8 ms·

The Greatest Books of All Time

43 points by bribri 6y ago

ggm 6y ago
Shame about the login filters. Not going to associate my ID with either of the Two you selected. For the first 50 books, I'd read 38, wanted to read about 9 and couldn't care less about 3. (William Faulkner and Thomas Mann. Probably, they are the ones I should read first!) Of the top 10 it was 9:1 read:want. I think I found the result pleasing but also surprising. I expected far more to be unread and unwanted overall. Most of them I'd read before leaving Universty. I got tired of clicking through your social capture. I'd have done more than 50 if you got rid of this burden. So: what's being harvested here? Explain to me how this affects SEO, or income, or anything specific. What was I doing in either clicking, or ignoring the social login? edit: hmm. -2. is this bad karma because I sound boastful? I'm a 59yo, if you live long enough, you will read books on the classical canon of books to be read. Is it bad karma because I think Thomas Mann is boring? (I loved watching death in venice, but magic mountain was interminably, prosaically dull dull dull and I couldn't finish it) or because I dislike William Faulkner? Or maybe because I asked what the login focus on FB and Apple was, and if this is (organ) harvesting?
- UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  I've never wanted to down vote a post more than right now. Never seen such a bad attitude on this site, yikes :(
citizenpaul 6y ago
I've tried to read " a sense of an ending" about 5 times and simply cannot get into it. I've read insane amounts of books across all subjects and categories. I have no idea how this book constantly comes to the top of best books lists.
gdebel 6y ago
Thank you, great work.
subungual 6y ago
The ratio of male to female authors and the small subset of countries that absolutely dominate this list tell me just about all I need to know about it. Sure, they qualify how the list was built at the top, but titling it "The Greatest Books of All Time" serves to perpetuate the problems with who gets exposure and what styles and perspectives are considered worthy of praise. This kind of list is exactly the thing I'd have bought into as a pretentious high schooler. It's a shame to see this thinking continuing to be propagated in 2021, in my personal opinion.
- bwb 6y ago
  Historically male writers vastly outnumbered female authors. It would be hard to build a historic list like this and correct that imbalance historically. How would you build this type of list to correct for this? It is still a massive problem within the publishing and review space. But slowly improving... lots more that could be done for non white authors as well.
  - coolgod 6y ago
    For example, the top 350 books doesn't include a single Chinese book! This is enough to shows you how biased and worthless this list is. It's essentially suggesting there is no literary tradition outside the west.
    - bwb 6y ago
      It seems like your frustration is over the name of the list, and you would prefer it is listed as "The greatest books of Western Civilization". Is that an accurate assessment if the title was different you would be fine with it? Since the site is in English I think it is likely aimed at an English audience...
      - subungual 6y ago
        >Since the site is in English I think it is likely aimed at an English audience... To be fair, fully half of the top ten books were not written in English. Non-Indo-European languages can be translated just as well as French and Russian can.
HenryBemis 6y ago
Great "Classics" list. I have read most in the past, but this is a very interesting list to go through again (even if it takes 2 years). Thank you (both Shane Sherman and bribri) for bringing this to my/our attention.
thr4chlitowaway 6y ago
(Throwaway because I don't want to tie my main account to the recommendation site(s) I'll bring up) This is a great resource that I haven't discovered before - I tend to read mostly from "top lists" when I'm not reading books I've been recommended organically - I appreciate the lifetimes people have already spent separating the wheat from the chaff. Thanks for sharing. Now, since it's on topic, and not listed in the "list of lists" on the site, I'd like to share my surprising source for book recommendations... I don't think that the actual discussion forums are worth spending brainpower or attention on, but I've actually gotten a lot of mileage out of the wikis that the 4chan communities of /lit/ and /sci/ curate. The former (/lit/, [1]) does a yearly vote to generate a top 100, but caveat lector: 2020's vote was raided by another board. You can see the past yearly top 100s on one page of the wiki ([2]), and I've not yet had a bad experience picking a book from previous lists (2020's still has worth if you ignore obvious troll entries). Sadly, the lists are usually in the form of an image and not raw text, so it's not very accessibility-friendly. Also to note: if you want to pick a book from a specific region or genre or want to know what order to approach a new author, there are plenty of other pages on the site beyond the top 100, which have also been great resources Lastly, /sci/'s wiki ([3]) is primarily for reference texts, which is HN's speed. The math books and the Haskell books are a solid list from what I've worked through or skimmed so far (the math suggestions are more numerous than the acclaimed "Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography"), but can't vouch for any other subject. [1] https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki//lit/_Wiki https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki//lit/_Wiki [2] https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki//lit/_Top_100_Lists https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki//lit/_Top_100_Lists [3] https://4chan-science.fandom.com/wiki//sci/_Wiki https://4chan-science.fandom.com/wiki//sci/_Wiki
- _tik_ 6y ago
  Thanks for the link. Surprisingly the list is more culturally diverse compare to other book recommendations
  - IndySun 6y ago
    Diverse? No, it is not. And not being diverse does not make it a bad 'list'.
_tik_ 6y ago
The titles should be The Greatest Western Book of All Times. Most Asians can relate more to Three Kingdoms, Journey To The West, Ramayana and Mahabharata than these list
IndySun 6y ago
Interesting idea. Unfortunately, and maybe it is my loss, but any link (on any topic) using wordings such as "Greatest" and "of all time" I always cautiously read comments first before clicking. I already feel the headline cannot be true based on so many other experiences - Awesome lists are another. Would it fuel more interest if simply Greatest was italicized thus emphasizing the method over the list?
ZeroGravitas 6y ago
Standard ebooks have some lists like this with their public domain entries: https://standardebooks.org/collections/modern-librarys-100-best-novels https://standardebooks.org/collections/modern-librarys-100-b... Not sure how to access a master list of lists though
- robin_reala 6y ago
  Good point, filed https://github.com/standardebooks/web/issues/102 https://github.com/standardebooks/web/issues/102.
cafard 6y ago
Really? The top two entries are dense modernist classics that only so many try to read. At third is Don Quixote. My stepmother remarked that pretty much everything that anyone mentions about Don Quixote comes from the first hundred pages or so. The Iliad: "The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters...". Yep. Somebody, somewhere, must have translated it into dactylic hexameters in English, but I can't think who that would be: it is not a handy meter for English. I think the algorithm needs some work.
wtf242 6y ago
This is actually my site. I built it over 10 years ago. I do understand the complaint about it being mostly western lit, and I've recently started searching for and adding more non-western lists. I am open to any recommendations. Thanks!
DoomHotel 6y ago
Any list like this that doesn't include Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is highly suspect. I kept on scrolling, but it wasn't there.

