How much of 'Great Literature' have you read?

White middle class men have good taste.

i'm surprised you don't have mark twain on that list.

Or more than a handful of non-Anglo Saxon writers.

a little Cervantes would certainly spice it up a little.

burntpunk, bare in mind that one mans meat is another mans poison.

The women writers you listed are,

Jane Austen
Judy Blume
Emily Bronte
Danielle Steele
Virginia Woolf

Why are there so few women? And why does Danielle Steele make the list, but Flannery O'Connor doesn't?

Some female writers to check out:

Kathy Acker
Ayn Rand
AM Homes
Elizabeth Bowen
Gertrude Stein

What about Sylvia Plath? As a matter of fact, where are the poets? Walt Whitman?

i red the bibbel.

William Faulkner (garb)
Scott F. Fitzgerald (grossly overrated)
Ernest Hemingway
Harper Lee
Stephen King
George Orwell
Edgar Allan Poe
Thomas Pynchon (different...but good)
J.D Salinger
William Shakespeare (grossly overrated)
John Steinbeck
Leo Tolstoy
Kurt Vonnegut

And great illustrated classics versions of these gents:

H.G Wells
Bram Stoker

Why was John Grisham on the list? His books may be good, but that's the first time I've heard them classified as literature. Granted, he gave us this:

Jackie Collins

since when was Dan Koontz great literature?

and how the fuck did Clive Cussler and John Grisham get on that list?

i think its coont

JUSTIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They said Judy Bloom!!!!!!!!!!!!!

eww!

I was gonna say. Dean Koontz? Really? I dont think he's even in the literatture section of B&N.

and another good female writer is Kathe Koja

I kind of got on a "great literature" kick a few months back and downloaded a shit ton of e-books and audio books. But I cant do the audio books. I think theres a grand total of 5 gigs of literature on my computer. None on my bookshelves though.

It's definitely a strange list.
And i only read great literature. Even if no one knows they're great.

Danielle Steele? Clive Cussler? Come on.

Yeah, your list is bereft of lady-writers. What about:

Amy Tan
Isabel Allende
Mary Shelley
Elizabeth Barret Browning
Sylvia Plath
Anne Frank
Murasaki Shikibu
Charlotte Bronte
Margaret Mitchell
Toni Morrison
Elizabeth Berg
Alice Sebold
Carson McCullers
Alice Walker
Zora Neale Hurston

...and that's just the stuff I came up with off the top of my head. If you're going to put in shittrash like Danielle Steele, please don't forget that there are actual women writers of consequence.

I don't think it's making fun to opine that some of the inclusions are just not authors of.."great" literature.

He's a strange taste, that's for certain.
Female writers, though, i don't know many or read many. That doesn't bother me. Most of the well known ones i find completely wretched. Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and others like them, i just can't be bothered.
Virginia Woolf though, i could read her for the rest of my days with a smile on my face. Amy Hempel, too.

YOU'RE wretched!

ditto amy hempel.

dammit. sersly.

bowel movement.

I cannot understand the whole Amy Hempel fuss. She's like Margaret Atwood, but crappier and out of print.

Oh, yeah...I um, forgot that I saw that part....

(still, though, Danielle Steele? meh)

Then what's the point of this thread, if not to make fun of the original post? What's the point of ANY thread?!

I think Jane has something there.
And Amy Hempel is great. You're just being hootie and contrary.
The more i look at his list, the more i wonder if he's actually read all these people. I mean, he has some great names up there, but when you put them next to someone like Steele, is makes no sense. How does on man make the transition from Melville and Marquez to Dean Koontz and consider them close to equal?

all these writers that we consider shouldn't be on the list are productive writers in the sense that they churn out books at an incredible rate and are very bankable. what is the reason for their success?

i'm not being snarky or anything but i really want to know if they've never produced at least one good book. i've never read any of koontz and steele to judge and i don't want to be a literary snob (i like angels & demons for what it is) but surely they produced one book that's readable and can be considered "literature"?

This is apropos of nothing, but I giggle every time I see the name Ian McEwan.

Also, yes. I re-read the OP and I still don't really get this thread. Are we supposed to discuss how much we like classics? Half the stuff on this list, regardless of quality, aren't even classic, like Cormac McCarthy. Personally I prefer classic literature to pretty much everything, especially 18th and 19th century English and French lit. Which there is very little of on this list. There's more than just Hugo and Austen, you know. What about Thomas Hardy? W. Somerset Maughn? Baudelaire? Charlotte Bronte? Guy de Maupassant? Fucking Dumas? I punch your list in the face.

They are to the literary world what Transformers was to the film world.
I mean, blockbuster films bust blocks, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're good. Entertaining maybe, but not a work that's aimed at art.

And now i look all snobbish.

Also, Guy de Maupassant has the greatest sounding name of any author.

unless people pronounce guy as "guy".

so no then on any noteworthy books from "pop" authors?

I'd consider Stephen King a 'pop' author, and i'm sure a lot of people here would say that he's great.
I'll say that the Harry Potter series is a noteworthy 'pop' series. Starts low, i think, but really finishes with some gusto.

I think that for something to really be considered "classic" literature, it has to be vindicated by at least 30 years of sustained reading and critique, give or take. I can't really seriously consider anything newer than about 1975.

but there are books considered "classic" just by the virtue of their age, not necessarily by how engaging the book is.

Was the original list supposed to be just classics?
All this talk of lists is making me itch. I'm three itches away from making my own list.

Wouldn't logic dictate that a book would have to be somewhat engaging to sustain popularity for dozens or hundreds of years? I still find Jane Austen to be entertaining and often universal, although she was writing around 200 years ago.

I think a lot of books get reputations undeservedly. Especially a lot of classics.

not necessarily.

sometimes i think that the notion of a book being a 'classic' is dictated whether it's required reading in schools or not, and that's where the perpetuation actually lies. some of them are great, like harper lee's mockingbird and most all vonnegut's books but some of them, i really couldn't care less.

and that's where subjectivity kicks in, i guess. i disagree with some of what's considered 'classic' these days just because everybody says it is.

But why would books be taught to us in school unless they had some sort of merit? Is there some sort of committee of sadists picking out all the required literature?

Yes, we call them english professors.
Really though, i do think classics are dictated by what teachers choose to teach. I'm sure Chuck Palahniuk's books will eventually seep into college curriculum as his fans--people around our age--become the people in charge of these things. You teach what you love, and maybe what you love is shit, but you've taught it now which gives it a sense, possibly undeserved, that it's good literature.

EDIT: This was in reference to Jane's post which i should've quoted.