Don't want to know what difficult is
If not then it's like being forced to untangle the mind of a twisted person. Finally a job for the LLM's that we can all be thankful for outsourcing.
If only because it's less french oriented, but also maybe because it starts with one of my favorite.
How is a list spanning over the last 40 centuries deserving of the tile "Books of the Century by Le Monde"? Why would the "Epic of Gilgamesh" or the "Book of Job" be on a list of 20th century books?
> ... it starts with one of my favorite.
From that same Wikipedia page: “The books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way;”
The list is sorted by authors' name.
Makes more sense like that.
I think some of the books on this list had very few readers, but were selected because of their relative fame among a list of 200 books. For instance, how many people have read the full "Gulag archipelago"? Or writings by Lacan or Barthes? Or the "Journal" by Jules Renard?
Most of them make sense to me. I don’t know some of them but then I don’t know everything. The methodology can be discussed (and indeed, a pre-selection of 200 books is at the same time a lot and not that much), but none of these lists can be perfect.
Out of curiosity, which one would you remove from the list, and which ones would you add?
For what it's worth and what mostly triggered my comment, I expected 1984 to be on the list but thought it missing, but as mentioned in the other comments I was wrong about that, it's just listed with the numbers written out. Le petit prince I wouldn't have wanted on the list, I know it's popular and french, but I never got the appeal. Ulysses, as mentioned below, surprised me as I thought it's only popular in some countries, and regardless of that I think its just not readable. I would kick out two of the Lord of the ring books, one is enough and it's not like each of them had a different impact.
Maybe even more subjective, The Hound of the Baskervilles is important and well known and everything, but does it really held up when you read it today? If not, which would be my opinion, should it be on the list regardless? And I'd consider replacing Thomas Mann Zauberberg with Tod in Venedig, just because I liked it a lot.
For missing books: Louis Begley is an author I felt to be missing, probably with Wartime lies, or About Schmidt. The first Harry Potter as well, but I understand that in 1999 it was too early for that judgement. Stephenson's Snow Crash is missing, maybe replaceable with Neuromancer to have something of that genre. Talking german literature with Thomas Mann above, Alfred Andersch Die Rote would have a place on my personal list, as well as Die Wand by Marlen Haushofer. Haruki Murakami is missing, though maybe with 1Q84 he better fits into a list of the current century. Stephen King? Paul Auster? Philip Roth? Though maybe that would be for The Human Stain, and that's from 2000.
As an aside, I was happily surprised to see The Master and Margarita on the list. It's one of the more known books that I thought had a very special charm, but not one I'd expect to see working on many, as one would have to have read Goethe's Faust and liked it...
It is very popular and a huge influence. I am not surprised (but then I am French and always found St-Exupéry fascinating).
> Ulysses, as mentioned below, surprised me as I thought it's only popular in some countries
Me too, to be honest. Quite a few English-speaking authors are maybe unexpectedly quite popular (Hemingway and Fitzgerald are there, and I think it is deserved; Dickens and Mark Twain should have been), but I would not think about Ulysses.
> The Hound of the Baskervilles is important and well known and everything, but does it really held up when you read it today
Crime is an important genre and Sherlock Holmes is quite popular (even though I would personally put something by Maurice Leblanc or Agatha Christie instead).
> Stephenson's Snow Crash is missing, maybe replaceable with Neuromancer to have something of that genre.
Sci-fi is underrepresented. I would put Neuromancer definitely, and at least something by Jules Verne. I cannot believe 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas did not make the cut.
Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll have a closer look at the books you mention I don’t already know :)
That's because "from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde%27s_100_Books_of_the_...
For example, 1984 is missing, and Louis Begley Wartime Lies. And I wouldn't have expected Ulysses in there given the french source, for me it was incomprehensible gibberish and I thought only the US ranks it high. But that gibberishness makes it certainly memorable, so given the question it fits.
When I don't know, I ask and don't judge (and lacking omniscience, I don't judge anyway).
I'm aware that some think this book is influential, I'm not clear on how widespread that belief is. Also, whether regular readers really like it. And no, Wikipedia does not clear that up.
If anything, it's surprising that English-speaking countries like it so much.
>I thought only the US ranks it high
Joyce never even set foot in the United States... You could say this about The Great Gatsby, which US sources might rank in the top 5 compared to 46 in this list.
Note that 1984 is listed, just as "Nineteen Eighty-Four". I missed it when searching, didn't think of searching for "Orwell" instead.
I'd disagree with you about its quality, I remember it fondly (well, as much as possible given the topic of having one's identity erased), it was a powerful experience - and I do remember it vividly, so when asked for books one remembers I'd absolutely mention it, and in a list of books of the century it does belong.
Joyce "prose" on the other hand did nothing for me but make me despise his book.
> "what stuck in your mind"
That's strongly correlated IMHO; and I don't really see any objective metric for the influence of a book anyway.
> He used to hold long book club style readings of his books among the prominent literateur in his times to exactly impinge in their minds that what he writes is clever and not gibberish.
My was so clever, that he had to verbally harangue people into finding his writing clever.
Or put another way “Every book surveyed” does a lot of heavy lifting here.
1. https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100?ref=PRHDCE40587....
2. https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novel...
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.
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.
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.
Any national worlds book list, and this explicitly includes US and UK lists, are heavily skewed and I mean ridiculously so
[0] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2023/05/great-books-e...
To the same token, French authors who make it across the Atlantic aren't always the most valued here.
After all you might not chose where you live, but how you live and where you die can be up to you. And as far as I can I try to respect what people chose for themselves.
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf
what wonderful surprises, i thought these amazing books were forgotten and lost
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
But very Eurocentric.
Where are Kalidas , Mahfouz , Soyinka or the Mahabharata?
Then again I also hated the episode of The Sopranos which has an extremely long dream sequence.