Are you a good reader?
What are your 15 best novels?
Here are mine=

1-Aylak Adam By Yusuf Atılgan
2-Ağrıdağı Efsanesi By Yaşar Kemal
3- Timbuktu By Paul Auster
4- The trial By Franz Kafka
5- Ulysses By James Joyce
6- One Hundred Years Solutude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7- Lolita By Vladimir Nabokov
8- The Stranger –L’Etranger By Albert Camus
9- The Brothers Karamozof By Fyodor Dostoyevski
10-The Grapes of Wratf By John Steinbeck
11-Les Mots By Jean Paul Sartre
12-To the lighthouse By Virginia Woolf
13-Light in August By William Faulkner
14-Victoria By Knut Hamsun
15-Gazi Paşa By Attila İlhan

I would love to tell but because most books I read are in Dutch I think it is of no use doing it.

Well, I suppose that most of us read books in their own languages, so I’m not the exception, but I don’t think it is of no use to recommend my favorites, since they must be translated to other languages too, as capital works of world literature.

For me, the only problem is to chose ONLY 15 best novels, but let me try:

War And Peace – Lev Tolstoy
Evgeny Onegin – Alexandr Pushkin
Resurrection - Lev Tolstoy
Anna Karenina – Lev Tolstoy
Quiet Flows the Don - Mikhail Sholokhov
Torrents of Spring - Ivan Turgenyev
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Time of Death - Dobrica Ćosić
Tzar Radovan's Treasure - Jovan Dučić
Death and the Dervish - Mehmed MeÅ¡a Selimović
The Bridge on the Drina - Ivo Andrić
The Citadel – A. J. Cronin
By The River Piedra I Sat Down And Wept - Paulo Coelho
1984 - George Orwell

Nice topic for book-lovers. But we are still waiting for Trudy to make her list. Until then, my choice:

The Idiot, F. M. Dostoyevsky
The Posessed, F. M. Dostoyevsky
Epic of Gilgamesh
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Second book of Migrations (Seobe, knjiga druga), Miloš Crnjanski
A Novel about London (Roman o Londonu), Miloš Crnjanski
Father Bernard the Swell (Bakonja fra-Brne), Simo Matavulj
The Song of Nibelungs (Das Nibelungenlied)
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), Thomas Mann
Orlando Enraged (Orlando Furioso), Ariosto
Dead Souls, Nikolay Gogol
Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Vladimir Voinovich
The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince), Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Wow! What an impossible task! I started to write my list but it is truly impossible for me - especially after reading Slavica and Duda's lists - everything from Tolstoy to Dickens - I added both their lists to mine!!! I would also add all six Jane Austin books to my list.

I agree with Duda about The Little Prince - probably the dearest most cherishished book of mine. A children's book with a deep message for adults. A Turkish translation of the entire book is available here:-

http://arzudurukan.www9.50megs.com/index.htm

Now I would like to add Winnie the Pooh by A.A.Miln. May it be sixteen? Or children books are excluded? Or we should exclude Gilgamesh? (Be sure I didn't translate it, Sui... I do not speak Sumerian... don't have Sumerian font in my PC anyway. )

Hmm, I always find these kind of questions rather hard. Same problem with "top 10 albums" for example, I wouldn’t know where to start.. and I'm such a doubter..

Anyway:

F. Scott Fitzgerald – the Great Gatsby
John Irving – The World According to Garp
John Irving – Hotel New Hampshire
Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road
D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Gerard Reve – De Avonden
Patrick Süskind – The Perfume
Truman Capote – In Cold Blood
J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
Haruki Murakami - South of the Border, West of the Sun
Donna Tartt - The Secret History

to be continued probably..

To Duda and Slavica;

You are like walking libraries!!! Its unbelievable!!!
Now i bend infront of you!

With regards your majesty!

Pardon me, Sui, but I am more a kind of sitting library... If I read less, I'd walk more... And I'd be slim as well.

Liked Elisa's list too... She inspired me to think more of some modern prosaists. My God, so many books, how can one decide? Now I'd like to add Malcolm Lawry and his "Under Vulcano"... and Peter Carey and his "Oscar and Lucinda"... and "The Blind Assasin" by Margaret Atwood... and... will someone stop me? Sui, Slavica, please... just stop me.



P.S. Elisa, suppose you recommend "The Parfume"? I saw it (translated! alas!) here and from the very start I have a feeling it's something worth reading. Can you compare it to something? I would like to hear somebody's personal impressions, for I don't like to read "noncertified" books.

