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N.E. Brigand
Gondolin
Wed, 7:06pm
Post #1 of 3
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"The Lord of the Rings" ranks 103rd on list of "best novels of all time."
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Eight days ago, The Guardian published a list of 100 books, ranked in an article describing them as the "greatest literature ever published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide." There were 172 voters. Books initially published in other languages were eligible so long as an English translation has also been published. These were the top ten:
1. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
2. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
3. Ulysses (James Joyce)
4. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
5. In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)
6. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
7. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
8. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
9. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
10. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
The Lord of the Rings did not make the list, but The Guardian printed each contributors' individual list. As published, these aren't searchable as a whole, but on his blog, a mathematician at Leeds named Matthew Aldridge analyzed each list to work out which books just missed the cut (he also spotted a couple errors), and it turns out The Lord of the Rings tied for 103rd with these four novels:
--Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel García Márquez)
--The Years (Annie Ernaux)
--To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
--Light in August (William Faulkner)
Per Aldridge's math, that would suggest that three respondents voted for The Lord of the Rings, and you don't need to check each of the 172 lists individually to confirm that (that said, because they list the authors alphabetically by first name, clicking on the very first name, as will be seen below, turns up one such vote), because Aldridge also found The Guardian's raw data file, which can be searched, and yields those contributors' names. All three are authors themselves:
I. Adam Roberts is a science fiction writer whose books include Gradisil, Jack Glass, Salt, and Yellow Blue Tibia. He put The Lord of the Rings first on his list. Roberts is the only one of these three contributors to include commentary on his choices, and he wrote this of Tolkien's romance:
"I loved this as a child, reread it as a young adult with disdain but now reread it with renewed wonder and admiration. An extraordinary universe of a novel, construed fundamentally from a confluence of languages, real and invented, into heroic and mundane life."
The rest of Roberts's list, in order, is Middlemarch, Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), (A Wizard of) Earthsea (Ursula K. LeGuin), Pnin (Vladimir Nabokov), Bleak House (Charles Dickens), The Heart of Midlothian (Walter Scott), The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells), Beloved, and The Inverted World (Christopher Priest). (Roberts just has "Earthsea" for his fourth title, so I'm only guessing that he meant the first such book.)
II. Melissa Harrison, a novelist and nature writer whose books include At Hawthorne Time, All Along the Barley, and The Stubborn Light of Things, put The Lord of the Rings in sixth place.
Harrison's other choices were Ulysses, Anna Karenina, The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner), the "Bring Up the Bodies" trilogy (which includes Wolf Hall) by Hilary Mantel, The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck), Piranesi (Susanna Clarke), Tarka the Otter (Henry Williamson), Light Years (James Salter), and The Information (Martin Amis).
III. Michael Chabon, the best-known respondent to list The Lord of the Rings, which he had in eighth position, is the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Wonder Boys (the latter was adapted into a 2000 film starring Michael Douglas), among much else.
Chabon's list also included Moby-Dick (Herman Melville), Orlando (Virginia Woolf), Love in the Time of Cholera, Pride and Prejudice, The Golden Bowl (Henry James), Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon), So Long, See You Tomorrow (William Maxwell), the "Aubrey-Maturin series" by Patrick O'Brian, and The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. LeGuin).
In addition to those three, Katherine Rundell, the author of Rooftoppers and Impossible Creatures, wrote that it felt "like committing a minor crime" to have omitted some twenty other "books that have given me some of the richest pleasure of my life," among which were some that made the overall top 25 (e.g., Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina) and some that didn't make the top 100, including Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson), Northern Lights (Philip Pullman), Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome), A Wizard of Earthsea, and The Lord of the Rings.
Rundell's top ten is Emma (Jane Austen), Middlemarch, Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Beloved, Gilead (Marilynne Robinson), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky), Wolf Hall, Moominland Midwinter (Tove Jansson) and The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas).
Additionally, one author listed The Hobbit: Lucas Rijneveld, a Dutch author who shared the Booker Prize with his translator for The Discomfort of Evening, put Tolkien's first novel in fourth place.
Filling out Rijneveld's list are Frankenstein, Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut), Grief Is the Thing With Feathers (Max Porter), Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov), Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk), "The Fall of the House of Usher" (Edgar Allan Poe), Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Heather Fawcett), Bear (Marian Engel), and On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Ocean Vuong).
I've read just twelve of the overall top 100. How about you?
Have you read any works by the five authors who chose or mentioned Tolkien's work? Do their books have any affinities with Tolkien's stories? What about the other novels these four contributors selected?
(Aldridge links to the original list at The Guardian. I'm not linking directly to that list because the newspaper covers all sorts of news including political stories, headlines for which are visible at the bottom of that page, and we're not supposed to share that kind of content here. I don't see anything like that on the Aldridge page to which I've linked, but if I missed something, by all means delete that link, mods.)
Glory to the heroes.
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Kimi
Forum Admin
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12:04am
Post #2 of 3
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are often useful as thought-provokers or conversation-starters (or indeed ideas of books to try!), and I note that the Guardian writers and their contributors aren't claiming this as at all definitive. There's a fashion in such lists, too--some of the paper's commentary noted a dearth of 1950s books this time around, including LOTR and C. S. Lewis' best-known works.
Having said all that: I've read five of the Top 10, and 23 overall, with one more borrowed from the library and currently on my TBR list. I haven't read anything by the five writers quoted.
The Passing of Mistress Rose
My historical novels
Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
- A Room With a View
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squire
Gondolin
3:06am
Post #3 of 3
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I am surprised by the "published in English" criterion, rather than "written in English"
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Ok , great literature is great literature. But why use the English language as a marker, when translation into English is allowed to include a book as "English"? Who cares at that point? Some other book, not translated into English for some technical reason, might arguably be even 'greater'.
The Guardian's top ten included, as I understand it, no less than four books actually written in languages other than English:
5. In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)
6. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
7. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
10. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
Why are these included? They are not part of English literature - translations be damned. I would prefer to see which books written in English are "the greatest literature ever published - no, sorry, ever written - in English" in a poll of this kind.
squire online:
Unfortunately my longtime internet service provider abandoned its hosting operations last year. I no longer have any online materials to share with the TORn community.
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