4.05 avg rating — 978,604 ratings

"Emma's self-deception is one of the great spectacles of English literature, like Othello's jealousy, or Argan's the hypochondriac (like Emma's dad) in Moliere. Austen generated her greatest comedy out of what would have been seen by her neighbors as her greatest defeat--not marrying. "

4.04 avg rating — 178,738 ratings

"One cannot understand Middlemarch until one has lived, been disappointed, recovered one's ideals, and yes, even--to have failed. So if you haven't done all these yet--and who would wish to have--read it again in your 30s or 40s or 50s. It gets better. Yet this novel may disappoint the 21st C reader. Where are the murders? The chase scenes? The drugs? (Even the first long novel, Clarissa, had drugs.)"

3.76 avg rating — 137,551 ratings

"I was fortunate to encounter this book after a full, excellent college English major, so as I read it at leisure during grad school summer, I found it very amusing in the grandest sense. Funny, too. This is a book that benefits from the reader having read most anthology English lit before s/he reads
Ulysses. Otherwise, one must dive for the footnotes. I was T.A for a couple Joyce courses at U Minn., so I could footnote it myself."

3.73 avg rating — 23,011 ratings

"Sterne invented a certain kind of modernity--the sexually allusive, apparently offhand, discontinuous, immediate....His prose, often written
under the burden of tuberculosis, and even the despair of his wife, achieves an appearance that is genial and carefree. Uncle Toby is one of the great characters in English fiction.
Sterne confesses that the more he writes, the further behind in the story he gets. "

4.03 avg rating — 396,689 ratings

" Queen Victoria's appreciated Alice, ordered " whatever this author produces." Dodgson's next book was a mathematical treatise that befuddled the Queen, where did we get this? "

3.72 avg rating — 186,435 ratings

4.01 avg rating — 16,425 ratings

"Updike's great subject, the cultural displacement and meaningless of suburban life, culminates in this novel of Florida: a brilliant summation of displaced persons who arrive at the summit of displacement, in vast new hallways."

3.59 avg rating — 298,212 ratings