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.
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.
> 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;”
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?"
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?
> 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?
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]
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
everyone else is in alphabetical order
Makes more sense like that.
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?
> 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?
I'm not sure I saw any living authors there. I see no reason why copyright should extend beyond the lifetime of the author.
1. https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100?ref=PRHDCE40587....
2. https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novel...
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.
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.
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.
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf
what wonderful surprises, i thought these amazing books were forgotten and lost
> 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.
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.But very Eurocentric.
Where are Kalidas , Mahfouz , Soyinka or the Mahabharata?