Stego Posted February 20, 2010 Share Posted February 20, 2010 I thought it was awesome, Wastrel, and my teasing was simply light-hearted. Seriously.I used to run a blog too, so I found it doubly impressive. Put that link back in your sig, or *I* will put it in *MY* sig! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Calibandar Posted February 21, 2010 Share Posted February 21, 2010 Wastrel,Come on man, post the list here. We're curious ;) You can do the other stuff afterwards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wastrel Posted February 21, 2010 Author Share Posted February 21, 2010 Apologies, something came up. List will be up shortly, once I've tried to proofread it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wastrel Posted February 21, 2010 Author Share Posted February 21, 2010 OK.I've created two lists, because I've taken the 21st century (2001 and later) out of the main list. There is naturally a recency bias, with contemporary works inevitably getting more attention; what's more, I'm not sure that it's as easy to judge quality after so little time, with many of the 21st century works not even complete yet. So, I've created a list of 101 books of the 20th century (well, there's four from before 1900, actually), and a list of 10 books of the next decade. For each list, I've also given ten additional works that didn't quite make it in.I'm don't want to waffle much here, but I should also remind that this is a popular vote, and that it should't be considered a 'greatest novels' list - more a 'greatest list' of novels: a recommendations list by a large group to an unknown genre reader, which aims to find some thing to please everyone, rather than to find the thing that will most please anyone.The Main List:The Affirmation – Christopher PriestThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael ChabonThe Anubis Gates – Tim PowersThe Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel Garcia MarquezThe Black Company – Glen CookeBlindness – Jose SaramagoThe Book of the New Sun – Gene WolfeBrave New World – Aldous HuxleyA Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller, Jr.Cat's Cradle – Kurt VonnegutChildhood's End – Arthur C. ClarkeChina Mountain Zhang – Maureen McHughThe Chronicles of Amber – Roger ZelaznyThe Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. LewisThe Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) – Stephen DonaldsonA Clockwork Orange – Anthony BurgessThe H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus – H.P. LovecraftThe Dark Tower – Stephen KingDiscworld – Terry PratchettThe Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le GuinDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. DickDoomsday Book – Connie WillisDownbelow Station – C.J. CherryhDracula – Bram StokerDune – Frank HerbertThe Dying Earth – Jack VanceThe Dying of the Light – George R.R. MartinThe Earthsea Trilogy – Ursula K. Le GuinThe Empire Trilogy – Raymond E. Feist and Janny WurtsEnder's Quartet – Orson Scott CardThe Farseer Trilogy – Robin HobbThe Fencer Trilogy – K.J. ParkerFevre Dream – George R.R. MartinFictions – Jorge Luis BorgesThe Forever War – Joe HaldemanThe Foundation Trilogy – Isaac AsimovThe Gap Series – Stephen DonaldsonGood Omens – Terry Pratchett and Neil GaimanThe Gormenghast Trilogy – Mervyn PeakeThe Gospel According to Jesus Christ - Jose SaramagoA Handmaid's Tale – Margaret AtwoodThe Harry Potter Series – J.K. RowlingHellblazer – Garth EnnisHis Dark Materials – Philip PullmanThe Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts – Douglas AdamsThe Hobbit – J.R.R. TolkienHyperion – Dan SimmonsI Am Legend – Richard MathesonThe Illiad - HomerInvisible Cities – Italo CalvinoThe Iron Dragon's Daughter – Michael SwanwickThe Last Unicorn – Peter S. BeagleThe Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le GuinThe Lions of Al-Rassan – Guy Gavriel KayLittle, Big – John CrowleyThe Liveship Traders – Robin HobbLord of Light – Roger ZelaznyThe Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. TolkienLucifer's Hammer – David Niven and Jerry PournelleThe Lyonesse Trilogy– Jack VanceThe Glass Bead Game – Hermann HesseThe Man in the High Castle – Philip K. DickThe Master and Margarita – Mikhail BulgakovMemory, Sorrow and Thorn – Tad WilliamsMidnight's Children – Salman RushdieThe Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. HeinleinLe Morte D'Arthur – Thomas MalloryMythago Wood – Robert HoldstockNeuromancer – William GibsonThe Night’s Dawn Trilogy – Peter F. HamiltonNineteen Eighty-Four – George OrwellOdyssey - HomerOne Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia MarquezOnly Forward – Michael Marshall SmithOtherland – Tad WilliamsPermutation City – Greg EganPlanet of Adventure – Jack VanceThe Prestige – Christopher PriestReplay – Ken GrimwoodThe Riddle-Master Trilogy – Patricia A. McKillipSandman – Neil GaimanThe Sarantine Mosaic – Guy Gavriel KayShardik – Richard AdamsThe Silmarillion – J.R.R. TolkienSlaughterhouse 5 – Kurt VonnegutSnow Crash – Neal StephensonSolaris – Stanislaw LemThe Soldier Trilogy (Soldier of the Mist, Soldier of Arete, and Soldier of Sidon)– Gene WolfeA Song of Ice and Fire – George R.R. MartinThe Stand – Stephen KingThe Stars My Destination – Alfred BesterStarship Troopers – Robert