On Paths Unknown discussion
LISTS
>
The List of Goodreads Readers
date
newest »
newest »
225. Kesey, Ken - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 225. Cioran, Emil - A Short History of Decay
225. Mosley, Nicholas - Impossible Object
225. Roth, Joseph - The Radetzky March (Von Trotta Family #1)
225. Pamuk, Orhan - My Name is Red
225. Tabucchi, Antonio - Pereira Maintains
231. Stegner, Wallace - Angle of Repose
231. Murdoch, Iris - The Sea, The Sea
231. Beauvoir, Simone de - The Second Sex
231. Chatwin, Bruce - In Patagonia
231. Vila-Matas, Enrique - Bartleby & Co.
231. Sacks, Oliver - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
231. Lethem, Jonathan - Motherless Brooklyn
231. Kipling, Rudyard - The Jungle Book
239. Stendhal - Scarlet and Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century
239. Maupassant, Guy de - Bel Ami
241. Isherwood, Christopher - The Berlin Stories
241. O'Brian, Patrick - The Fortune of War (Aubrey/Maturin, #6)
241. Palahniuk, Chuck - Fight Club
241. Tzu, Lao - Tao Te Ching
241. Gibbon, Edward - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
241. Miłosz, Czesław - New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001
241. Potok, Chaim - My Name Is Asher Lev
241. Nin, Anaïs - The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
241. Tagore, Rabindranath - Gitanjali
241. Rhys, Jean - Wide Sargasso Sea
241. Naipaul, V.S. - A House for Mr Biswas
241. Kiš, Danilo - A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
241. Lish, Gordon - What I Know So Far
241. Lorca, Federico García - The Selected Poems
241. Knausgård, Karl Ove - My Struggle: Book 1
241. Euripides - Medea
257. Abe, Kōbō - The Woman in the Dunes
257. Kertész, Imre - Liquidation
257. Ginsberg, Allen - Howl and Other Poems
257. Rumi - The Essential Rumi
257. Warren, Robert Penn - All the King's Men
257. Mano, D. Keith - Take Five
257. Manchester, William - The Last Lion 1: Visions of Glory 1874-1932
257. Spark, Muriel - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
265. Fuentes, Carlos - Terra Nostra
265. Krakauer, Jon - Into the Wild
265. Rich, Adrienne - The Dream of a Common Language
268. Sábato, Ernesto - The Tunnel
268. Smith, Ali - How to Be Both
268. Tranströmer, Tomas - The Half-Finished Heaven
268. Abbey, Edward - Desert Solitaire
268. Bjørneboe, Jens - Moment of Freedom: The Heiligenberg Manuscript
268. West, Nathanael - The Day of the Locust
268. Lermontov, Mikhail - A Hero of Our Time
275. Vesaas, Tarjei - The Ice Palace
275. Machiavelli, Niccolò - The Prince
275. Berger, John - Ways of Seeing
275. Franzen, Jonathan - The Corrections
275. Miller, Arthur - Death of a Salesman
275. Stein, Gertrude - Tender Buttons
281. Self, Will - Great Apes
281. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
281. Remizov, Aleksey - Часы (The Clock)
281. Aira, César - An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
281. Greenblatt, Stephen - The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
281. McPhee, John - Annals of the Former World
281. Theroux, Paul - The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia
281. White, Patrick - Riders in the Chariot
281. Thompson, Hunter S. - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
281. Pratchett, Terry - Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter
281. Calasso, Roberto - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
281. Jung, C.G. - Memories, Dreams, Reflections
293. Percy, Walker - The Moviegoer
293. Zamyatin, Yevgeny - We
293. Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim
293. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō - The Makioka Sisters
297. Narayan, R.K. - Malgudi Days
297. McMurtry, Larry - Lonesome Dove
297. Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
297. Platonov, Andrei - The Foundation Pit
297. Blanchot, Maurice - The Space of Literature
297. Babel, Isaac - The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
297. Morris, Edmund - The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
304. Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke - Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories
304. Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
304. Mahfouz, Naguib - Palace Walk
304. Tarkovsky, Andrei - Sculpting in Time
308. Kosiński, Jerzy - The Painted Bird
308. Virgil - The Aeneid
308. Valéry, Paul - The Art of Poetry
308. Thomas, Dylan - Under Milk Wood
312. Laxness, Halldór - Independent People
312. Kaufmann, Walter - Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre
312. Stoppard, Tom - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
312. Jackson, Shirley - We Have Always Lived in the Castle
312. Koestler, Arthur - Darkness at Noon
312. Pope, Alexander - The Rape of the Lock
312. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di - The Leopard
319. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
319. Ozick, Cynthia - The Shawl
321. Davis, Lydia - The Collected Stories
321. Maalouf, Amin - Samarkand
321. White, T.H. -The Once and Future King
324. Tournier, Michel - The Erl-King (or The Ogre)
324. Ugrešić, Dubravka - Thank You for Not Reading
324. Carpentier, Alejo - The Kingdom of This World
324. Boyd, William - Restless: A Novel
324. Wilder, Thornton - The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The rankings are based on number of times an author’s book was rated a five from the 200, plus I gave bonus points if the book was identified as a favorite and I also factored in the overall Goodreads ratings. To provide an example of the author’s work, I also included the book that was the most frequently rated a five by these nearly 200 Goodreads reviewers.
