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)