43 points by bribri 6y ago

ggm 6y ago

Shame about the login filters. Not going to associate my ID with either of the Two you selected. For the first 50 books, I'd read 38, wanted to read about 9 and couldn't care less about 3. (William Faulkner and Thomas Mann. Probably, they are the ones I should read first!) Of the top 10 it was 9:1 read:want. I think I found the result pleasing but also surprising. I expected far more to be unread and unwanted overall. Most of them I'd read before leaving Universty. I got tired of clicking through your social capture. I'd have done more than 50 if you got rid of this burden. So: what's being harvested here? Explain to me how this affects SEO, or income, or anything specific. What was I doing in either clicking, or ignoring the social login? edit: hmm. -2. is this bad karma because I sound boastful? I'm a 59yo, if you live long enough, you will read books on the classical canon of books to be read. Is it bad karma because I think Thomas Mann is boring? (I loved watching death in venice, but magic mountain was interminably, prosaically dull dull dull and I couldn't finish it) or because I dislike William Faulkner? Or maybe because I asked what the login focus on FB and Apple was, and if this is (organ) harvesting?

UShouldBWorking 6y ago
I've never wanted to down vote a post more than right now. Never seen such a bad attitude on this site, yikes :(

citizenpaul 6y ago

I've tried to read " a sense of an ending" about 5 times and simply cannot get into it. I've read insane amounts of books across all subjects and categories. I have no idea how this book constantly comes to the top of best books lists.

gdebel 6y ago

Thank you, great work.

subungual 6y ago

The ratio of male to female authors and the small subset of countries that absolutely dominate this list tell me just about all I need to know about it. Sure, they qualify how the list was built at the top, but titling it "The Greatest Books of All Time" serves to perpetuate the problems with who gets exposure and what styles and perspectives are considered worthy of praise. This kind of list is exactly the thing I'd have bought into as a pretentious high schooler. It's a shame to see this thinking continuing to be propagated in 2021, in my personal opinion.

bwb 6y ago
Historically male writers vastly outnumbered female authors. It would be hard to build a historic list like this and correct that imbalance historically. How would you build this type of list to correct for this? It is still a massive problem within the publishing and review space. But slowly improving... lots more that could be done for non white authors as well.
- coolgod 6y ago
  For example, the top 350 books doesn't include a single Chinese book! This is enough to shows you how biased and worthless this list is. It's essentially suggesting there is no literary tradition outside the west.
  - bwb 6y ago
    It seems like your frustration is over the name of the list, and you would prefer it is listed as "The greatest books of Western Civilization". Is that an accurate assessment if the title was different you would be fine with it? Since the site is in English I think it is likely aimed at an English audience...
    - subungual 6y ago
      >Since the site is in English I think it is likely aimed at an English audience... To be fair, fully half of the top ten books were not written in English. Non-Indo-European languages can be translated just as well as French and Russian can.