I extended the list to 328 authors because I wanted to include Thornton Wilder’s little masterpiece, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. I think it deals with a topic that has fascinated mankind since the beginning of time and Wilder reaches a conclusion I can understand, while telling the story with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.
Obviously, this isn’t a true ranking because I didn’t ask each person to provide an individual rank order of their favorite authors and we can debate forever any particular score, but I think the clustering is very interesting and seems to make some intuitive sense to me.
What jumps out to me about this list compared to the usual lists of best or greatest books is:
1) 72% of authors were alive in at least part of the last half of the 20th century. The canon currently being read is modernism and postmodernism.
2) The list includes authors are from 54 countries and it is often hard to find such a universal list. (Admittedly, there is a bias toward the English speaking countries with 45% of 328 authors from there; however, it is less than half and many of the authors (or their parents) emigrated from other countries.
3) The list includes over 20 authors noted for sci-fi and fantasy, and therefore recognizes that these ‘serious’ Goodreads readers not only enjoy science fiction and fantasy, but consider them to be worthy of the highest rating.
4) The list includes over 30 authors known for their poetry and is not limited to only prose.
5) The list includes over 20 authors known for their nonfiction, and again only those authors with works rated five were included.
6) The list includes 42 Noble Prize for Literature winners, plus 23 (that we know of) who were nominated multiple times but did not win. For example, Paul Valery was nominated 12 separate years without winning. The list includes 47 winners of international awards for literature (the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the European Literary Award, the Man-Booker International Prize and the Common Wealth Award for Literature.)
7) And most promising for me, I discovered many authors I really was not familiar with; If these nearly 200 rated them a five, similar to the fives for Saramago, David Foster Wallace, Borges and my other favorite authors, then I look forward to adding these authors to my reading list.
Mod
Will be browsing the list to see which ones I might have missed. ;)
Understandable, you were one of the 200 I used
Mod
Yes, and since we're a group of friends - we would (hopefully) have similar reading tastes...
Anyway, thanks again, it's always nice to see ranked lists like this one.
I'd read (or at least tried: there are a few I gave up on) 20% of the first 200, but my matches dropped off really quickly after that. I think only one or two of the next hundred, and a cluster around #300.
Hey, Jan.Thanks for making this awesome list.
The problem with most GR lists (aside from author spam) is that most of the voters really shouldn't be voting. People vote on "Best SF" lists without having read Dune, or "Best Book Ever" without having read Don Quixote. So you get nothing but Harry Potter and Twilight in the top 10.
This makes me sound like a snob, but I sometimes wish there was a minimal reading requirement before voting on a "Best of" list.
All these arrogant comments are my way of thanking you for making an intelligent list, even if I think Blindness is seriously overrated.
On Paths Unknown
Books mentioned in this topic
Dune (other topics)Don Quixote (other topics)
Blindness (other topics)
Thank you for suggesting I start a new topic. I always enjoy examining lists of best books, maybe even obsessively so, as I have placed them in spreadsheets to identify common features so I could better understand the ranking.
