AMF Favorite Fictional Books 2020 Edition: The Results

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BleuPanda
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Re: AMF Favorite Fictional Books 2020 Edition: The Results

Post by BleuPanda »

Here's the full top 200 and the excel sheet:
#1. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (1949)
#2. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (1960)
#3. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
#4. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
#5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series - Douglas Adams (1979-1992)
#6. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (1945)
#7. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
#8. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace (1996)
#9. Animal Farm - George Orwell (1946)
#10. The Trial - Franz Kafka (1925)
#11. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
#12. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
#13. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury (1953)
#14. The Road - Cormac McCarthy (2006)
#15. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-1955)
#16. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
#17. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (1877)
#18. The Stranger - Albert Camus (1946)
#19. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (1931)
#20. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (1813)
#21. Watchmen - Alan Moore and David Gibbons (1986-1987)
#22. Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse (1922)
#23. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
#24. Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling (1997-2007)
#25. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (1601)
#26. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson (1971)
#27. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami (1994)
#28. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess (1962)
#29. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (1961)
#30. King Lear - William Shakespeare (1608)
#31. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (1831)
#32. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (1869)
#33. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (1884)
#34. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville (1851)
#35. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (1985)
#36. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (1939)
#37. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
#38. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey (1962)
#39. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (1937)
#40. Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare (1597)
#41. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner (1929)
#42. Neuromancer/Sprawl Trilogy - William Gibson (1984-1988)
#43. His Dark Materials Series - Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
#44. Discworld Series - Terry Pratchett (1983-2015)
#45. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (1847)
#46. A Song of Ice and Fire Series - George R.R. Martin (1996-???)
#47. Beloved - Toni Morrison (1987)
#48. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway (1926)
#49. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (2004)
#50. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (1861)
#51. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (1857)
#52. Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card (1980)
#53. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov (1966)
#54. Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West - Cormac McCarthy (1986)
#55. Ubik - Philip K. Dick (1969)
#56. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle (1887-1927)
#57. High Fidelity - Nick Hornby (1995)
#58. The Odyssey - Homer (-700)
#59. White Noise - Don DeLillo (1985)
#60. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (1964)
#61. Perfume - Patrick Süskind (1985)
#62. The Stand - Stephen King (1978)
#63. Dune - Frank Herbert (1965)
#64. Blindness - Jose Saramago (1998)
#65. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon (2003)
#66. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie (1926)
#67. And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie (1939)
#68. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (1859)
#69. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)
#70. The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka (1915)
#71. Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse (1927)
#72. Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee (1999)
#73. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino (1979)
#74. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson (1992)
#75. Ulysses - James Joyce (1922)
#76. Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry (1947)
#77. On the Road - Jack Kerouac (1957)
#78. Macbeth - William Shakespeare (1606)
#79. The Secret History - Donna Tartt (1992)
#80. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (1954)
#81. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
#82. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (1847)
#83. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera (1984)
#84. Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller (1949)
#85. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison (1952)
#86. Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (1891)
#87. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov (1962)
#88. New York Trilogy - Paul Auster (1987)
#89. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis (1991)
#90. Atonement - Ian McEwan (2002)
#91. Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth (1969)
#92. The Divine Comedy - Dante Aligheri (1472)
#93. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler (1939)
#94. Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1981)
#95. The Neverending Story - Michael Ende (1979)
#96. Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk (1996)
#97. The Shining - Stephen King (1977)
#98. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (1843)
#99. Labyrinths/Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges (1935)
#100. Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie (1934)
#101. The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe (1987)
#102. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick (1968)
#103. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (1963)
#104. The Plague - Albert Camus (1947)
#105. East of Eden - John Steinbeck (1952)
#106. Battle Royale - Koushun Takami (1999)
#107. Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1932)
#108. The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann (1924)
#109. The Crucible - Arthur Miller (1953)
#110. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
#111. Stoner - John Williams (1965)
#112. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (1927)
#113. American Gods - Neil Gaiman (2001)
#114. The Time Machine - H.G. Wells (1895)
#115. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle (1901)
#116. Rebecca - Daphne de Maurier (1938)
#117. Watership Down - Richard Adams (1972)
#118. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexander Dumas (1844)
#119. 2666 - Roberto Bolano (2004)
#120. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (1890)
#121. Exhalation - Ted Chiang (2019)
#122. Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang (2002)
#123. In the Penal Colony - Franz Kafka (1914)
#124. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky (1868)
#125. Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury (1957)
#126. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943)
#127. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - John le Carre (1974)
#128. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway (1952)
#129. The Call of the Wild - Jack London (1903)
#130. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen (2001)
#131. It - Stephen King (1986)
#132. The Elementary Particles - Michel Houellebecq (1998)
#133. Othello - William Shakespeare (1603)
#134. Journey to the Center of the Earth - Jules Verne (1864)
#135. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (1981)
#136. A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket (1999-2006)
#137. Circe - Madeline Miller (2018)
#138. Charlotte's Web - E.B. White (1952)
#139. Matilda - Roald Dahl (1988)
#140. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz (2007)
#141. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe (1958)
#142. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (1837)
#143. 11/22/63 - Stephen King (2011)
#144. The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton (1967)
#145. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (1899)
#146. A Canticle For Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr. (1961)
#147. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (2003)
#148. Misery - Stephen King (1987)
#149. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (1989)
#150. The Castle - Franz Kafka (1926)
#151. Millennium Series - Stieg Larsson (2005-2007)
#152. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig (1974)
#153. Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol (1842)
#154. Death in Venice - Thomas Mann (1912)
#155. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe - Edgar Allan Poe (1827-1849)
#156. The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende (1982)
#157. Sasameyuki/The Makioka Sisters - Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (1948)
#158. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner (1930)
#159. A Personal Matter - Kenzaburo Oe (1964)
#160. Sentimental Education - Gustave Flaubert (1869)
#161. Narcissus and Goldmund - Hermann Hesse (1930)
#162. Berlin Alexanderplatz - Alfred Doblin (1929)
#163. Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami (1987)
#164. The World According to Garp - John Irving (1978)
#165. The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde (1895)
#166. A Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka (1922)
#167. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (2001)
#168. The Brothers Lionheart - Astrid Lindgren (1973)
#169. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco (1980)
#170. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1985)
#171. The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing (1962)
#172. The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy (1994)
#173. Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton (1990)
#174. Faust - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1808)
#175. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis (1950-1956)
#176. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson (1881)
#177. Dracula - Bram Stoker (1897)
#178. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (1980)
#179. Remembrance of Earth's Past Series - Cixin Liu (2008-2010)
#180. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon (1966)
#181. Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann (1947)
#182. The Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare (1598)
#183. Mistborn series - Brandon Sanderson (2006-???)
#184. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (1868)
#185. Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family - Thomas Mann (1901)
#186. Nemesis - Philip Roth (2010)
#187. No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy (2005)
#188. Nostromo - Joseph Conrad (1904)
#189. Redwall Series - Brian Jacques (1986-2011)
#190. The Good Soldier Svejk - Jaroslav Hasek (1923)
#191. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - John le Carre (1963)
#192. The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison (1970)
#193. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962)
#194. Therese Raquin - Emile Zola (1867)
#195. Gargantua and Pantagruel - Francois Rabelais (1532)
#196. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway (1940)
#197. Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov (1859)
#198. Ringworld - Larry Niven (1970)
#199. A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams (1947)
#200. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (1865)
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ordinaryperson
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Re: AMF Favorite Fictional Books 2020 Edition: The Results

