Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Novels/Assessment/Top-important

/Archive 1

Since discussion seems to have died on this some time ago, I've decided to archive and begin anew. I'll start with a list of books currently in the category, alphabetical order by author.


 * 1) Fengshen Yanyi
 * 2) Journey to the West
 * 3) Lazarillo de Tormes
 * 4) Louisa May Alcott. Little Women
 * 5) Jane Austen. ''Pride and Prejudice
 * 6) Honoré de Balzac. Le Père Goriot
 * 7) L. Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
 * 8) Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre
 * 9) Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights
 * 10) Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita
 * 11) Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan of the Apes
 * 12) Albert Camus. The Fall
 * 13) Albert Camus. The Plague
 * 14) Albert Camus. The Stranger
 * 15) Cao Xueqin. Dream of the Red Chamber
 * 16) Lewis Carroll. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 * 17) Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quixote
 * 18) Agatha Christie. And Then There Were None
 * 19) Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness
 * 20) Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe
 * 21) Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist
 * 22) Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol
 * 23) Charles Dickens. David Copperfield
 * 24) Charles Dickens. Bleak House
 * 25) Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities
 * 26) Charles Dickens. Great Expectations
 * 27) Isak Dinesen. Out of Africa
 * 28) Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment
 * 29) Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Idiot
 * 30) Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov
 * 31) Arthur Conan Doyle. A Study in Scarlet
 * 32) Arthur Conan Doyle. The Hound of the Baskervilles
 * 33) Alexandre Dumas. The Three Musketeers
 * 34) Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo
 * 35) George Eliot. Middlemarch
 * 36) William Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury
 * 37) Henry Fielding. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
 * 38) Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary
 * 39) E. M. Forster. Howards End
 * 40) Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude
 * 41) William Gibson. Neuromancer
 * 42) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Sorrows of Young Werther
 * 43) William Golding. Lord of the Flies
 * 44) Günter Grass. The Tin Drum
 * 45) Thomas Hardy. Tess of the d'Urbervilles
 * 46) Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter
 * 47) Sadegh Hedayat. The Blind Owl
 * 48) Joseph Heller. Catch-22
 * 49) Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms
 * 50) Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea
 * 51) Victor Hugo. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
 * 52) Victor Hugo. Les Misérables
 * 53) Aldous Huxley. Brave New World
 * 54) Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady
 * 55) Henry James. The Turn of the Screw
 * 56) James Joyce. Ulysses
 * 57) James Joyce. Finnegans Wake
 * 58) Franz Kafka. The Trial
 * 59) Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Les Liaisons dangereuses
 * 60) D. H. Lawrence. Lady Chatterley's Lover
 * 61) Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird
 * 62) Lu Xun. The True Story of Ah Q
 * 63) Luo Guanzhong. Romance of the Three Kingdoms
 * 64) Herman Melville. Moby-Dick
 * 65) A. A. Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh
 * 66) Margaret Mitchell. Gone with the Wind
 * 67) Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji
 * 68) Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita
 * 69) George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four
 * 70) Boris Pasternak. Doctor Zhivago
 * 71) Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time
 * 72) Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow
 * 73) Erich Maria Remarque. All Quiet on the Western Front
 * 74) Jean Jacques Rousseau. Julie, or the New Heloise
 * 75) Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children
 * 76) Salman Rushdie. The Satanic Verses
 * 77) J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye
 * 78) Mary Shelley. Frankenstein
 * 79) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
 * 80) John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath
 * 81) Stendhal. The Red and the Black
 * 82) Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island
 * 83) Robert Louis Stevenson. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
 * 84) Bram Stoker. Dracula
 * 85) Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin
 * 86) Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels
 * 87) William Makepeace Thackeray. ''Vanity Fair
 * 88) Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace
 * 89) Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina
 * 90) Ivan Turgenev. Fathers and Sons
 * 91) Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
 * 92) Mark Twain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
 * 93) Jules Verne. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
 * 94) H. G. Wells. The War of the Worlds
 * 95) Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray
 * 96) Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse

I move that we add the following at a blow:


 * 1) Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart
 * 2) Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility
 * 3) Jane Austen. Mansfield Park
 * 4) Jane Austen. Emma
 * 5) Jane Austen. Persuasion
 * 6) Honoré de Balzac. Eugénie Grandet
 * 7) Honoré de Balzac. Illusions Perdues
 * 8) Honoré de Balzac. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
 * 9) Honoré de Balzac. La Rabouilleuse
 * 10) Honoré de Balzac. La Cousine Bette
 * 11) Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep
 * 12) Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White
 * 13) Wilkie Collins. The Moonstone
 * 14) Joseph Conrad. Lord Jim
 * 15) Joseph Conrad. Nostromo
 * 16) Joseph Conrad. The Secret Agent
 * 17) Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground
 * 18) George Eliot. Adam Bede
 * 19) George Eliot. The Mill on the Floss
 * 20) George Eliot. Silas Marner
 * 21) George Eliot. Daniel Deronda
 * 22) Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man
 * 23) William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying
 * 24) William Faulkner. Light in August
 * 25) William Faulkner. Absalom, Absalom!
 * 26) F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby
 * 27) Gustave Flaubert. Sentimental Education
 * 28) E. M. Forster. A Passage to India
 * 29) Nikolai Gogol. Dead Souls
 * 30) Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd
 * 31) Thomas Hardy. The Return of the Native
 * 32) Thomas Hardy. The Mayor of Casterbridge
 * 33) Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure
 * 34) Jaroslav Hasek. The Good Soldier Svejk
 * 35) Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises
 * 36) Henry James. Daisy Miller
 * 37) Henry James. Washington Square
 * 38) Henry James. The Wings of the Dove
 * 39) Henry James. The Ambassadors
 * 40) Henry James. The Golden Bowl
 * 41) James Joyce. Dubliners
 * 42) James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
 * 43) D. H. Lawrence. Sons and Lovers
 * 44) Thomas Mann. Death in Venice
 * 45) Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain
 * 46) Robert Musil. The Man Without Qualities
 * 47) Samuel Richardson. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
 * 48) Samuel Richardson. Clarissa
 * 49) Walter Scott. Waverley
 * 50) Stendhal. The Charterhouse of Parma
 * 51) Laurence Sterne. The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman
 * 52) Leo Tolstoy. The Death of Ivan Ilyich
 * 53) Anthony Trollope. Chronicles of Barsetshire (alternately, Barchester Towers and/or The Last Chronicle of Barset, individually)
 * 54) Anthony Trollope. Palliser novels
 * 55) Anthony Trollope. The Way We Live Now
 * 56) Virginia Woolf. Mrs Dalloway
 * 57) Émile Zola. L'Assommoir
 * 58) Émile Zola. Nana
 * 59) Émile Zola. Germinal

I further suggest that the following be moved down to high importance:


 * 1) Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan of the Apes
 * 2) Agatha Christie. And Then There Were None
 * 3) Isak Dinesen. Out of Africa
 * 4) Arthur Conan Doyle. A Study in Scarlet
 * 5) William Gibson. Neuromancer
 * 6) Sadegh Hedayat. The Blind Owl

Thoughts? My propositions are admittedly centered on anglophone literature, and particularly focused on the 19th and early 20th century. Still, I think the importance of most of the works I suggest adding is fairly obvious, and the removals are also fairly clearly out of place in the current list. There are probably others that ought to be added, though, but I think this would be a decent start. It would give us about 150 top importance novels. I'd suggest that with 50 or 100 more than that, we'd have a fairly good sample to more or less set the "top" importance novels. john k (talk) 19:27, 20 August 2008 (UTC)