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Ultimate Best Books

All :: Novels

    Tender is the Night

    Tender is the Night

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    4.13 (8)

    The hotel and its bright, tan prayer rug of a beach were one.On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. [Sentence one, p. 3, of Scribner edition]

    #164
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    #384
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    The War of the Worlds

    The War of the Worlds

    H. G. Wells

    3.67 (9)

    No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

    #94
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    A Suitable Boy

    A Suitable Boy

    Vikram Seth

    4.5 (2)

    'You too will marry a boy I choose' said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter.

    #307
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    Possession

    Possession

    A.S. Byatt

    3.67 (6)

    The book was thick and black and covered with dust.

    #247
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    2,618
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    A Confederacy of Dunces

    A Confederacy of Dunces

    John Kennedy Toole

    4.0 (4)

    A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs.Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel-which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first-is to tell of my first encounter with it. (Foreword)

    #179
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    4,189
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    The Bell Jar

    The Bell Jar

    Sylvia Plath

    4.0 (8)

    It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

    #81
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    Waiting for Godot

    Waiting for Godot

    Samuel Beckett

    4.27 (11)

    Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before. Enter Vladimir ESTRAGON: (giving up again) Nothing to be done.

    #119
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    The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

    The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

    Junot Diaz

    3.8 (5)

    They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.

    #220
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    3,104
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    Being and Nothingness

    Being and Nothingness

    Jean-Paul Sartre

    3.0 (1)

    Modern thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it.

    #298
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    1,937
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