Thursday, August 03, 2006

Pick Up A Penguin.

Penguin have published their list of the top 100 books ever. These sorts of list are inherently subjective but their list isn't obviously crazy (apart from the Communist Manifesto):
THE BEST CRAZIES

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey

The Diary of a Madman
Nikolai Gogol

Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys

Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Notes From Underground
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

THE BEST SEX

Story of the Eye
Georges Bataille

A Spy in the House of Love
Anaïs Nin

Lady Chatterley’s Lover
D. H. Lawrence

Venus In Furs
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer

THE BEST VILLAINS

The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad

Diamonds are Forever
Ian Fleming

The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov

The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad

THE BEST LOVERS

A Room with a View
E. M. Forster

Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë

Don Juan
Lord Byron

Love In A Cold Climate
Nancy Mitford

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tennessee Williams

THE BEST HEROES

David Copperfield
Charles Dickens

Middlemarch
George Eliot

She
H. Rider Haggard

The Fight
Norman Mailer

No Easy Walk to Freedom
Nelson Mandela

THE BEST TEARJERKERS

Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck

The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton

Notre-Dame De Paris
Victor Hugo

Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy

The Old Curiosity Shop
Charles Dickens

THE BEST SPINE-TINGLERS

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson

Dracula
Bram Stoke

Frankenstein
Mary Shelley

The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole

The Turn of the Screw
Henry James

THE BEST MINXES

Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

Baby Doll
Tennessee Williams

Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Truman Capote

Emma
Jane Austen

THE BEST JOURNEYS

On the Road
Jack Kerouac

The Odyssey
Homer

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll

THE BEST DECADENCE

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Vile Bodies
Evelyn Waugh

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde

The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Against Nature
J. K. Huysmans

THE BEST REBELS

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X

The Outsider
Albert Camus

Animal Farm
George Orwell

The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Les Misérables
Victor Hugo

THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION

The Time Machine
H. G. Wells

The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick

The Invisible Man
H. G. Wells

The Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham

We
Yevgeny Zamyatin

THE BEST VIOLENCE

A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

Hell’s Angels
Hunter S. Thompson

A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens

Another Country
James Baldwin

In Cold Blood
Truman Capote

THE BEST HIGHS

Junky
William S. Burroughs

The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Thomas De Quincey

The Subterraneans
Jack Kerouac

Monsieur Monde Vanishes
Georges Simenon

THE BEST SUBVERSION

1984
George Orwell

The Monkey Wrench Gang
Edward Abbey

The Prince
Niccolo Machiavelli

Bound for Glory
Woody Guthrie

Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller

THE BEST CRIMES

Maigret and the Ghost
Georges Simenon

The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle

The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan

THE BEST ADULTERY

Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert

Thérèse Raquin
Emile Zola

Les Liaisons dangereuses
Choderlos de Laclos

The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy

THE BEST DEBAUCHERY

I, Claudius
Robert Graves

Hangover Square
Patrick Hamilton

The Beggar’s Opera
John Gay

The Twelve Caesars
Suetonius

Guys and Dolls
Damon Runyon

THE BEST ACTION

Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson

The Iliad
Homer

The Count Of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas

From Russia with Love
Ian Fleming

War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy

THE BEST LAUGHS

Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons

The Diary of a Nobody
George and Weedon Grossmith

The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens

Scoop
Evelyn Waugh

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
I've put the one's I've read in green and the one's I've bought but never actually read in red.

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