This is so hard, but have made an attempt to select my favourite 15:-

Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austin
Emma - Jane Austin
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Expery
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
I, Claudius - Robert Graves

Thanks for the idea, Sui. Though it will be your fault when I became a fat woman...

Aenigma (x) - you made my day with Trollop! Can I guess you are secret lover of Dickens too? (I use to read "Oliver Twist" again and again under my pillow still. )

Jonathan Swift! Not fair... And Laurence Sterne... Mark Twain... Elsa Morante...

May it be 115... please? I would like to add some more...

Well... Here are my first and second top fifteen list according to the two slightly different definitions of novel.

novel: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

1. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
2. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
3. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
4. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
5. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
6. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
7. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
8. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
9. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
10. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
11. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
12. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
13. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
14. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
15. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

novel: an extended fictional work in prose; usually in the form of a story

1. Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky
2. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (Ah, my dear Jan Valjean!...)
3. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoyevsky
4. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
5. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Hemingway
6. The Metamorphosis - Kafka
7. The Trial - Kafka
8. War and Peace - Tolstoy
9. Ulysses - James Joyce
10. Frankenstein - Marry Shelley
11. Search of Lost Time (whole series) - Marcel Proust
12. The Iron Heel - Jack London
13. Modam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
14. The Grapes of Wratf - John Steinbeck
15. Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov

P. S. Thanks, Elisa! I didn't see your post at once. The word "unique" is enough. Sold!

Black Beauty - Anna Sewell

it was my term work in prep class in high school... we used to watch its movie together with my family

One of the most human books I ever read: "The Book of the Dun Cow" by Walter Wangerin. And maybe "Waterbabies" by Charles Kingsley... Now I am becoming sentimental... it's the fault of the man in yellow coat...

AllTooGoodDetectiveWork, Aenigma... Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle... Do you like Sherlock Holmes, by the way?

O my god! I completely forgot French Literature!

Victor Hugo – Les Miserables
Victor Hugo – The Hunchback Of Notre-Dame
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Stendhal – Red and Black
Alexandre Dumas Son – La dame aux camélias,
Alexandre Dumas Father – The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo (and many many others!)

I agree! 115 wouldn’t be enough!

And allow me adding one of my biggest favorites – Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach.

And.. and.. talking about novels for children and youth … who doidn’t grow up reading “Robinson Crusoe”…

Oh… how about 1115?

What about Gabriel Chevallier and his "Clochemerle"? Oooooohhhh... French writers! And Lesage...

Mon plaisire, Jean...

I have another children's book to add to my list!

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Awwwwwww

You stole it from me...

But admit... you read "Harriette the Spy" when you was a child? Admit...

Or SoCalledDetectives... Uhhhh, this is going fast like Midnight Express!

Lucky you! You had the torch...

In fact... no need to worry... I am sure they do not read this thread.

Ohhhh... Oscar Wilde!

By the way, I was right: spammers DO NOT read this thread. I just got this:

heloo there..how are u..

Which writer should I quote in my answer?

Dorian Gray... or Bodrian Gray?

I think I should go! It's one thing to trash a thread in Off-Topic, but quite another to trash one in Poetry and Literature!

Slavica!!

I am surprised at you!

Only if it's illustrated... with beautiful drawings of Ernest Shepard who illustrated both the Winnie and the Wind!

Having scanned through the tread I am ashamed to say that I have not read hardly any of the books listed except Jonathan Seagull which I loved! and Lady Chatterley's Lover, the unexpurgated version of course.

My literary list are mostly biographies and true stories(for example Wild Swans, The mysteries of Olga Checkova)and I used to be a Patricia Cornwall fan (no classics here! just blood and gore) and one book I could not put down, was "Silence of the Lambs" by Thomas Harris.

