The DU Lounge

I admit I haven't read many books on the Guardian's list. The highest ranked book I've read is The Great Gatsby which I found to be good, though not as great as many people seem to feel about it. I also read Nineteen Eighty Four and Wuthering Heights from the Top 20 and found them to be much better in my opinion to the Great Gatsby. The one on the list that I consider the "best" of those I read is probably Crime and Punishment, though it was a difficult read in High School when I read it.

My biggest issue with the list is the following authors had multiple books on the list:
5 - Virginia Woolf
4 - Jane Austen
4 - Charles Dickens
3 - Henry James
3 - Toni Morrison
2 - James Baldwin
2 - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 - Gustave Flaubert
2 - Thomas Hardy
2 - Kazuo Ishiguro
2 - Franz Kafka
2 - Thomas Mann
2 - Cormac McCarthy
2 - Vladimir Nabokov
2 - W.G. Sebald
2 - Leo Tolstoy
Those 16 authors made up over 40% of the list. It seems to me that it would make more sense to find room for some other authors over a 5th book by Virginia Wolff or a 4th by Austen or Dickens. I understand it was assembled based on votes by authors but I think that didn't end up working real well as the list ended up missing too many great authors.

I did find it interesting that I agree with all 3 books on Stephen King's list that I have read. Carson McCullers' The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood and Twain's Huckleberry Finn.

I guess my top 2 favorite/best books I've ever read would be Wise Blood and The Grapes of Wrath, with a lot of contenders for the 3rd spot including those I already mentioned along with Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's Animal Farm, Salinger's Catcher In The Rye and Franny & Zooey, and Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth and I'm sure several other I'm forgetting right now.