As we look for what to read next, I decided to look at readers’ experience here at Goodreads. Below is a list I developed from the readers in Goodreads. I looked at nearly 200 readers from 35 separate countries who have read a great deal of books (an average per reader of 910 books read and rated) and who have interests similar to me (which I determined they did if they rated Dostoyevsky, Borges, DFW, Kundera, Calvino, Saramago, Murakami, Camus, at 5s). Here is the compilation
1. Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
1. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - The Brothers Karamazov
3. Borges, Jorge Luis - Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
3. Wallace, David Foster - Infinite Jest
5. Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita
5. Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
5. Murakami, Haruki – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
5. Kafka, Franz - The Trial
9. Calvino, Italo - If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
10. Orwell, George - 1984
10. Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)
10. Bolaño, Roberto - 2666
10. Tolstoy, Leo - Anna Karenina
14. McCarthy, Cormac - Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
14. Pynchon, Thomas - Gravity's Rainbow
14. Joyce, James - Ulysses
14. Márquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
14. Vonnegut, Kurt - Slaughterhouse-Five: The Children’s Crusade
14. Camus, Albert - The Stranger
20. Tolkien, J.R.R. - The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)
20. Greene, Graham - The Heart of the Matter
22. Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
22. Saramago, José - Blindness
22. Eco, Umberto - The Name of the Rose
22. Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
22. Kundera, Milan - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
27. Dickens, Charles - Great Expectations
27. Doyle, Arthur Conan - The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes
27. Steinbeck, John - Of Mice and Men
27. Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
31. Melville, Herman - Moby Dick or The Whale
31. Bernhard, Thomas - The Loser
31. Hemingway, Ernest - The Old Man and the Sea
34. Gogol, Nikolai - Dead Souls
34. Mitchell, David - Cloud Atlas
34. Pessoa, Fernando - The Book of Disquiet
37. Nietzsche, Friedrich - Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One
37. Hesse, Hermann - Siddhartha
37. Zweig, Stefan - Chess Story
37. DeLillo, Don - White Noise
41. Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
41. Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
41. Gass, William H. - Omensetter's Luck
41. Sartre, Jean-Paul- Nausea
41. Vollmann, William T. - Europe Central
41. Sebald, W.G. - The Emigrants
41. Rilke, Rainer Maria - Letters to a Young Poet
48. Bulgakov, Mikhail - The Master and Margarita
48. Homer - The Odyssey
48. Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
51. Alighieri, Dante - Inferno (The Divine Comedy #1)
51. Dick, Philip K. - A Scanner Darkly
51. Eliot, T.S. - The Waste Land and Other Poems
54. Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
54. Mishima, Yukio - Spring Snow
54. Walser, Robert - Jakob von Gunten
57. Poe, Edgar Allan - The Complete Stories and Poems
57. Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
57. Cortázar, Julio - Hopscotch
57. Graves, Robert - I, Claudius
57. Marías, Javier - A Heart So White
62. Gaddis, William - The Recognitions
62. Hrabal, Bohumil - Too Loud a Solitude
62. Rushdie, Salman - Midnight's Children
62. Bellow, Saul - Herzog
62. Asimov, Isaac - Foundation
67. Amis, Martin - Money: A Suicide Note
67. Coetzee, J.M. - Waiting for the Barbarians
67. Atwood, Margaret - The Handmaid's Tale
67. Hamsun, Knut - Hunger
71. Powell, Anthony - A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement
71. Adams, Douglas - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
71. Chekhov, Anton - Selected Stories
74. O'Connor, Flannery - The Complete Stories
74. Roth, Philip - American Pastoral (The American Trilogy #1)
74. Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
74. Carver, Raymond - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories
78. Plato - The Republic
78. Kawabata, Yasunari - The Sound of the Mountain
78. Gaiman, Neil - American Gods
78. Bukowski, Charles - Ham on Rye
78. Baldwin, James - The Fire Next Time
78. Neruda, Pablo - Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
78. Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
78. Chandler, Raymond - The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)
86. Waugh, Evelyn - Brideshead Revisited
86. Schulz, Bruno - The Street of Crocodiles
86. Markson, David - Wittgenstein's Mistress
86. Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
90. Saavedra, Miguel de Cervantes - The Adventures of Don Quixote
90. Foucault, Michel - Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
90. Williams, John - Stoner
90. Hardy, Thomas - Far from the Madding Crowd
90. Durrell, Lawrence - Justine (The Alexandria Quartet, #1)
95. Sagan, Carl - Cosmos
95. Moore, Alan - Watchmen
95. Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
95. Barnes, Julian - The Sense of an Ending
99. Miller, Henry - Tropic of Cancer
99. Guin, Ursula K. Le - The Dispossessed
99. Coover, Robert - The Public Burning
102. Morrison, Toni - Beloved
102. Cummings, E.E. - 100 Selected Poems
104. Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
104. Ishiguro, Kazuo - The Remains of the Day
104. Žižek, Slavoj - The Sublime Object of Ideology
104. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
104. Theroux, Alexander - Darconville’s Cat
104. Sorrentino, Gilbert - Mulligan Stew
104. Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
111. Lem, Stanisław - Solaris
111. Baudelaire, Charles - Les Fleurs du Mal
111. McElroy, Joseph - Women and Men
111. Bradbury, Ray - Fahrenheit 451
115. Dumas, Alexandre - The Count of Monte Cristo
115. Llosa, Mario Vargas - The War of the End of the World
117. Auster, Paul - The New York Trilogy
117. Celan, Paul - Poems of Paul Celan
117. Barth, John - The Sot-Weed Factor
117. Miéville, China - Perdido Street Station (Bas-Lag, #1)
117. Perec, Georges - Life: A User's Manual
117. Grass, Günter - The Tin Drum
117. O'Brien, Flann - The Third Policeman
117. Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
125. Aeschylus - The Oresteia
125. James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
125. Hitchens, Christopher - Arguably: Selected Essays
125. Kristóf, Ágota - The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels
129. Rimbaud, Arthur - Illuminations
129. Pushkin, Alexander - Eugene Onegin
129. Kazantzakis, Nikos - The Last Temptation of Christ
129. Queneau, Raymond - Exercises in Style
129. Maugham, W. Somerset - Of Human Bondage
129. Byatt, A.S. - Possession
135. Russell, Bertrand - The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
135. Mailer, Norman - The Executioner's Song
137. Takaya, Natsuki - Fruits Basket, Vol. 1
137. Burgess, Anthony - A Clockwork Orange
137. Krasznahorkai, László - War & War
137. Céline, Louis-Ferdinand - Journey to the End of the Night
137. Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
142. Simic, Charles - The World Doesn't End
142. Lawrence, D.H. - Women in Love
142. McCullers, Carson - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
142. Irving, John - A Prayer for Owen Meany
142. Carter, Angela - The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
142. Carson, Anne - Autobiography of Red
142. Campbell, Joseph - The Hero with a Thousand Faces
142. Mistry, Rohinton - A Fine Balance
150. McEwan, Ian - Atonement
150. Balzac, Honoré de - Cousin Bette
150. Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
150. Johnson, Denis - Jesus' Son
150. Chabon, Michael - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
150. Mantel, Hilary - Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)
150. Ondaatje, Michael - The English Patient
150. Munro, Alice - Dear Life
150. Levi, Primo - The Periodic Table
150. Eliot, George - Middlemarch
160. Kierkegaard, Søren - Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
160. Aristotle - The Nicomachean Ethics
160. Thoreau, Henry David - Walden & Civil Disobedience
165. Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
165. Blake, William - Songs of Innocence and of Experience
165. Brautigan, Richard - Trout Fishing in America
165. Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #1)
165. Hugo, Victor - Les Misérables
165. Rulfo, Juan - Pedro Páramo
165. E.M. Forster - A Passage to India
165. Musil, Robert -The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1
173. London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
173. Sontag, Susan - Against Interpretation and Other Essays
173. Stephenson, Neal - Snow Crash
173. Vidal, Gore - Burr
177. Zola, Émile - Germinal
177. Fowles, John - The Magus
177. Toole, John Kennedy - A Confederacy of Dunces
177. Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
181. Stevenson, Robert Louis - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
181. Pinker, Steven - The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
181. Yeats, W.B. - The Collected Poems
181. Trollope, Anthony - The Way We Live Now
181. Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
181. Barthelme, Donald - Sixty Stories
181. Kerouac, Jack - On the Road
181. Dawkins, Richard - The God Delusion
181. Canetti, Elias - Auto-da-Fé
190. Voltaire - Candide
190. Brodsky, Joseph - Less Than One: Selected Essays
190. Davies, Robertson - Fifth Business (The Deptford Trilogy #1)
190. O'Brien, Tim - The Things They Carried
190. Updike, John - Rabbit, Run
190. Hammett, Dashiell - The Maltese Falcon
196. Kapuściński, Ryszard - The Shadow of the Sun
196. Andrić, Ivo - The Bridge on the Drina
196. Gladwell, Malcolm - Outliers: The Story of Success
200. Lessing, Doris - The Golden Notebook
200. Lowry, Malcolm - Under the Volcano
200. Bryson, Bill - A Short History of Nearly Everything
200. Grossman, Vasily - Life and Fate
200. Stevens, Wallace - The Collected Poems
200. Barthes, Roland - Mythologies
200. Tuchman, Barbara W. - A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
200. O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey Into Night
208. Lispector, Clarice - Near to the Wild Heart
208. Tartt, Donna - The Secret History
208. Deleuze, Gilles - A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
211. Feynman, Richard -Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman:
211. Assis, Machado de - Dom Casmurro
211. Houellebecq, Michel - The Elementary Particles
211. Montaigne, Michel de - The Complete Essays
211. Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
211. Böll, Heinrich - The Clown
211. Brooke-Rose, Christine - Textermination
211. Williams, Tennessee - A Streetcar Named Desire
211. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust: First Part
211. Smith, Zadie - White Teeth
211. Cheever, John - The Stories of John Cheever
211. Wharton, Edith - The Age of Innocence
211. Szymborska, Wisława - Poems
211. Ovid - Metamorphoses
(Continue)