THE BEST OF THE WORLD
THE BEST OF THE CENTURY

According to TIME Magazine worlwide (USA) (1999-2006)

BEST NOVEL OF THE CENTURY=
“Ulysses” by James Joyce (1922)
Runners-Up=
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

THE COMPLETE LIST – TIME Magazine All-Time 100 Novels:
“An American Tragedy” by Theodore dreiser
“Beloved” by toni morrison
“Animal Farm” by George Orwell
“Mrs.Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf
“Herzog” by Saul Bellow
”Invisible Man” by Ralp Ellison
“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell
“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck
“The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
”To kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee
“To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf
”Tropic of Cancer” by Henry Miller
“Housekeepng” by Marilyne Robinson
“White Teeth” by Zadie Smith
“Loving” by Henry Green
“The blid Assassin” by Margaret Atwood
“Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret” by Judy Blume
“The Man who loved Childen” by Christina Stead
“A Handful of Dust” by Evelyn Waugh
“A Death in the Family” by James Agee
“Play It As It lays” by Joan Didion
“The Power and the Glory” by Graham Gren
“Go Tell it on the Mountain” by James Baldwin
“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” by John Le carre
“Dog Soldiers” by Robert Stone
…
…
BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY =
“The Gulag Archipipelago” by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (1974)
“The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank
“The Double Helix” by James Watson

BEST CHILDREN’S BOOK OF THE CENTURY=
“Charlotte’s Web” by E.BWhite (1952)
“The Chronicles of Nornia” by C.S.Lewis
“A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’ Engle

BEST POEM OF THE CENTURY=
“The Waste Land” by T.S.Eliot (1922)
Runners -Up=
The Second Coming” by W.B.Yeats
Home Burial” by Robert Frost

My universities by maxim gorki
French liutenants woman by john fowles
Great expecations by Charles Dickens
A love episode by emile zola
Crime and punishment by dostoyevsky
Wuthering heights by emily bronte
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
George orwell 1984
Black Coffee" by Agatha Christie


Mehmet my hawk by yaşar kemal
Sevdalinka by ayşe kulin
4th murad by yavuz bahadıroglu
Çanakkale mahşeri(the last judgement in Çanakkale) by mehmed Niyazi
Şu çılgın Türkler by Turgut özakman(not really good)
Leyla ile mecnun İskender pala

Here are some good books, not novels though (who has time for that! ). Take a look:

Richard Wrangham, Dale Paterson - Demonic Males
Jackson Katz - The Macho Paradox
Gary Brooks - The Centerfold Syndrome

All Nobel Laureates in Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to 103 persons since 1901.
Jump down to: | 1980 | 1960 | 1940 | 1920 | 1901 |
• 2006 - Orhan Pamuk
• 2005 - Harold Pinter
• 2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
• 2003 - J.M. Coetzee
• 2002 - Imre Kertész
• 2001 - V.S. Naipaul
• 2000 - Gao Xingjian
• 1999 - Günter Grass
• 1998 - José Saramago
• 1997 - Dario Fo
• 1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
• 1995 - Seamus Heaney
• 1994 - Kenzaburo Oe
• 1993 - Toni Morrison
• 1992 - Derek Walcott
• 1991 - Nadine Gordimer
• 1990 - Octavio Paz
• 1989 - Camilo José Cela
• 1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
• 1987 - Joseph Brodsky
• 1986 - Wole Soyinka
• 1985 - Claude Simon
• 1984 - Jaroslav Seifert
• 1983 - William Golding
• 1982 - Gabriel García Márquez
• 1981 - Elias Canetti
• 1980 - Czeslaw Milosz
• 1979 - Odysseus Elytis
• 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
• 1977 - Vicente Aleixandre
• 1976 - Saul Bellow
• 1975 - Eugenio Montale
• 1974 - Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson
• 1973 - Patrick White
• 1972 - Heinrich Böll
• 1971 - Pablo Neruda
• 1970 - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
• 1969 - Samuel Beckett
• 1968 - Yasunari Kawabata
• 1967 - Miguel Angel Asturias
• 1966 - Samuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs
• 1965 - Mikhail Sholokhov
• 1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre
• 1963 - Giorgos Seferis
• 1962 - John Steinbeck
• 1961 - Ivo Andric
• 1960 - Saint-John Perse
• 1959 - Salvatore Quasimodo
• 1958 - Boris Pasternak
• 1957 - Albert Camus
• 1956 - Juan Ramón Jiménez
• 1955 - Halldór Laxness
• 1954 - Ernest Hemingway
• 1953 - Winston Churchill
• 1952 - François Mauriac
• 1951 - Pär Lagerkvist
• 1950 - Bertrand Russell
• 1949 - William Faulkner
• 1948 - T.S. Eliot
• 1947 - André Gide
• 1946 - Hermann Hesse
• 1945 - Gabriela Mistral
• 1944 - Johannes V. Jensen
• 1943 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1942 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1941 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1940 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1939 - Frans Eemil Sillanpää
• 1938 - Pearl Buck
• 1937 - Roger Martin du Gard
• 1936 - Eugene O'Neill
• 1935 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1934 - Luigi Pirandello
• 1933 - Ivan Bunin
• 1932 - John Galsworthy
• 1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt
• 1930 - Sinclair Lewis
• 1929 - Thomas Mann
• 1928 - Sigrid Undset
• 1927 - Henri Bergson
• 1926 - Grazia Deledda
• 1925 - George Bernard Shaw
• 1924 - Wladyslaw Reymont
• 1923 - William Butler Yeats
• 1922 - Jacinto Benavente
• 1921 - Anatole France
• 1920 - Knut Hamsun
• 1919 - Carl Spitteler
• 1918 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1917 - Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan
• 1916 - Verner von Heidenstam
• 1915 - Romain Rolland
• 1914 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1913 - Rabindranath Tagore
• 1912 - Gerhart Hauptmann
• 1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck
• 1910 - Paul Heyse
• 1909 - Selma Lagerlöf
• 1908 - Rudolf Eucken
• 1907 - Rudyard Kipling
• 1906 - Giosuè Carducci
• 1905 - Henryk Sienkiewicz
• 1904 - Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray
• 1903 - Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
• 1902 - Theodor Mommsen
• 1901 - Sully Prudhomme