A. HeinleinTigana – Guy Gavriel KayThe Tooth Fairy – Graham JoyceTransmetropolitan – Warren EllisUse of Weapons – Iain M. BanksThe Warlord Trilogy – Bernard CornwellWatchmen – Alan MooreWatership Down – Richard AdamsWe – Yevgeny ZamyatinThe Wheel of Time – Robert JordanTen additional works also mentioned: Salem’s Lot (Stephen King), Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis), The Once and Future King (T.H. White), The Elric Series (Michael Moorcock), A Fire Upon The Deep (Vernor Vinge), Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury), The Vorkosigan Saga (Lois McMaster Bujold), The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon), and The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri).Ten Works from the 21st Century:Acts of Caine – Matthew StoverBlack Man – Richard MorganThe First Law Trilogy – Joe AbercrombieThe Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott LynchThe Long Price Quartet – Daniel AbrahamThe Malazan Book of the Fallen – Steven EriksonThe Orphan’s Tales – Cathrynne M. ValentePrince of Nothing – R. Scott BakkerThe Scar – China MièvilleStories of Your Life and Others – Ted ChiangAlso mentioned: The Road (Cormac McCarthy), American Gods (Neil Gaiman), City of Saints and Madmen (Jeff Vandermeer), Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell), Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (Susanna Clarke), The Wizard Knight (Gene Wolfe), Chasm City (Alastair Reynolds), Anathem (Neal Stephenson). 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kuroishi Posted February 21, 2010 Share Posted February 21, 2010 Thank you for the list, Wastrel !I kinda expected to find more books that I haven't read in it, but it should still be a valuable guideline for a significant amount of time. :)Now I must say I'm curious (as everybody will be I guess) as to how the counting went, what was the minimal amount of points to get on the list ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
automne Posted February 21, 2010 Share Posted February 21, 2010 Thank you for your time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Multaniette Posted February 21, 2010 Share Posted February 21, 2010 edit: redundant Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vrana Posted February 21, 2010 Share Posted February 21, 2010 Great Job! You mention one hundred years of solitude twice but I don't think it's the worst book in the world toget two spots on the list. ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liadin Posted February 21, 2010 Share Posted February 21, 2010 Nice!! I'm also curious how many votes were needed to get a book on the list. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isis Posted February 21, 2010 Share Posted February 21, 2010 Thanks for putting the time and effort in.NB: You have The Tooth Fairy by 'Graham Priest' rather than 'Graham Joyce'. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marcelo Rebelo Firqoralas Posted February 21, 2010 Share Posted February 21, 2010 Good work Wastrel. Are you going to publish the list sorted by number of votes as well? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wastrel Posted February 21, 2010 Author Share Posted February 21, 2010 Good work Wastrel. Are you going to publish the list sorted by number of votes as well?I think it's better not to. This was never built to be a poll to produce a ranked list, and if I'd set out to do that, I'd probably have chosen a different system; but if I present the rankings, people will read it as a ranked list, which I think would be inappropriate. [in particular, I'd rather not say which books came last][its not perfectly straightfoward to rank the books, in any case - for instance, The Left Hand of Darkness got fewer votes than Downbelow Station, but Le Guin got a LOT more votes than Cherryh overall. And while in theory you could vote for multiple books by the same author, in practice there's always a tendency in these polls toward wanting to nominate more authors and just pick one per author - so if people had been banned from voting for the Dispossessed for some reason, Left Hand would probably have beaten Downbelow Station.]That said, I don't mind answering specific position questions (ie 'X or Y - who did better?') People may be interested to know that Tolkien narrowly but safely beat Martin, but that ASOAIF was the top book, with Tolkien's vote split. There was then a large gap to Wolfe and Bakker, and then another gap to Herbert, Mieville, Kay, Simmons, and Orwell, with Card completing the top ten. That's in terms of the points I handed out, which reward higher-tier votes. In terms of pure 'how many people voted at all' scores, the top ten were Tolkien, Martin, Mieville, Wolfe, Bakker, Herbert, Abercrombie, Kay, Gaiman and Hobb. To answer how many votes were needed: well, it's a lot more complicated than that (both because it's not just a highest-score-wins system, because I take into accounts votes for other books by the same author, and also because I gave more 'points' to top-tier votes than to bottom-tier votes). In theory, if all the conditions were right, a book only needed two people to vote for it in their lowest tier - and indeed there is one (and iirc only one) work here that only got those two votes. In