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7.30.2005

The 7 greatest novels

Here are seven of the most indisputably great novels:


  • Don Quixote - Cervantes
  • Tom Jones - Fielding
  • Vanity Fair - Thackeray
  • Moby Dick - Melville
  • War and Peace - Tolstoy
  • Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
  • The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
(I drew from a list of 80 or so of the greatest novels of all time. These seven were the only ones to fall into the category of 'without argument, universal, great' novels. And notice they're all big, 500 to 1000+ page, tomes. The novel form rewards larger dimensions. I included Vanity Fair (which I may not have prior to my current reading of it) because it's simply a great novel and I've been reading opinions of it by various people from the 19th and 20th centuries and didn't realize it had such a high reputation, and because it provides what lesser novels and novelists can do so well - like Austen - which is to delineate human nature and all the phenomena of society. So, after sifting the list for the weightiest great works these seven remained. I had others on the list but as I sifted them with more and more objectivity these seven turned out to be the most 'without argument' candidates. There are other great novels, yet they each could be quibbled with in various ways, but the seven above can't be quibbled with in any way.)

ps- I also found a key to the list by realizing that though the two great novels of Tolstoy have to be on the list Dostoevsky's great novel Brothers Karamazov represents him all by itself (I use to think Crime and Punishment had to be included) because it's just the nature of Dostoevsky's art that his novels tend to present the same things and The Brothers Karamazov sum it all up in a pinnacle way.

Posted by c.t. at 06:26