about a more prevalent issue, like bias in literature - a more general topic that would need to be sourced and written extremely well if it were to be live. ReaderofthePack (formerly Tokyogirl79)  (｡◕‿◕｡)  17:54, 31 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I read, above, a couple of major concerns being expressed about creating a universal list of greatest novels: the massiveness of the task; and potential biases inherent in the undertaking.
 * Perhaps both concerns could be reduced by distributing the task among the various-language Wikipedias. This would reduce the massiveness of the overall task and the inherent biases by securing a broader range of specialized literary expertise.
 * The various resulting lists could then be integrated into a single overall list.
 * Nihil novi (talk) 07:18, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
 * One more thing. WP:VITAL, section on novels. Not a source per se, but folks over there (whom I occasionally join) have been trying to figure out what's "greatest" in various categories, novels included, for years. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 08:57, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Very interesting undertaking, thanks for pinging me. Currently I am too busy elsewhere to get into this (and also wondering beforehand if this can get installed after the deletion of the previous version). In case you come upon some German lists and would like my help there specifically, please ping me again, I'd be happy to contribute small-scale. Daranios (talk) 10:59, 1 August 2022 (UTC)