HenryBemis 6y ago

Great "Classics" list. I have read most in the past, but this is a very interesting list to go through again (even if it takes 2 years). Thank you (both Shane Sherman and bribri) for bringing this to my/our attention.

thr4chlitowaway 6y ago

(Throwaway because I don't want to tie my main account to the recommendation site(s) I'll bring up) This is a great resource that I haven't discovered before - I tend to read mostly from "top lists" when I'm not reading books I've been recommended organically - I appreciate the lifetimes people have already spent separating the wheat from the chaff. Thanks for sharing. Now, since it's on topic, and not listed in the "list of lists" on the site, I'd like to share my surprising source for book recommendations... I don't think that the actual discussion forums are worth spending brainpower or attention on, but I've actually gotten a lot of mileage out of the wikis that the 4chan communities of /lit/ and /sci/ curate. The former (/lit/, [1]) does a yearly vote to generate a top 100, but caveat lector: 2020's vote was raided by another board. You can see the past yearly top 100s on one page of the wiki ([2]), and I've not yet had a bad experience picking a book from previous lists (2020's still has worth if you ignore obvious troll entries). Sadly, the lists are usually in the form of an image and not raw text, so it's not very accessibility-friendly. Also to note: if you want to pick a book from a specific region or genre or want to know what order to approach a new author, there are plenty of other pages on the site beyond the top 100, which have also been great resources Lastly, /sci/'s wiki ([3]) is primarily for reference texts, which is HN's speed. The math books and the Haskell books are a solid list from what I've worked through or skimmed so far (the math suggestions are more numerous than the acclaimed "Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography"), but can't vouch for any other subject. [1] https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki//lit/_Wiki https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki//lit/_Wiki [2] https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki//lit/_Top_100_Lists https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki//lit/_Top_100_Lists [3] https://4chan-science.fandom.com/wiki//sci/_Wiki https://4chan-science.fandom.com/wiki//sci/_Wiki

_tik_ 6y ago
Thanks for the link. Surprisingly the list is more culturally diverse compare to other book recommendations
- IndySun 6y ago
  Diverse? No, it is not. And not being diverse does not make it a bad 'list'.

_tik_ 6y ago

The titles should be The Greatest Western Book of All Times. Most Asians can relate more to Three Kingdoms, Journey To The West, Ramayana and Mahabharata than these list

IndySun 6y ago

Interesting idea. Unfortunately, and maybe it is my loss, but any link (on any topic) using wordings such as "Greatest" and "of all time" I always cautiously read comments first before clicking. I already feel the headline cannot be true based on so many other experiences - Awesome lists are another. Would it fuel more interest if simply Greatest was italicized thus emphasizing the method over the list?

ZeroGravitas 6y ago

Standard ebooks have some lists like this with their public domain entries: https://standardebooks.org/collections/modern-librarys-100-best-novels https://standardebooks.org/collections/modern-librarys-100-b... Not sure how to access a master list of lists though

robin_reala 6y ago
Good point, filed https://github.com/standardebooks/web/issues/102 https://github.com/standardebooks/web/issues/102.

cafard 6y ago

Really? The top two entries are dense modernist classics that only so many try to read. At third is Don Quixote. My stepmother remarked that pretty much everything that anyone mentions about Don Quixote comes from the first hundred pages or so. The Iliad: "The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters...". Yep. Somebody, somewhere, must have translated it into dactylic hexameters in English, but I can't think who that would be: it is not a handy meter for English. I think the algorithm needs some work.

wtf242 6y ago

This is actually my site. I built it over 10 years ago. I do understand the complaint about it being mostly western lit, and I've recently started searching for and adding more non-western lists. I am open to any recommendations. Thanks!

DoomHotel 6y ago

Any list like this that doesn't include Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is highly suspect. I kept on scrolling, but it wasn't there.