the case of that work (no, I won't name it), the author got enough votes to get a slot on the list, but the votes were split between multiple works, plus the most popular work was after 2000 (but didn't get enough votes to get mentioned there), so the slot went to a less popular work instead. But that's a very odd situation, and most got a lot more than that. In general, a good rule of thumb would be having at least five people vote the book in the 5-12 tier. And I know that five people doesn't sound very many, but bear in mind that a) there were over 600 nominated books and only about 100 voters, so lots of things had only one or two votes for them, and B) the top books totally dominated, which left fewer votes available for the rest to fight for.I'll talk more about how the list was worked out at another time.----Isis: thanks, don't know how that happened. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheEvilKing Posted February 22, 2010 Share Posted February 22, 2010 Good stuff Wastrel. Some surprises for me - I thought I'd see the Engineer Trilogy by Parker and Altered Carbon by Morgan, instead of the Fencer Trilogy and Black Man respectively.I plan to use this as a bit of a reading guide. Should last me a while. Out of 111 works listed I have read 14 and have a further 13 sitting on my shelf.I gots some reading to do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted February 22, 2010 Share Posted February 22, 2010 Good stuff Wastrel. Some surprises for me - I thought I'd see the Engineer Trilogy by Parker and Altered Carbon by Morgan, instead of the Fencer Trilogy and Black Man respectively.Or Meivilles The Scar! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wastrel Posted February 22, 2010 Author Share Posted February 22, 2010 Or Meivilles The Scar!The Engineer trilogy is post-2000, and although it got more votes than the Fencer trilogy, it didn't reach the (higher) threshold for the shorter list.The Scar is post-2000, and does indeed appear on the post-2000 list. It did beat PSS, but only by one point.Black Man beat Altered Carbon fairly - although, had I chosen to include the Takeshi Kovacs books as a series, they would together have beaten Black Man. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted February 22, 2010 Share Posted February 22, 2010 The Engineer trilogy is post-2000, and although it got more votes than the Fencer trilogy, it didn't reach the (higher) threshold for the shorter list.The Scar is post-2000, and does indeed appear on the post-2000 list. It did beat PSS, but only by one point.Ah, that makes sense wrt KJ Parker. I find The Scar surprising. I had pegged - erroneously it seems! - as the least well regarded of the Bas Lag books. Interesting information. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maithanet Posted February 22, 2010 Share Posted February 22, 2010 I am amazed that The Road didn't make it into the Top 10 for 21st century books. That book gets a lot of attention on this board, and the people who like it, generally REALLY like it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wastrel Posted February 22, 2010 Author Share Posted February 22, 2010 I am amazed that The Road didn't make it into the Top 10 for 21st century books. That book gets a lot of attention on this board, and the people who like it, generally REALLY like it.So was I. I guess that some people didn't consider it genre? Or not enough had read it.It was joint eleventh on that list. HOWEVER, it did get more points than the Chiang and the Stover - I promoted them onto the list because they got more people voting for them as 'great'. So a different electoral system might have put McCarthy on the list. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isis Posted February 22, 2010 Share Posted February 22, 2010 So was I. I guess that some people didn't consider it genre? Or not enough had read it.I don't think it's because people don't consider it genre. You may be right in saying that not enough of the people who voted here have read it though.I really liked The Road but there are simply other books that I have liked better over the years and which are dearer to my heart. If I had a top 100/top 50 books list I'm sure it would be in there somewhere. Just because I didn't include it in my own top 20 doesn't mean that I don't rate the book highly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maithanet Posted February 22, 2010 Share Posted February 22, 2010 I don't think it's because people don't consider it genre. You may be right in saying that not enough of the people who voted here have read it though.I really liked The Road but there are simply other books that I have liked better over the years and which are dearer to my heart. If I had a top 100/top 50 books list I'm sure it would be in there somewhere. Just because I didn't include it in my own top 20 doesn't mean that I don't rate the book highly.I don't think we need to make excuses for individual books. Not enough people voted for The Road, for whatever reason. I was surprised by this, because I had thought the book sufficiently popular to get on such a list. But apparently I was mistaken. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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