For me the best (therefore my favorites) are :

1 The Tunnel ( Ernesto Sábato )

2 The Foreigner (Albert Camus) Master piece!

3 One hundred years of loneliness" (Gabriel García Márquez)

4 Virgins of Paradise (Barbara Wood)

5 The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

6 Diario de un Mago (Paulo Coelho)

7 Veinte Poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Pablo Neruda) - chilean poet-

8 Martín Rivas (Alberto Blest Ghana ) - chilean writer-

9 "La Cabaña del Tío Tom "

10 "The Talented Mr. Ripley (Patricia Highsmith)

11 "The House of Spirits" (Isabel Allende)-chilean writer-

12 "El perfume"

13 " El lobo estepario" (Herman Hesse)

14 "Corazón" (Edmundo d' Amicis) I was a little girl when I read it and really touched me

15 "Los Viejos puentes de madera" ( Robert James Waller)

Can I add some more, even if they aren't novels:

- "Arabian Nights" or "1001 Nights"
- "The Art of War" (Sun Tzu)
- "Little Women" (Louise May Alcott)
- "Doña Flor and her two husbands" (Jorge Amado)
- I ching
- "Classicals" (Confucius)
- "The name of the Rose" (Umberto Eco)

Forgot another one:

American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis

ps: this time I've seen the movie, it's absolutely nothing like the book......

gabriel garcia marquez -one hundred years of solitude 8 i dont think any other novel could be better than this)

paul auster - the book of illusions

dostoeyevsky - crime and punishment

steinbeck - of mice and men

milan kundera - the unbearable lightness of being

..these are my favoruite 5 one

and of course there are really good turkish novels but you can not find any of them except novels of orhan pamuk and yasar kemal

merhaba!
as the universal library has unlimited resources and therefore selecting the "best"/"most read"/"most popular" 15 books seems unrealistic, I propose to have an open list of recommendations

mine are the following:
Amin Maalouf- Leo Africanus and Balthasar`s Odyssey
Sadegh Hedayat- The Blind Owl (BUF-e KUR)
Rudolf Otto- The Holly
Mircea Eliade- Sacred and Profane
Umberto Eco- The Name of the Rose
Mikhail Bulgakov- The Master and MArgarita
Hermann Hesse- Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)
Jose Saramago- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and All the Names
Ismail Kadare- The General of the Dead Army
N.H. Kleinbaum- Dead Poets Society
Milan Kundera- Ludicrous Loves
Pascal Bruckner- The Art of Loving
Marguerite Duras- L`Amant
Carlos Ruiz Zafon- The Shadow of the Wind
Peter Beagle- The Last Unicorn and Fine and Private Place

Difficult to keep it to 15 - but here are some of my favourites from the age of about 5 upwards :

