The blog of The Top Ten author J. Peder Zane.
Somerset Maugham's Top Ten
Friday, March 30, 2007
Nigelbeale.com observes that Top Top Ten List in my book — that is the ten biggest vote getters from all 125 lists on the list — is very similar to the list compiled by Somerset Maugham 50 years ago.
Here's Maugham's list:
1. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
2. Pride and Pejudice by Jane Austen
3. The Red and the Black by Stendahl
4. Le Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
5. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
6. Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
9. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Here's ours:
THE TOP TOP TEN LIST
1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The stories of Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot
Posted by J. Peder Zane at 6:25 AM
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hmmm...comparing the two lists quite clearly contradicts my point...probably better and more accurate to observe that the ‘top lists’ of many of our contemporary writers remain very similar to the one chosen by Somerset Maugham 50 years ago.
Mr. Beale,
While the titles on the lists are not identical, they share the very same spirit. That is, most of the books have stood the test of time. They embody the timeless essence of great artistic achievment, an ineffable quality that makes works relevant and moving despite vast changes in politics and culture.
I would put among the top ten Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. I would venture to say that all Southern writers rely on Stowe (including Twain -- H.Finn would not be possible w/o Uncle Tom, nor would Absalom Absalom). And for modern literature, I would put among the top ten Conrad Richter's 'The Waters of Kronos'. For Richter was the first to express our narcissistic and modern desire for a return to a non-solipsitic nostalgic world.
This may amuse you: Here's a list of Top Ten unfinished books (by readers) as compiled in a survey entitled the Teletext Reading Report:
1. Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - JK Rowling
3. Ulysses - James Joyce
4. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
5. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
7. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
8. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
9. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
10. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Hmm... that ordering on Maugham's list is wrong. As I recall (I read through the Maugham book in a used book store not long ago, and now I'm regretting not picking it up) The first nine weren't ordered by significance, and I distinctly remember that he referred to War and Peace as the best of them; I believe his words were "Certainly [it is] the greatest of all novels." The ordering listed there is just the order in which Maugham discusses the books, not a ranking.