The Globe and Mail's "50 Greatest Books"

Add to my lists | Print this list

"Over the coming year 2008, an international panel chosen by The Globe and Mail will select the 50 Greatest Books ever written. Each week, a single work will be discussed by an expert or a writer passionate about the work in question. "

  1. 1.
    Adventures of Huck Finn
    by Mark Twain
  2. 2.
    ?
    In Search of Lost Time (Everyman's Library Classics)
    by Marcel Proust
  4. 4.
  5. 5.
    The Republic (Penguin Classics)
    by Plato
  6. 6.
    Don Quixote
    by Miguel De Cervantes
  7. 7.
    Ulysses
    by James Joyce
  9. 9.
    The Confessions of St. Augustine (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by St. Augustine
  10. 10.
    The Prince
    by Niccolo Machiavelli
  11. 11.
    The Great Gatsby
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  12. 12.
    Middlemarch (Signet Classics)
    by George Eliot
  13. 13.
    The Wealth of Nations (Bantam Classics)
    by Adam Smith
  14. 14.
    The Interpretation of Dreams
    by Sigmund, Freud
  15. 15.
    Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics)
    by Jonathan Swift
  16. 16.
    One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.)
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  17. 17.
    King Lear (The New Folger Library Shakespeare)
    by William Shakespeare
  18. 18.
    Critique of Pure Reason (Philosophical Classics)
    by Immanuel Kant
  19. 19.
    Pride and Prejudice (Vintage Classics)
    by Jane Austen
  20. 20.
    The Iliad / The Odyssey
    by Homer
  21. 21.
    The Brothers Karamazov
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  22. 22.
    Collected Poems 1909-1962
    by T.S. Eliot
  23. 23.
    Lolita
    by Vladimir Nabokov
  24. 24.
    The Koran (Penguin Classics)
    by Anonymous
  25. 25.
    Our Mutual Friend (Modern Library Classics)
    by Charles Dickens
  26. 26.
    Ficciones (English Translation)
    by Jorge Luis Borges
  27. 27.
    The Histories
    by Herodotus
  28. 28.
    Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Penguin Classics)
    by Herman Melville
  29. 29.
    Madame Bovary
    by Gustave Flaubert
  30. 30.
    Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories
    by Franz Kafka
  32. 32.
    ?
    Principia Mathematica (1687) by Isaac Newton
    by Isaac Newton
  33. 33.
    The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
    by William Butler Yeats
  35. 35.
    ?
    The Theban Trilogy of Sophocles
    by Rev W Linwood
  36. 36.
    Mahabharata
    by William Buck
  38. 38.
    ?
    Social Contract
    by Jean Jacques Rousseau
  39. 39.
    Michel de Montaigne - The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics)
    by Michel de Montaigne
  40. 40.
    Faust
    by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  41. 41.
    ?
    Silent Spring
    by Rachel Carson
  42. 42.
    Anton Chekhov's Short Stories (Norton Critical Editions)
    by Anton Chekhov
  43. 43.
    ?
    An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
    by Hume
  44. 44.
    War and Peace (Vintage Classics)
    by Leo Tolstoy
  45. 45.
    ?
    A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
    by Mary Wollstonecraft
  46. 46.
    The Decameron (Penguin Classics)
    by Giovanni Boccaccio
  47. 47.
    Waiting for Godot
    by Samuel Beckett
  48. 48.
    ?
    The Tale of Genji
    by Shikibu Murasaki
  49. 49.
    ?
    a diderot pictorial encyclopedia

  50. 50.
    The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin Classics)
    by Henry James
This is a community list. You can contribute, edit, or help maintain it by adding it to your lists.
Created by Athena on Feb 09, 2008.
 

Comments

dustydale

Lolita and the Nabokov need for the clever — 1 year ago

I’m aware that almost every review and certainly any jacket blurb extols the excellence of this book. However, I have found that Nabokov has let his need to impress the reader with his cleverness get in the way of developing characters of any depth or a narrative with engaging themes. Upon completing Lolita, I was scratching my head wondering why such a banal piece of prose has received such accolades. Lolita lovers may say that this banality was just what Mr. N. was trying to achieve – if so, there’s enough of the banal filling the warehouses and bookstores of Chapters and Borders, thank you very much!

I have just finished his collected short stories and, by and large, I find similar flaws in his writing there. Almost all surface. ‘Almost’, as there are times, such as Mademoiselle O and First Love (strongly autobiographical works), when Mr N. appears to drop his need for the clever and the overloaded surface details, and allows himself to explore the depths of a character or situation. To forget himself and his standard literary persona, so to speak. But, IMHO, this doesn’t happen very often. As well, his need for the clever moves him to choose words, particularly adverbs, that often just don’t work to produce the image or effective description – sometimes, his diction reminds one that he isn’t fully comfortable in English. So the Nabokov industry mystifies me – although I imagine he would be very pleased with how his apparent irony and word play are being appreciated.

Aug 07, 10:11PM | 0 comments | Reply to this



or
Login with Facebook