All,
I wonder what everybody thinks of this list? Has our collective wisdom made a monster? Will Robert become a happier wiser man when he sits down and reads, these ten books? When I was a kid I slept on a sleeping porch in the summer, where there was a pile of old magazines, Old Dick Tracy comic books, illustrations of world war II fighting aircraft, etc, that somehow never got cleaned up, summer after summer. Among them was a copy of "Pageant" magazine, kind of the equivalent of People Mag and Reader's Digest mashed together: the worst sort of Dentist Office trash. In that issue, somebody had compiled a photo of a woman who was made up of the best features of all the beautiful women of the day. "Huh?!" Is that what we have here? This is NOT a rhetorical question. Comments, please. Nick From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robert J. Cordingley Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2010 7:58 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] The 10 Best Literary Works - the envelope please! What a terrific response! Thanks to everyone who shared their recommendations. I've closed the list because with 119 candidates we now can see 10 clear winners. Here are the top 10 Titles with Author and (No. of Recommendations) that were recommended 3 or 4 times. * Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha (Don Quixote) by Miguel de Cervantes (4) * Moby Dick or The Whale by Herman Melville (4) * Ulysses by James Joyce (4) * The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (3) * The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse (3) * Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life by George Eliot (3) * Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse (3) * Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (3) * Siddartha by Hermann Hesse (3) * War & Peace by Lyev Nikolayevich (Leo) Tolstoy (3) 17 titles were recommended by 2 people, the remaining 92 only by 1. 25 people sent their recommendations. I believe I've actually read 7 of the recommended titles but none of them made the top 10, so I do have a long way to go with my literary education! I compiled the list from the posted emails using these guidelines: * I only included the first 10 mentioned if you went over the limit. Thanks to those who stopped at 10 or less. * I didn't include any series, tho' I allowed one trilogy to remain on the list * I didn't follow up on any referred lists because I wanted FRIAM list members' recommendations, not someone else's, sorry. * I tried to exclude non-fiction. * I've sorted them by recommendations then alphabetically on title to help you find your choices (with 'A' and 'The' at the end of their titles). The complete list is in the attached .xls file. Let me know if you have any problems opening it. Thanks again. Robert C
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