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)[reply]


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