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ALBERT CAMUS (1913–60) Algeria/France; Of Nobel Prize winners in literature only >> Rudyard Kipling was younger than Camus was when he received the award in 1957.
 According to the judges, he received the prize for work which ‘illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times’. This work ranges from The Plague, a novel set in a quarantined North African town, and The Fall, the record of one man’s disillusionment with the life he had been leading, to plays and philosophical essays such as The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus.
 His best known and most widely read book, however, is The Outsider, sometimes translated, more accurately, as The Stranger. Set in Algeria, the country in which Camus grew up, the novel focuses on the alienated figure of Meursault. At the beginning of the novel he has just received word of his mother’s death: (‘Mother died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know’ are the famous opening lines which establish very concisely Meursault’s detachment from everyday emotions) and he is about to travel to her funeral.


 The narrative follows the next few days in Meursault’s life, culminating in his shooting of a man on a heat-ravaged beach. As the law moves into action to deal with Meursault’s crime, attention focuses as much on his apparent indifference to his mother’s death and on his unsettling beliefs about the essential meaninglessness of life as on the murder he committed.

 Albert Camus died in a car crash three years after becoming a Nobel Laureate. The legacy he left consists of the writings, both fictional and non-fictional, in which he presents his vision of an absurd universe where man can only assert his freedom and individuality by coming to recognize that rationality and meaning in life are unattainable goals. Of these writings, The Outsider continues to be the most accessible and the most rewarding for readers.

 Film version

 Lo Straniero (directed by Luchino Visconti, with Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault, 1967)

 Read on

 The Fall; The Plague Saul Bellow, The Victim; André Gide, The Immoralist; >> Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death; Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea

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 SAMUEL BUTLER (1835–1902) Poet, painter, musician, critic, amateur scientist, and philosopher, Samuel Butler was a polymathic but faintly ridiculous figure in late 19thcentury culture, as likely to pursue eccentric hobbyhorses (his belief that Homer was a woman, for example) as he was to produce significant works of literature. However, Erewhon, his satirical novel about a society where Victorian values were turned on their heads, remains brilliantly readable and The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously, is a powerful fictional critique of the orthodoxies of the age.

 The novel charts several generations of a family but it focuses on Ernest Pontifex whose anxious and unhappy character is shaped by the narrow religious beliefs of his father and grandfather before him. Ordained as a minister more because his family wishes it than because he has any genuine vocation for the church, Ernest faces social catastrophe when he naïvely mistakes a respectable woman for a prostitute and propositions her. He is imprisoned but, ironically, this proves a liberating experience, allowing him to begin the process of shaking off the shackles of religious and social conformity which bind him. More trials and tribulations are to follow – he enters unwittingly into a bigamous marriage with a former chambermaid, for example – but he is on the road to self-fulfilment. 



The Way of All Flesh was written more than twenty years before Butler’s death but he chose not to publish it in his lifetime. When it did appear it was immediately hailed as a devastating assault on the hypocrisies and self-righteousness of the Victorian age. Reaching for hyperbole, George Bernard Shaw called it ‘one of the summits of human achievement’. For modern readers it can have little of the revelatory power it had for its first audience but it remains a witty and compassionate exploration of religious and social repression and of one man’s struggle to attain his true self. 

  Read on Erewhon Ivy Compton-Burnett, A House and Its Head; Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (autobiography rather than fiction but a similar portrait of incompatability of beliefs across the Victorian generations)
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The half-wild foundling Heathcliff, introduced as a child into the Earnshaw family, falls in love with Cathy Earnshaw as they grow up but any chance of future happiness together is thwarted by Cathy’s own ambivalent feelings (she is strongly attracted to Heathcliff yet feels that marriage to him would be socially impossible) and by the fierce antagonism of Hindley, Cathy’s brother. Heathcliff chooses exile rather than the humiliation of staying at Wuthering Heights and disappears abroad. When he returns, he discovers that Cathy has married a neighbor, Edgar Linton.

 The rest of the novel chronicles Heathcliff’s terrible vengeance on the Earnshaws and the Lintons for the wrongs he believes they have done him, a vengeance that echoes down the generations, long after Heathcliff himself is dead. Cathy dies in childbirth, driven to despair by the consequences of her choice of social convention over passion when she married Linton rather than Heathcliff, and by the mental torment, Heathcliff inflicts on her. Isabella Linton, Edgar’s sister, falls in love with Heathcliff and marries him but he uses her only as a means of gaining power over the rest of her family. Hindley succumbs to drink and dissipation and Wuthering Heights, which he had inherited from his father, falls into Heathcliff’s hands. 


