Books of the Century by Le Monde | Hacker News Reader

Books of the Century by Le Monde

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147 pointszlu80 comments

> 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

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.

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.

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.

Ulysses is not enjoyable.

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.

> 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.

Don Quixote is #1

everyone else is in alphabetical order

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.

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

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.

1984 is 22 on the list.

Upps. Searching for 1984 didn't turn it up.

1984 is N°22 on that list...

James Joyce wearing his bottle bottom glasses (thick glasses) would like to have a word with you. You can call him genius, dirty, knowledgeable in many languages but certainly not gibberish. He used to hold long book club style readings of his books among the prominent literateur in his times to exactly impinge in their minds that what he writes is clever and not gibberish. In our book club we often discuss for hours what he was trying to say on a page. Sometimes he says things in 3 different dimensions by writing a single sentence.

Are you sure you are not just reinforcing my point? :)

Yep.

> He used to hold long book club style readings of his books among the prominent literateur in his times to exactly impinge in their minds that what he writes is clever and not gibberish.

My was so clever, that he had to verbally harangue people into finding his writing clever.

Woolf had his number, she was right on every count.

Ulysses was first published in Paris during the 20 years that Joyce lived there.

>I thought only the US ranks it high

Joyce never even set foot in the United States... You could say this about The Great Gatsby, which US sources might rank in the top 5 compared to 46 in this list.

Right, Great Gatsby is another book one could highlight, where it's surprising that it is on the (french) list, while it would be on an US list. But I haven't read it, I do not know whether it is a good example for the difference between a good or important book and a memorable one.

1984 is listed at number 22 under its actual title, written out.

Ulysses was written in Paris, where James Joyce lived, and was published in Paris by the now legendary Shakespeare & Co. The US and UK banned it for being obscene.

When I don't know, I ask and don't judge (and lacking omniscience, I don't judge anyway).

It's completely irrelevant where it was written, where it was published and where it was banned, I'm talking about how it is seen today. It is possible I am getting this wrong -certainly possible, since I'm taking this impression from English speaking sites like this, that I attribute to the US what should be attributed to England -, but I have seen no argument so far that even strives the point I made.

What is your question? If you just want to know why Ulysses is seen as influential you can start with the wikipedia article. If you want to try again to read it you can try to read it with a guide of some kind, there are multiple, I used this one https://www.ulyssesguide.com/1-telemachus.

No question. It's completely against my being to consider something as good if it can't be enjoyed without a guide. I hated the tendency in computer science to hide simple definitions behind jargon. I'm okay with stuff having hidden meaning, with texts being interpretable, I'm not okay with it just being gibberish when not studying it in closest detail.

I'm aware that some think this book is influential, I'm not clear on how widespread that belief is. Also, whether regular readers really like it. And no, Wikipedia does not clear that up.

Since you have no question I won't venture to answer. :D

Of course it's relevant to how it's seen today. French culture nurtured the author, a French publisher published it, and France didn't ban it while other countries did. This is all evidence that the book was well-liked in France when it was published, and there's no reason to think that would change over time.

If anything, it's surprising that English-speaking countries like it so much.

I disagree, those aren't relevant factors. Just based on those facts it's possible there was one sponsor in France who published the book and then it bombed, never to be read by a significant amount of the public. That it wasn't banned is normal in a free society, but also says nothing about its popularity.

Anything is possible, but the facts make some things more likely, especially combined with the book's later popularity in France.

> most influential

> "what stuck in your mind"

That's strongly correlated IMHO; and I don't really see any objective metric for the influence of a book anyway.

If you found Ulysses confusing, what would you think of Finnegan's Wake? Ulysses is practically a children's book in comparison. As for the lack of 1984, Orwell was an important author sure, but not particularly a good one. People read 1984 and Animal Farm for the messages, not for the exquisite prose that someone like Joyce can manage.

Sorry, I haven't tried to read that one. If it's even more, hm, abstract?, then I won't ever try.

Note that 1984 is listed, just as "Nineteen Eighty-Four". I missed it when searching, didn't think of searching for "Orwell" instead.

I'd disagree with you about its quality, I remember it fondly (well, as much as possible given the topic of having one's identity erased), it was a powerful experience - and I do remember it vividly, so when asked for books one remembers I'd absolutely mention it, and in a list of books of the century it does belong.

Joyce "prose" on the other hand did nothing for me but make me despise his book.

If you want a shot at liking Joyce try "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

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”

That makes it sound like 50 shades of grey would have had a 50/50 chance of getting into the top 100 if it only was included in the wider selection

If the question is "which book stuck in your mind" maybe it would've had a good chance to be listed as #1?

Obviously 50/50 if random. But even if not random, I estimate 50 Shades would be 500-100,000 times more likely to be a book of the century using a list of 200 with it in it, vs an unaided open ended survey.

It’s a shortlist that is ranked by a committee, just like how the Oscar’s have nominees and winners.

Or put another way “Every book surveyed” does a lot of heavy lifting here.

> 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?

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...

40 is Mann’s Magic Mountain.

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

Yes, I saw that, Der Zauberberg is the german title.

> Le petit prince I wouldn't have wanted on the list, I know it's popular and french

It is very popular and a huge influence. I am not surprised (but then I am French and always found St-Exupéry fascinating).

> Ulysses, as mentioned below, surprised me as I thought it's only popular in some countries

Me too, to be honest. Quite a few English-speaking authors are maybe unexpectedly quite popular (Hemingway and Fitzgerald are there, and I think it is deserved; Dickens and Mark Twain should have been), but I would not think about Ulysses.

> The Hound of the Baskervilles is important and well known and everything, but does it really held up when you read it today

Crime is an important genre and Sherlock Holmes is quite popular (even though I would personally put something by Maurice Leblanc or Agatha Christie instead).

> Stephenson's Snow Crash is missing, maybe replaceable with Neuromancer to have something of that genre.

Sci-fi is underrepresented. I would put Neuromancer definitely, and at least something by Jules Verne. I cannot believe 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas did not make the cut.

Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll have a closer look at the books you mention I don’t already know :)

> Sci-fi is underrepresented

That's because "from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists"

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

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...

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?

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

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.

Salman Rushdie is alive and still writing.

(Author of Midnight’s children)

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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

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.

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.

I write him down as American because that's his elective nation, although he's quintessentially European.

After all you might not chose where you live, but how you live and where you die can be up to you. And as far as I can I try to respect what people chose for themselves.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

> 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.

Nice.

But very Eurocentric.

Where are Kalidas , Mahfouz , Soyinka or the Mahabharata?

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.

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.

Infinite Jest?

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.

pretty french heavy that list.

well, it is a french newspaper surveying french people

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