First time I've read more than three books lol so I'll vote.
Very hard between Karamazov, Lady and The Posthomous Memoirs Of Brás Cubas (which has a brand new translation in English btw) (also read Washington and Treasure Island). Might go for Bras Cubas.
Quite like to read Pinocchio and A Rebours. Is The Shooting Party good? Lol I didn't know of its existence!
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 9 June 2020 11:20 (three years ago) link
Good bit on the friendship and mutual admiration of Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson in the last LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/andrew-o-hagan/bournemout
― neith moon (ledge), Tuesday, 9 June 2020 11:26 (three years ago) link
Lol I didn't know of its existence!
Me neither! :-o
― Heavy Messages (jed_), Tuesday, 9 June 2020 11:47 (three years ago) link
For some reason in my head reading that LRB piece I thought of Henry James as a young acolyte that RLS adopted while nearing death, surprised to find out Stevenson was actually the younger man.
Went for Brás Cuba as well.
― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 9 June 2020 12:46 (three years ago) link
Not five years I'm all that aquainted with
― abcfsk, Wednesday, 10 June 2020 16:41 (three years ago) link
Adult me says À rebours but reading The Brothers Karamazov was a transformative turning point for me as a teen, so it gets my vote.
― pomenitul, Wednesday, 10 June 2020 16:44 (three years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.
― System, Saturday, 13 June 2020 00:01 (three years ago) link
Not many Twain stans showing up here, maybe because he refused to paper over all the racism and ignorance of the characters in Huck Finn and it is not properly uplifting or moralistic. Instead, it's amazingly grim stuff, lightly told. The fact that it, like Gulliver's Travels, often gets mistakenly categorized as a children's book is one of the weirdest ironies in the history of literature. Twain and Swift each use the adventures of an innocent main character as a cover to flay humanity and nail its hide to the wall. America is written deeply into The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and it still describes us, while most Americans are still too blind to see what's up in that book.
― A is for (Aimless), Saturday, 13 June 2020 01:02 (three years ago) link
The fact that it's often coupled with Tom Saywer probably doesn't help either.
― Daniel_Rf, Saturday, 13 June 2020 11:08 (three years ago) link
it’s been 140 years and there still hasn’t been a book like huckleberry finn. twain perfectly captured the cognitive dissonance that permeates american society, the twisted morality one must develop to believe our way of life is just and godly.
― ACABincalifornia (voodoo chili), Saturday, 13 June 2020 11:45 (three years ago) link
I love Huckleberry Finn.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 13 June 2020 12:33 (three years ago) link
"Not many Twain stans showing up here, maybe because he refused to paper over all the racism and ignorance of the characters in Huck Finn and it is not properly uplifting or moralistic."
Doubt Twain will be 'cancelled' anytime soon...
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 13 June 2020 13:56 (three years ago) link
Struggling to think of any canonical works about racism that ARE "uplifting or moralistic", tbh. That does feel like a bit of a strawman argument.
― Daniel_Rf, Saturday, 13 June 2020 16:49 (three years ago) link
Concerned library patrons have been trying to cancel Twain for a while:https://www.thoughtco.com/why-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn-banned-740145
ILB icon Ernest Hemingway:
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. It's the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
It's not all that, but I voted for it.
― Brad C., Saturday, 13 June 2020 17:04 (three years ago) link
That Hemingway quote is still around because he was an ex-newspaperman and knew how to be quotable. His general sentiment is somewhere in the vicinity of being right, even though his judgment, as expressed, is obviously wrong.
― A is for (Aimless), Saturday, 13 June 2020 17:44 (three years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.
― System, Sunday, 14 June 2020 00:01 (three years ago) link
My fellow Twain stans arrived!
― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 14 June 2020 01:51 (three years ago) link
See told you Twain wasn't cancelled.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 14 June 2020 09:47 (three years ago) link
Always extra interested in the votes for books I hadn't heard of so would be interested in the thoughts of the Giovanni Verga voter.
― Daniel_Rf, Sunday, 14 June 2020 10:23 (three years ago) link
Couldn't vote, at least 10 masterpieces on this list.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Wednesday, 17 June 2020 00:28 (three years ago) link