Aralarında Paul Auster, Stephen King gibi bilindik isimlerin de yer aldığı 125 yazarın oyladığı listelerle oluşturulmuş bir kitap. 500 küsur esere yer verilmiş, isim havuzu olarak iş görebilecek bir derleme olmuş. Kitabın başında ve sonunda yer alan listeleri paylaşayım:
THE TOP TOP TEN LIST
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- The stories of Anton Chekhov
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
TOP TEN WORKS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Dubliners by James Joyce
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- The stories of Flannery O’Connor
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
TOP TEN WORKS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
1 . Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
5. The stories of Anton Chekhov
6. Middlemarch by George Eliot
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. Emma by jane Austen
TOP TEN WORKS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
- Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
- Candide by Voltaire
- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
- The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
TOP TEN WORKS OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- King Lear by William Shakespeare
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- The Tempest by William Shakespeare
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
- Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
- The plays of Moliere
- Henry V and Othello, The Moor of Venice by William
Shakespeare
TOP TEN WORKS OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY AND EARLIER
- The Odyssey by Homer
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
- The Bible
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Oresteia by Aeschylus
- The Aeneid by Virgil
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
- The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights
- Oedipus the King by Sophocles
TOP TEN WORKS BY AMERICAN AUTHORS
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- The stories of Flannery O’Connor
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
TOP TEN WORKS BY BRITISH AUTHORS
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- Middlemarch by Ceorge Eliot
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- King Lear by William Shakespeare
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Dubliners by James Joyce
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
TOP TEN WORKS BY RUSSIAN AUTHORS
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The stories of Anton Chekhov
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
- Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
- Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
TOP TEN WORKS BY FRENCH AUTHORS
1 . Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
2. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
3. The Stranger by Albert Camus
4. Candide by Voltaire
5. Germinal by Emile Zola
6. L’Assommoir [The Dram Shop] by Emile Zola
7. Nana by Emile Zola
8. Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac
9. The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos
10. The Fall by Albert Camus
TOP TEN WORKS OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- The Stand by Stephen King
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis
Stevenson - The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ by C. S. Lewis
- Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson
- The Lord of the Rings by J . R. R. Tolkien
- The War with the Newts by Karel Capek
- His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
- Dune by Frank Herbert
TOP TEN AUTHORS BY NUMBER OF BOOKS SELECTED
William Shakespeare — 11
William Faulkner — 6
Henry James — 6
Jane Austen — 5
Charles Dickens — 5
Fyodor Dostoevsky — 5
Ernest Hemingway — 5
Franz Kafka — 5
(tie) James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf — 4
TOP TEN AUTHORS BY POINTS EARNED
Leo Tolstoy — 327
William Shakespeare — 293
James Joyce — 194
Vladimir Nabokov — 190
Fyodor Dostoevsky — 177
William Faulkner — 173
Charles Dickens — 168
Anton Chekhov — 165
Gustave Flaubert — 163
Jane Austen — 161
Reddit yorumlarına göz attığımda, oyunların senaryonun filmde hayat bulması gibi tiyatroda vasfını bulup kitaptan sayılmaması, en azından karışık liste yaratmaması gerektiği gibi görüşlere katılmakla birlikte; Rus edebiyatına dair küçümseyici görüşlere de cahile bakar gibi baktım.
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/3z18qm/the_greatest_books_of_all_time_as_voted_by_125/
Diğer başka listeleri arattığımda da karşıma şu çıktı:
Bu kitap özelinde, beni en çok şaşırtan Nabokov, ve çokça yerdiği Dostoyevski’yi seçmenler nezdinde geçmesi oldu. Flaubert ve Bovary ile Rus yazarlar, “egolu” Hemingway’in de bolca övgüsüne mazhar olmuştu. Gatsby’i Reddit okurlarının bile “şişirilmiş” görmesi de yerinde bir tespit, en azından Fitzgerald’dan önce hem onun hem Hemingway’in “bizden daha iyi” dedikleri Faulkner’in yer bulması gerektiğinde sanıyorum hepimiz hemfikiriz. Emma’nın Pride and Prejudice’yi geçmesi de sürpriz bir plase olmuş.