The next generation (Hindley’s son Hareton, Catherine’s daughter and Linton, Heathcliff’s, and Isabella’s child) have the sins of their fathers and their mothers visited upon them and struggle to escape the consequences.
 Contemporaries were astonished and disconcerted by the raw emotion of Emily Brontë’s novel when it first appeared in 1847, the year before her early death from TB, and it has continued to enthral readers in the century and a half since that first publication. Melodramatic and wildly romantic the doomed love story of Cathy and Heathcliff may be but it has lost none of its power to stir the imagination.

 Film versions
Wuthering Heights (Merle Oberon as Cathy and Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, 1939); Wuthering Heights (Juliette Binoche as Cathy and Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff, 1992)

 Read on
R.D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone; Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Daphne Du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel; >> Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
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The history of the Brontë family, with its record of illness, alcoholism, unrequited loves and early deaths, is as compelling as any of the books written by the Brontë sisters. All three sisters published their first novels in 1847. Anne’s story was Agnes Grey and >> Emily’s Wuthering Heights. 
Charlotte, the eldest of the three, made her debut with Jane Eyre, in which a young governess falls in love with her brooding employer but cannot marry him because of the dark secrets from his past that still haunt him.
 The narrative follows its eponymous heroine from her orphaned childhood and her miserable experience of institutional life at Lowood Asylum, alleviated only briefly by her doomed friendship with the gentle Helen Burns, to her young adulthood as a governess. Despatched to Thornfield Hall to tutor the ward of its master, Edward Rochester, Jane finds herself drawn to her enigmatic employer and he is attracted by her quiet but determined character. 
A marriage is all set to take place when word reaches Jane that Rochester is married already. Indeed his wife, a violent lunatic, is incarcerated in the attic of Thornfield Hall itself. The wedding, of course, is canceled and the would-be bride and groom have to go their separate ways. Reduced to near destitution, Jane is finally taken in by the virtuous and compassionate St Rivers family.
 Only after many more twists and turns of fate, some more improbable than others, are she and Rochester brought together again and the obstacles that stand in the way of their love removed.
 Charlotte Brontë’s novel, one of the most famous of the 19th century, transcends the romantic melodrama and often absurd coincidences of its plot to show readers the slow emotional progress of its heroine and the gradual maturing of her personality under pressure.

Film versions:
  •  Jane Eyre (Orson Welles as Rochester and Joan Fontaine as Jane, 1944);
  •  Jane Eyre (directed by Franco Zeffirelli, with William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg, 1996) 
 Read on 
The Professor; Shirley Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca; >> George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (a novel which recreates the past life of the first Mrs Rochester, the madwoman in the attic)
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Hello everyone, I hope you are fine. I'm glad to visit my blog, please enjoy reading my posts and contact me if you have any question:
To day I chose to post this IMPORTANT list of novels which linked to 10+ "Top 100" book lists from different sources, the lists were compared with each other and see what books are most recommended in top lists. The books are sorted by the number of lists in which the book is included. 

Here is the list:

  1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller - (10/11 Lists)
  2. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - (10/11 Lists)
  3. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - (10/11 Lists)
  4. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison - (9/11 Lists)
  5. Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut - (9/11 Lists)
  6. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger - (9/11 Lists)
  7. The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner - (9/11 Lists)
  8. 1984 by George Orwell - (8/11 Lists)
  9. Beloved by Toni Morrison - (8/11 Lists)
  10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - (8/11 Lists)
  11. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - (8/11 Lists)
  12. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway - (7/11 Lists)
  13. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser - (6/11 Lists)
  14. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand - (6/11 Lists)
  15. Brave New World by Alduos Huxley - (6/11 Lists)
  16. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell - (6/11 Lists)
  17. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie - (6/11 Lists)
  18. My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918) - (6/11 Lists)
  19. On the Road by Jack Kerouac - (6/11 Lists)
  20. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - (6/11 Lists)
  21. The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers- (6/11 Lists)
  22. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - (6/11 Lists)
  23. The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934) - (6/11 Lists)
  24. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston - (6/11 Lists)
  25. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - (6/11 Lists)
  26. Ulysses by James Joyce - (6/11 Lists)
These novels were selected from these lists (the name of the list followed by a quick summary):
  • TIME’s List of the 100 Best Novels - Published 2005, America-centric, contains only books after 1923.
  • Book Riot’s 100 Greatest American Novels 1893-1993 - Published early July 2013, one book per author only
  • The Guardian’s Top 100 Bestselling Books of All Time (in the UK) - published August 2009, based on Nielsen Bookscan data, maybe influenced by reading lists
  • The Entertainment Weekly 100 Greatest Novels Ever - Published July 2012
  • The 100 Most Influential Books of All Time - Book, published 1998, heavy on philosophy and theology, nothing newer than 1971
  • The 100 Favorite Novels of Librarians - Based on a 1998-1999 survey of librarians
  • 100 Major Works of Modern Creative Nonfiction - from About.com
  • The Modern Library Best 100 Novels of the 20th Century - Published 1998, possibly influenced by Scientologists
  • Goodread's Top 100 Literary Novels of All Time - Published September 2011, voted on by readers of the website
  • Top 100 Works In World Literature - Published 2002, pointedly not English-centric.
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Critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923—the beginning of TIME (2010).