Post by ordinaryperson »

Good job on the roll out BleuPanda. It seems my suggestion of a book club in the guessing thread went over well. I had already assumed that 1984 would top the poll so I already had a schedule in mind. It goes like this:

Week 1: Part 1: Chapters 1-7
Week 2: Part 1: Chapter 8-Part 2: Chapter 6
Week 3: Part 2: Chapter 7-Part 3: Chapter 1
Week 4: Part 3: Chapter 2-End

I wanted to do the schedule in way for one book a month (although larger books such as The Brothers Karamazov this would have to change). Going from my copy of 1984, each week would be ~70 pages, this might be too much for some people and I just want some feedback on my idea for the schedule.
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BleuPanda
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Re: AMF Favorite Fictional Books 2020 Edition: The Results

Post by BleuPanda »

I read both of our top two books in the same high school class...

My top 10 need to read:
17. Anna Karenina
22. Siddhartha
26. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
28. A Clockwork Orange
32. War and Peace
48. The Sun Also Rises
51. Madame Bovary
52. Ender's Game
56. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (I've read a very small handful)
57. High Fidelity

I'm actually surprised I've read so much of the top. It's weird that one of those above is a YA(?) sci-fi novel considering my interests, but I also have never felt particularly inclined to engage with Orson Scott Card.
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Re: AMF Favorite Fictional Books 2020 Edition: The Results

Post by Nick »

BleuPanda wrote: Mon Sep 07, 2020 5:10 pm
I'm actually surprised I've read so much of the top. It's weird that one of those above is a YA(?) sci-fi novel considering my interests, but I also have never felt particularly inclined to engage with Orson Scott Card.
Orson Scott Card the person kinda sucks, but Orson Scott Card the writer is solid. If YA sci-fi is up your alley I'd say give Ender's Game a shot.
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Re: AMF Favorite Fictional Books 2020 Edition: The Results

