Books of the Century by Le Monde

https://standardebooks.org/collections/le-mondes-100-books-of-the-century

by zlu • 4 months ago

147 80 4 months ago

onli12• 4 months ago

What a strange list. Many books I'd never expect to be listed, others I'd expect to be listed are missing. So I looked up the background and indeed it's based on strange methodology, citing wikipedia: "Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists, 17,000 French participants responded to the question, "Which books have stuck in your mind?" (Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?"

Makes more sense like that.

jdsnape• 4 months ago

Out of interest, why does that seem a strange methodology?

onli12• 4 months ago

When reading "Books of the Century" I expected a list of the most important, most influential or just best books. Skewed towards the french perspective, given Le Monde as a source. But this was never the goal, just a "what stuck in your mind" question.

For example, 1984 is missing, and Louis Begley Wartime Lies. And I wouldn't have expected Ulysses in there given the french source, for me it was incomprehensible gibberish and I thought only the US ranks it high. But that gibberishness makes it certainly memorable, so given the question it fits.

hammock2• 4 months ago

Starting with only 200 titles in the survey, for a final list of 100, seems off to me for starters. Every book surveyed has a 50% chance of making “book of the century”

kergonath2• 4 months ago

Many books I'd never expect to be listed, others I'd expect to be listed are missing

Most of them make sense to me. I don’t know some of them but then I don’t know everything. The methodology can be discussed (and indeed, a pre-selection of 200 books is at the same time a lot and not that much), but none of these lists can be perfect.

Out of curiosity, which one would you remove from the list, and which ones would you add?

onli12• 4 months ago

Hm, you are right. Those lists can't be perfect and giving this a second look, I guess my comment was hasty. For the choices I thought weird I can mostly see the justification when researching the titles a bit more (and partly by checking for their names in my language -> properly identifying them).

For what it's worth and what mostly triggered my comment, I expected 1984 to be on the list but thought it missing, but as mentioned in the other comments I was wrong about that, it's just listed with the numbers written out. Le petit prince I wouldn't have wanted on the list, I know it's popular and french, but I never got the appeal. Ulysses, as mentioned below, surprised me as I thought it's only popular in some countries, and regardless of that I think its just not readable. I would kick out two of the Lord of the ring books, one is enough and it's not like each of them had a different impact.

Maybe even more subjective, The Hound of the Baskervilles is important and well known and everything, but does it really held up when you read it today? If not, which would be my opinion, should it be on the list regardless? And I'd consider replacing Thomas Mann Zauberberg with Tod in Venedig, just because I liked it a lot.

For missing books: Louis Begley is an author I felt to be missing, probably with Wartime lies, or About Schmidt. The first Harry Potter as well, but I understand that in 1999 it was too early for that judgement. Stephenson's Snow Crash is missing, maybe replaceable with Neuromancer to have something of that genre. Talking german literature with Thomas Mann above, Alfred Andersch Die Rote would have a place on my personal list, as well as Die Wand by Marlen Haushofer. Haruki Murakami is missing, though maybe with 1Q84 he better fits into a list of the current century. Stephen King? Paul Auster? Philip Roth? Though maybe that would be for The Human Stain, and that's from 2000.

As an aside, I was happily surprised to see The Master and Margarita on the list. It's one of the more known books that I thought had a very special charm, but not one I'd expect to see working on many, as one would have to have read Goethe's Faust and liked it...

keiferski3• 4 months ago

How is this strange? It’s pretty much what I’d expect from francophone readers. What were you expecting?

linehedonist• 4 months ago

For a French-leaning list I’m surprised not to see Memoirs of Hadrian, “often considered the best French novel of the 20th century”, per the recent LRB review. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n10/joanna-biggs/beneath...

idoubtit2• 4 months ago

I agree, though the list contains "L'œuvre au noir", another wonderful novel by Marguerite Yourcenar.

I think some of the books on this list had very few readers, but were selected because of their relative fame among a list of 200 books. For instance, how many people have read the full "Gulag archipelago"? Or writings by Lacan or Barthes? Or the "Journal" by Jules Renard?

pcasca• 4 months ago

Infinite Jest?

orwin• 4 months ago

I don't think I would place all of them in any 'top' list, but all the books I have read, ~60%, are great read. Weird list though.

haunter• 4 months ago

This should have an 1999 in the title even if the site and ebooks published are newer

lovegrenoble• 4 months ago

More clean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde%27s_100_Books_of_the_...

rixed• 4 months ago

I find this other list more deserving of this title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokklubben_World_Library

If only because it's less french oriented, but also maybe because it starts with one of my favorite.

idoubtit2• 4 months ago

I find this other list more deserving of this title

How is a list spanning over the last 40 centuries deserving of the tile "Books of the Century by Le Monde"? Why would the "Epic of Gilgamesh" or the "Book of Job" be on a list of 20th century books?

