aListofBooks

Ultimate Best Books

List: The Novel 100 by Daniel S. Bert

The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

3.53 (19)

A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

#26
RANK
20,944
POINTS
0 votes on this list
Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev

3.67 (3)

"Well, Piotr, not in sight yet?" was the question asked on May the 20th, 1859, by a gentleman of a little over forty, in a dusty coat and checked trousers, who came out without his hat on to the low steps of the posting station at S-.

#337
RANK
1,647
POINTS
0 votes on this list
Nostromo

Nostromo

Joseph Conrad

3.67 (6)

In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco—the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.

#340
RANK
1,609
POINTS
0 votes on this list
Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady

Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady

Samuel Richardson

4.0 (4)

I am extremely concerned, my dearest friend, for the disturbances that have happened in your family.

#312
RANK
1,804
POINTS
0 votes on this list
Dream of the Red Chamber

Dream of the Red Chamber

Tsao Hsueh-Chin

5.0 (1)

When the Goddess Nugua undertook to repair the Dome of Heaven, she fashioned at the Great Mythical Mountain under the Nonesuch Bluff 36,501 pieces of stone, each 120 feet high and 240 feet around. (Part 1 - Chapter One)

#511
RANK
569
POINTS
0 votes on this list
The Trial

The Trial

Franz Kafka

3.7 (10)

Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.

#114
RANK
7,223
POINTS
0 votes on this list
Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

4.17 (35)

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

#17
RANK
24,100
POINTS
0 votes on this list
The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage

Stephen Crane

4.0 (7)

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

#108
RANK
7,689
POINTS
0 votes on this list
Petersburg

Petersburg

Andrei Bely

3.0 (2)

Your Excellencies, Your Lordships, Your Honors, Citizens!

#570
RANK
370
POINTS
0 votes on this list
Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

4.08 (12)

Okonkwo was well-known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat.

#86
RANK
9,513
POINTS
0 votes on this list