Don't want to know what difficult is
If only because it's less french oriented, but also maybe because it starts with one of my favorite.
Makes more sense like that.
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?
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.
>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.
> 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.
> "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.
When I don't know, I ask and don't judge (and lacking omniscience, I don't judge anyway).
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.
Any national worlds book list, and this explicitly includes US and UK lists, are heavily skewed and I mean ridiculously so
[0] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2023/05/great-books-e...
I'm not sure I saw any living authors there. I see no reason why copyright should extend beyond the lifetime of the author.