by jackconsidine
3 subcomments
- > Ulysses by Joyce => 264,258 words (16 hours 1 minute) with a reading ease of 74.9 (fairly easy)
Don't want to know what difficult is
- I find this other list more deserving of this title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokklubben_World_Library
If only because it's less french oriented, but also maybe because it starts with one of my favorite.
- What a strange list. Many books I'd never expect to be listed, others I'd expect to be listed are missing. So I looked up the background and indeed it's based on strange methodology, citing wikipedia: "Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists, 17,000 French participants responded to the question, "Which books have stuck in your mind?" (Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?"
Makes more sense like that.
by lovegrenoble
0 subcomment
- More clean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde%27s_100_Books_of_the_...
- The sad thing is how many aren't available.
I'm not sure I saw any living authors there. I see no reason why copyright should extend beyond the lifetime of the author.
- It's a decent list of what readers in France think of as the books to read from the 20th c., in that it holds value. Including to myself, a French citizen with odd tastes.
The general debate on what's the objective list doesn't hold weight, and I'd rather see what each corner of the world values.
- Kinda ironic that standardebooks.org refuses non-English books but will happily promote a French ranking... I mean none of those books are actually available on standardebooks.org - at least not in their original French version.
- What would be interesting is to cross reference this list with an Anglophone one and pull out the writers that are big in France but almost unknown amongst the public in America. Céline is definitely one such example, I think.
- This should have an 1999 in the title even if the site and ebooks published are newer
- About IP. It's 70 years after the death of the author in France, so Camus (car crash in 1960) books will be PD in 2030.
There is an exception for people who lost live from war (+30 years), so 2044 is the year the elevate to PD for "Le petit prince".
I don't understand that right is attached to local legislation. Like you will have access to these book before we do because of the local legislation of USA? That is a bit crazy.
by GeoAtreides
0 subcomment
- Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf
what wonderful surprises, i thought these amazing books were forgotten and lost
by throwforfeds
4 subcomments
- The Stranger at #1 sort of tells me everything I need to know about the list. It's a fine book, and I ended up liking it a lot more when I went back and re-read it in French many years later, but #1 of the 20th century. Yeah, not even close.
I know this is primarily a Francophone list, but not having Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy or so many of the great Latin American authors on it makes me wonder how much makes it into French via translation.
by harshreality
0 subcomment
- > Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists, 17,000 French participants responded to the question, "Which books have stuck in your mind?" (Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?) As Le Monde journalist Josyane Savigneau aptly clarified in her article, the list is not meant to encompass the 100 most distinguished French literary works of the 20th century, but rather to reflect the emotional connections of the French populace.[1]
Limiting the poll to 200 books (if I'm understanding it right... the cited le monde page is paywalled), selected by the elite French-literati, who then polled sub-elite French-literati, is a questionable basis for a list of "books of the century", even in France. Numbers of votes for each book would've been nice, to see how unanimous the top selections were.
8/100, in any language, are from the last third of the century (after 1967). Of those, 4 are well-known in North America (Styron, Eco, Rushdie, Solzhenitsyn). Of those, only two, Styron and Rushdie, are originally in English.
The most recent -en- works prior to those two were Kerouac in 1957 and then Nabokov and Tolkien in 1955.
year: number (fr/en/other)
1900s: 7 ( 1 / 4 / 2)
1910s: 4 ( 3 / 0 / 1)
1920s: 20 ( 8 / 7 / 5)
1930s: 12 ( 6 / 5 / 1)
1940s: 19 (10 / 4 / 5)
1950s: 20 (13 / 6 / 1)
1960s: 12 ( 7 / 0 / 5)
1970s: 4 ( 1 / 1 / 2)
1980s: 2 ( 0 / 1 / 1)
totals: 49 / 28 / 23
Given the chronological bias, and few postwar -en- works probably due to distribution and translation challenges, it's pointless to mention all of the American and even British classics they left out from later in the 20th century. English-language books from the 80s and 90s, particularly science fiction, might have barely reached mainstream French consciousness in 1999.
- I'm surprised to see Brave New World amongst these. The idea it presents is indeed powerful and influential, but for such a smart guy it comes across stilted and craftless. Try reading it now and it just doesn't hold up to more nuanced fiction.
by BiraIgnacio
0 subcomment
- I'm happy to see so many philosophy or philosophy-adjacent books on that list.
And I also wonder why that is.
by yallpendantools
1 subcomments
- Why are some numbers skipped? E.g., 58 [59 60] 61 [62] 63 64 65 66 67 68 [69] 70
by KnuthIsGod
1 subcomments
- Nice.
But very Eurocentric.
Where are Kalidas , Mahfouz , Soyinka or the Mahabharata?
- I don't think I would place all of them in any 'top' list, but all the books I have read, ~60%, are great read. Weird list though.
- Infinite Jest?
- Kafka at number 3? Meh. It was incredibly dull and tiresome IMHO. I understand it's supposed to be written like a fever dream but to what end? It was simply tedious and difficult to follow.
Then again I also hated the episode of The Sopranos which has an extremely long dream sequence.
by raffael_de
1 subcomments
- pretty french heavy that list.
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