... it starts with one of my favorite.

From that same Wikipedia page: “The books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way;”

The list is sorted by authors' name.

Rant423• 4 months ago

Don Quixote is #1

everyone else is in alphabetical order

keiferski3• 4 months ago

What would be interesting is to cross reference this list with an Anglophone one and pull out the writers that are big in France but almost unknown amongst the public in America. Céline is definitely one such example, I think.

specproc• 4 months ago

The sad thing is how many aren't available.

I'm not sure I saw any living authors there. I see no reason why copyright should extend beyond the lifetime of the author.

schaefer• 4 months ago

Salman Rushdie is alive and still writing.

(Author of Midnight’s children)

aidenn02• 4 months ago

I personally think that the lifetime of the author is a bit odd, since it reduces the rewards towards those who are old or infirm. I agree the length is way too long though.

Remember that Disney was a major factor in lobbying for the longer copyright terms, and their 1959 film Sleeping Beauty was made 80 years after Tchaikovsky's ballet (a major source for the Film's soundtrack).

If we thus take 79 years as our measuring stick (And I still think that's a bit too long) 18 more books from the list would be in the public domain.

  Maybe if we take 25 as a typical beginning of career and 80 as a typical date of death for someone who lives to 25 we could settle on 55 years?  That would leave only 13 items on the list as still under copyright, and I believe that includes all works by living authors too.

raffael_de• 4 months ago

pretty french heavy that list.

throwforfeds3• 4 months ago

well, it is a french newspaper surveying french people

BiraIgnacio• 4 months ago

I'm happy to see so many philosophy or philosophy-adjacent books on that list. And I also wonder why that is.

throwforfeds3• 4 months ago

The Stranger at #1 sort of tells me everything I need to know about the list. It's a fine book, and I ended up liking it a lot more when I went back and re-read it in French many years later, but #1 of the 20th century. Yeah, not even close.

I know this is primarily a Francophone list, but not having Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy or so many of the great Latin American authors on it makes me wonder how much makes it into French via translation.

zwaps• 4 months ago

Honestly, American lists are the same. Every decent English speaking author, plus some selections of other languages.

Any national worlds book list, and this explicitly includes US and UK lists, are heavily skewed and I mean ridiculously so

lo_zamoyski• 4 months ago

This is one of the criticisms[0] of at least some Great Books curricula. The skew tends too strongly towards the Anglo-American and the “canon” is too rigidly held.

[0] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2023/05/great-books-e...

throwforfeds3• 4 months ago

Oh for sure, agreed. These lists do well to drive traffic and sell things, but I never put much weight in them.

Bayart3• 4 months ago

Cormac McCarthy is decently translated (for having read him in both English and French) and is well known. But for the average French litterati, American literature harks back to Hemingway, Steinbeck, Salinger, Burroughs, Capote, Nabokov and so on much before McCarthy. Toni Morrison isn't well known here yet, if only because her writing is embedded with Afro-American reality which is off-phase with Europe culture. For the same reason you'd hardly hear about Ralph Ellison in France if you're not in circles aware of post-colonial African diaspora writing.

To the same token, French authors who make it across the Atlantic aren't always the most valued here.

mmooss3• 4 months ago

It's interesting Nabakov is thought of as American. Yes, an American citizen beginning age ~46 (in 1945) but born in Russia, wrote in multiple languages, lived much of life in Europe.

fmajid• 4 months ago

Yep, I had never heard of Derrida until I read a mention of him in an American Physics journal of all places.

LucasOe• 4 months ago

I know it's subjective, but personally I think Nausea by Sartre is the much better "The Stranger", and it always saddens me a bit to see Camus so high up on every list while missing Sartre.

yallpendantools• 4 months ago

Why are some numbers skipped? E.g., 58 [59 60] 61 [62] 63 64 65 66 67 68 [69] 70

bentley• 4 months ago

Standard Ebooks doesn’t produce graphic novels, so Asterix, Tintin, etc. are excluded. And although SE does produce collections of short works like essays and poetry, it does so in a way that doesn’t usually map one‐to‐one to existing published collections, which is probably why essays and poems have been excluded from this list.

jackconsidine• 4 months ago

Ulysses by Joyce => 264,258 words (16 hours 1 minute) with a reading ease of 74.9 (fairly easy)

Don't want to know what difficult is

acabal• 4 months ago

The reading ease algorithm we use is the Flesh-Kincaid algorithm, which works pretty well for regular prose books but clearly fails very badly on avant-garde prose like Ulysses or As I Lay Dying.

givemeethekeys• 4 months ago

Were these books easier to read when they were written?

