A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Brave New World - Aduos Huxley
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Native Son - Richard Wright
Candide - Voltaire
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Anthem - Ayn Rand
Last edited by Trident on Tue Apr 24, 2007 12:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
Sorry to be picky (and perhaps a little vengeful !!) but Beowulf and Paradise Lost are epic poems, aren't they? I didn't think they came under the category.
There's always been a lot of tension between Lois and me, and it's not so much that I want to kill her, it's just, I want her to not be alive anymore.
Well, if none of us has read a book, that doesn't mean it wasn't important in the literary world. Then again, if none of us has read that book, then why should it be on our list? I do see your point. But I still think that a lot of works out there that we haven't read that still deserve to be honored.
I'm not sure if any of us has read War and Peace (Imp? DD? CL? Anyone?), but even it none of us had read it, I still think it should be on the list.
I don't agree. What you seem to be wanting to do is create a complete book top 100. This has been done before and in a better way by people who have read way more books. Why should we bother? We'll just be copycats of other lists strewn across the net and the media, and it'll serve no real purpose -- why don't we create our own list, the books that matter to the young reader? So what if we haven't read so-called literary classics?
I'd prefer a list born of our own experiences rather than ones we expect to enjoy.
Then we'd have the "YWS Top 100 Favourite Books list" (name change advocate, I am) rather than just trying to work out what the best books in the world are, which other people can probably do better at; or, to use a different spin, nobody can anyway. Let's just do it our way instead.
Nate wrote:And if YWS ever does become a company, Jack will be the President of European Operations. In fact, I'm just going to call him that anyways.
It's not my right to dictate, I don't want to be in control of this. It's just been my ideas. I'd suggest we only used books that have been read.
100 is a big number. If we only say, receive 200 nominations, then we're going to have a 50% acceptance rate, which is quite high. So 100 might be too high but it might be a good idea to wait to see how popular this is.
Yet again, only my ideas
Nate wrote:And if YWS ever does become a company, Jack will be the President of European Operations. In fact, I'm just going to call him that anyways.
I completely get where you're coming from. It is the "Young Writers Society" list after all. There's not going to be nearly as many classics as recent books, obviously. (I really doubt anybody here has read "Ulysses". The pure thought of it makes me shudder.)
What we do need is people nominating the books. The more people that do that, the more books that have been read can get on the list.
And Jack, please don't worry about offending me or this concept. I really don't mind the input. I'm glad you said something. Heck, this whole idea came from the fact that many of us were dissatisfied with another book list that was based off of sales and hype. I just really didn't want our list to be that again, if that makes any sense. ^_^
Ooh, good idea...I'm certain some of these have been listed already, but seconded nominations could be helpful.
Catch-22- Joseph Heller
The Brothers Karamazov- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anna Karenina- Leo Tolstoy
Sherlock Holmes (series)- Sir Arthur Konan Doyle
Crime and Punishment- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Farenheit 451- Ray Bradbury
Twelfth Night- William Shakespeare
The Canturbury Tales- Geoffrey Chaucer
The Picture of Dorian Grey- Oscar Wilde
Lolita- Vladimir Nabokov
Graffiti is the most passionate form of literature there is.
!!) but Beowulf and Paradise Lost are epic poems, aren't they? I didn't think they came under the category.
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