Post by BleuPanda »

ordinaryperson wrote: Mon Sep 07, 2020 5:07 pm Good job on the roll out BleuPanda. It seems my suggestion of a book club in the guessing thread went over well. I had already assumed that 1984 would top the poll so I already had a schedule in mind. It goes like this:

Week 1: Part 1: Chapters 1-7
Week 2: Part 1: Chapter 8-Part 2: Chapter 6
Week 3: Part 2: Chapter 7-Part 3: Chapter 1
Week 4: Part 3: Chapter 2-End

I wanted to do the schedule in way for one book a month (although larger books such as The Brothers Karamazov this would have to change). Going from my copy of 1984, each week would be ~70 pages, this might be too much for some people and I just want some feedback on my idea for the schedule.

While I would like to do a book club and use this list as a guideline, I would prefer we do something other than 1-200 or 200-1 in order; perhaps have those participating nominate the next book from the list and then have everyone vote? At least for me, the main appeal of a book club is to read something new while having the opportunity to discuss with others experiencing it for the first time. I feel like almost everyone here has already read 1984, so I don't know what would be gained by the context of a book club discussion - additionally, do we really need to highlight this book even more? I'd be more interested in reading the works that got a small handful of enthusiastic votes, those loved by the few who have read them.
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Re: AMF Favorite Fictional Books 2020 Edition: The Results

Post by styrofoamboots »

Thanks for running the poll, BleuPanda!
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Listyguy
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Re: AMF Favorite Fictional Books 2020 Edition: The Results

Post by Listyguy »

Thanks for running this poll, Bleu! It's interesting to compare these results to those from three years ago.


I'm also pretty surprised to see Infinite Jest in the top 10. Not because it's undeserving (I enjoyed it a lot), but because I'm surprised enough of us have read that 1000 page monster for it to place that high.
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Re: AMF Favorite Fictional Books 2020 Edition: The Results

Post by ordinaryperson »

BleuPanda wrote: Mon Sep 07, 2020 5:41 pm
ordinaryperson wrote: Mon Sep 07, 2020 5:07 pm Good job on the roll out BleuPanda. It seems my suggestion of a book club in the guessing thread went over well. I had already assumed that 1984 would top the poll so I already had a schedule in mind. It goes like this:

Week 1: Part 1: Chapters 1-7
Week 2: Part 1: Chapter 8-Part 2: Chapter 6
Week 3: Part 2: Chapter 7-Part 3: Chapter 1
Week 4: Part 3: Chapter 2-End

I wanted to do the schedule in way for one book a month (although larger books such as The Brothers Karamazov this would have to change). Going from my copy of 1984, each week would be ~70 pages, this might be too much for some people and I just want some feedback on my idea for the schedule.

While I would like to do a book club and use this list as a guideline, I would prefer we do something other than 1-200 or 200-1 in order; perhaps have those participating nominate the next book from the list and then have everyone vote? At least for me, the main appeal of a book club is to read something new while having the opportunity to discuss with others experiencing it for the first time. I feel like almost everyone here has already read 1984, so I don't know what would be gained by the context of a book club discussion - additionally, do we really need to highlight this book even more? I'd be more interested in reading the works that got a small handful of enthusiastic votes, those loved by the few who have read them.
I would be fine with the voting, but I'm not sure if there will be enough participants for voting. Would it be a better idea if I created a list using a list randomizer and going down that list? I'll add the 69 other books that received more than one vote to the list so we'll get to highlight some lesser known books. I don't want to leave out some of the classics as some of us may not have read them.
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Re: AMF Favorite Fictional Books 2020 Edition: The Results

Post by DaveC »

Thanks BleuPanda

If I've seen the film or play, I tend to be less motivated to read the book, so the highest ranked books I haven't read are:-

2. Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
9. George Orwell - Animal Farm
14. Cormac McCarthy - The Road
18. Albert Camus - The Stranger
25. William Shakespeare - Hamlet
26. Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
30. William Shakespeare - King Lear
31. Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
33. Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
34. Herman Melville - Moby-Dick

Of these, The Road and Moby-Dick are the novels I feel most motivated to read. For a book club, I might pass on re-reading a book I have already read twice (e.g. 1984, LotR, Ender's Game, and a few others), but otherwise I like the general idea.

I have read those three novels by William Gibson but had no idea until now that they are regarded as a trilogy. They weren't when I read them. Meanwhile we still wait for The Telegony (#3 Epic Cycle).
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Re: AMF Favorite Fictional Books 2020 Edition: The Results

Post by antonius »

Thanks for running this poll BluePanda. Love the book covers.
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