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Ultimate Best Books

List: 100 Best Novels by Modern Library

Lolita

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

4.14 (36)

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth.

#32
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17,053
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Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake

James Joyce

3.25 (4)

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

#256
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2,364
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Under the Volcano

Under the Volcano

Malcolm Lowry

4.2 (5)

Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus.

#289
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1,970
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To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

3.43 (14)

"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added.

#118
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6,911
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Invisible Man

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

4.31 (16)

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me."

#76
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10,135
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The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

3.48 (23)

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.

#65
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11,280
POINTS
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The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

3.95 (97)

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

#1
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45,173
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The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors

Henry James

4.0 (4)

Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted.

#283
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2,023
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Women in Love

Women in Love

D. H. Lawrence

2.8 (5)

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds.

#184
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4,129
POINTS
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Pale Fire

Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov

4.0 (6)

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.<i>Pale Fire</i>, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A.

#276
RANK
2,097
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0 votes on this list