A - B

  • The Adventures of Augie March
  • All the King’s Men
  • American Pastoral
  • An American Tragedy
  • Animal Farm
  • Appointment in Samarra
  • Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
  • The Assistant
  • At Swim-Two-Birds
  • Atonement
  • Beloved
  • The Berlin Stories
  • The Big Sleep
  • The Blind Assassin
  • Blood Meridian
  • Brideshead Revisited
  • The Bridge of San Luis Rey

C - D

  • Call It Sleep
  • Catch-22
  • The Catcher in the Rye
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • The Confessions of Nat Turner
  • The Corrections
  • The Crying of Lot 49
  • A Dance to the Music of Time
  • The Day of the Locust
  • Death Comes for the Archbishop
  • A Death in the Family
  • The Death of the Heart
  • Deliverance
  • Dog Soldiers

F - G

  • Falconer
  • The French Lieutenant’s Woman
  • The Golden Notebook
  • Go Tell it on the Mountain
  • Gone With the Wind
  • The Grapes of Wrath
  • Gravity’s Rainbow
  • The Great Gatsby

H - I

  • A Handful of Dust
  • The Heart is A Lonely Hunter
  • The Heart of the Matter
  • Herzog
  • Housekeeping
  • A House for Mr. Biswas
  • I, Claudius
  • Infinite Jest
  • Invisible Man

L - N

  • Light in August
  • The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
  • Lolita
  • Lord of the Flies
  • The Lord of the Rings
  • Loving
  • The Moviegoer
  • Lucky Jim
  • The Man Who Loved Children
  • Midnight’s Children
  • Money
  • Mrs. Dalloway
  • Naked Lunch
  • Native Son
  • Neuromancer
  • Never Let Me Go
  • 1984

O - R

  • On the Road
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  • The Painted Bird
  • Pale Fire
  • A Passage to India
  • Play It As It Lays
  • Portnoy’s Complaint
  • Possession
  • The Power and the Glory
  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
  • Rabbit, Run
  • Ragtime
  • The Recognitions
  • Red Harvest
  • Revolutionary Road

S - T

  • The Sheltering Sky
  • Slaughterhouse Five
  • Snow Crash
  • The Sot-Weed Factor
  • The Sound and the Fury
  • The Sportswriter
  • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
  • The Sun Also Rises
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God
  • Things Fall Apart
  • To Kill a Mockingbird
  • To the Lighthouse
  • Tropic of Cancer

U - W

  • Ubik
  • Under the Net
  • Under the Volcano
  • Watchmen
  • White Noise
  • White Teeth
  • Wide Sargasso Sea

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 Elizabeth Bowen: Born into the Anglo-Irish gentry (her family home was Bowen’s Court, near Dublin), Elizabeth Bowen set her finest works not in Ireland but in London. The Heat of the Day, for example, is one of the most effective of all evocations of London in the Blitz and examines the love affair of Stella Rodney and Robert Kelway, doomed by both the large-scale upheaval in which it is conducted and by the sinister machinations of Stella’s other suitor who betrays the fact that Kelway is a spy. As the plot moves towards its inevitable and foreshadowed conclusion, the themes of love and betrayal play themselves out against the backdrop of a city at war, one in which all the characters seem to have lost their bearings.
 In The Death of the Heart, published in the late 1930s, Portia Quayne is an innocent abroad in the deracinated world of metropolitan sophisticates. Orphaned by the death of her mother, with whom she had been leading a peripatetic life in assorted hotels on the Continent, the sixteen-year-old Portia is taken in by her wealthy half-brother and his wife who live in some style in fashionable London. 
All three of them find the new arrangements difficult but it is when Portia’s naïvely insightful diary falls into the hands of her sister-in-law Anna and when the young girl believes herself to have fallen in love with Eddie, a vain and self-centered admirer of Anna, that trouble really begins. Finally, Portia flees her half-brother’s house and takes refuge in a residential hotel in Kensington. 
Curiously, Elizabeth Bowen did not like her own novel overmuch and she once dismissed it as ‘an inflated short story’. 

Today its tragicomic portrait of a vulnerable young girl bemused by the new world into which she is thrust seems far more powerful and perceptive than its author was prepared to acknowledge. 

Read on:
The Heat of the Day; The Last September >> Henry James, What Maisie Knew; William Trevor, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel; Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot
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Welcome to The Minimal.


I'm Talia - I'm passionate at Beauty, Travel, Fashion. This blog is a place where I want to share all the things I love to you! Keep

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