'Black Beauty' ~ Anna Sewell
'Pippi Longstocking' ~ Astrid Lindgren
'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' ~ Mark Twain
'The Wind in the Willows' ~ Kenneth Grahame
'David Copperfield' ~ Charles Dickens
'Gullivers Travels' ~ Jonathan Swift
'The Secret Garden' ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett
'Tai Pan' ~ Charles Clavell
'Papillon' ~ Henri Charriere
'Brideshead Revisited' ~ Evenlyn Waugh
'Rebecca' ~ Daphne du Maurier
'Of Mice and Men' ~ John Steinbeck
'To Kill a Mockingbird' ~ Harper Lee
'Lord of the Flies' ~ William Goldring
'The Hobbit' ~ J R R Tolkien
'Sala's Gift':My Mother's Holocaust Story ~Anna Krichner
'Cold Mountain' ~ Charles Frazier
'Pride and Prejudice' ~ Jane Austen
'One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest' ~ Ken Kesey

My pleasure

Or it's the differences between students... which I conclude from Elisa's post. Thanks, Elisa! I didn't know you are from Netherlands, so I draw away my words. My opinion about Duch students doesn't refer to you. We had bad students who hated clasics too...

If you label them as "classics" I think its an instant turn-off to some people! "Classics" are a wide range of novels which have have become regarded as such because they are so wonderfully written!

People imagine them all to be "heavy going" when in fact they are all diverse and unique.

Love of reading comes from chosing books(whatever kind) that you enjoy - not those which you are made to read - at school, college wherever

Quote Duda : Pride or prejudice, that is the question...


...Hehehe ..thought the question was ...'To be or not to be'...

Those who read both books will recognize my paraphraze anyway... Maybe I should have written: "Read or not to read"...

errrm ....I was joking Duda

Not mine... but maybe somebody other's? What do you think?

As Slavica said, Reading book is really important...
He who reads literature, enjoys arts, is a well-mannered, cultured and good person, according to scientists..

Haha! We will have to agree to disagree, Slavica. I believe reading is a habit which needs to be acquired and the more you read, the more likely you are to gravitate to the classics.

Personally, I would rather see a child reading an "unworthy" book than playing a computer game...

Thank you Slavica! I cant believe Pablo Neruda is in "off topic" either! what other latin poets do you know or like?
Thank you for the link I will post more unknown information about Pablo Neruda and my personal translations of his poems on the thread dedicated to him which , I hope , one turkish native speaker can translate into turkish because I found several mistakes in the english translations.
You know for me being Chilean, It is a pleasure to see people from all over the world loving him who was born in a remote country like Chile!!
Dilara

The Perfume by Patrick Suskind- a book definitely worth reading....

Can you imagine a world entirely made of perfumes, smells, fragrances? Can you imagine a man who knows life ony by smelling it? do you know each person has an unique smell, a smell than can make him/her anonimous or irresistible?
Once upon a time there was a man who discovered an evanescent perfume that he wanted to control: the perfume of young woman.....

Enjoy

Mine are:
1. Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
2. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
3. Wild Swans - Jung Chang
4. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
5. Le Petit Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
6. Djiin - Alain Robbe-Grillet
7. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
8. The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay
9. Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) - Kafka
10. Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich) - Bertolt Brecht
11. Not without my Daughter - Betty Mahmoody
12. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
13. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
14. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
15. War and Peace - Tolstoy

Honourable Mention: Interview with the Vampire - Anne Rice (I couldn't fit it onto the list)

Rereading this topic, I find myself surprised by something else: no Italian writers (except Elsa Morante, but it was me who mentioned her), no Polish, no Czech and Slovakian writers (may I add Karel Czapek as one of the best East-European writers?), no Nordian or Dane writers, etc, and the biggest gap - very small percent of Russian (or Ex-Russian) writers) - and the Russian literature is world for itself - not world but cosmos!

It seems the literature has become susceptible to fashions and interests of publishers & booksellers, turning itself to an industry of entertainment. And as long as the people are reading Lesley Pearses and James Patersons... the good literature stays forgotten.

I don't think I have read 15 fictional books in my entire life......in fact I know I haven't!!! I generally only read text books

Heinrich Boll - The Clown
Michel Tournier - Friday
Herman Hesse - The Glass Bead Game
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller
Lucius Apuleius Platonicus - The Golden Ass (Apuleius Asinus )
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Victor Hugo - The Man Who Laughs
Milán Füst - The Story of My Wife
John Fowles - The Magician
Umberto Eco - The Foucalt Pendulum
George Orwell - 1984
Henri Stendhal - On Love (essay, not novel )
Martin Buber - Gog and Magog - A Chronicle
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 100 Years of Solitude