If not then it's like being forced to untangle the mind of a twisted person. Finally a job for the LLM's that we can all be thankful for outsourcing.

sebastianz• 4 months ago

Using your mind to "untangle" is the whole point and pleasure of reading. Using llms to expand your understanding of it makes sense, but "Outsourcing" the reading not so much.

Bayart3• 4 months ago

It's a decent list of what readers in France think of as the books to read from the 20th c., in that it holds value. Including to myself, a French citizen with odd tastes.

The general debate on what's the objective list doesn't hold weight, and I'd rather see what each corner of the world values.

gausswho• 4 months ago

I'm surprised to see Brave New World amongst these. The idea it presents is indeed powerful and influential, but for such a smart guy it comes across stilted and craftless. Try reading it now and it just doesn't hold up to more nuanced fiction.

_ache_• 4 months ago

About IP. It's 70 years after the death of the author in France, so Camus (car crash in 1960) books will be PD in 2030. There is an exception for people who lost live from war (+30 years), so 2044 is the year the elevate to PD for "Le petit prince".

I don't understand that right is attached to local legislation. Like you will have access to these book before we do because of the local legislation of USA? That is a bit crazy.

GeoAtreides• 4 months ago

Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf

what wonderful surprises, i thought these amazing books were forgotten and lost

Ecco• 4 months ago

Kinda ironic that standardebooks.org refuses non-English books but will happily promote a French ranking... I mean none of those books are actually available on standardebooks.org - at least not in their original French version.

aidenn02• 4 months ago

Good to know that they don't have the original French version of Brave New World

wackget• 4 months ago

Kafka at number 3? Meh. It was incredibly dull and tiresome IMHO. I understand it's supposed to be written like a fever dream but to what end? It was simply tedious and difficult to follow.

Then again I also hated the episode of The Sopranos which has an extremely long dream sequence.

KnuthIsGod• 4 months ago

Nice.

But very Eurocentric.

Where are Kalidas , Mahfouz , Soyinka or the Mahabharata?

testrun• 4 months ago

This is a very interesting point. Is there a similar list in India, Japan, Korea or any other country? Will be interesting to compare them and see if some of those books on the other lists are translated.

harshreality• 4 months ago

Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists, 17,000 French participants responded to the question, "Which books have stuck in your mind?" (Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?) As Le Monde journalist Josyane Savigneau aptly clarified in her article, the list is not meant to encompass the 100 most distinguished French literary works of the 20th century, but rather to reflect the emotional connections of the French populace.[1]

Limiting the poll to 200 books (if I'm understanding it right... the cited le monde page is paywalled), selected by the elite French-literati, who then polled sub-elite French-literati, is a questionable basis for a list of "books of the century", even in France. Numbers of votes for each book would've been nice, to see how unanimous the top selections were.

8/100, in any language, are from the last third of the century (after 1967). Of those, 4 are well-known in North America (Styron, Eco, Rushdie, Solzhenitsyn). Of those, only two, Styron and Rushdie, are originally in English.

The most recent -en- works prior to those two were Kerouac in 1957 and then Nabokov and Tolkien in 1955.

    year: number (fr/en/other)
    1900s: 7  ( 1 /  4 /  2)
    1910s: 4  ( 3 /  0 /  1)
    1920s: 20 ( 8 /  7 /  5)
    1930s: 12 ( 6 /  5 /  1)
    1940s: 19 (10 /  4 /  5)
    1950s: 20 (13 /  6 /  1)
    1960s: 12 ( 7 /  0 /  5)
    1970s: 4  ( 1 /  1 /  2)
    1980s: 2  ( 0 /  1 /  1)
    totals:    49 / 28 / 23

Given the chronological bias, and few postwar -en- works probably due to distribution and translation challenges, it's pointless to mention all of the American and even British classics they left out from later in the 20th century. English-language books from the 80s and 90s, particularly science fiction, might have barely reached mainstream French consciousness in 1999.

ckmate-king-2• 4 months ago

Two other lists I know of address the same topic. Modern Library put together in 1999 a list of the 100 best novels and 100 best non-fiction books [1]. (The best novel was Ulysses.) Time Magazine published in 2005 a list of the best 100 English-language novels published since 1923. [2]

1. https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100?ref=PRHDCE40587....

2. https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novel...

Books of the Century by Le Monde

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