Today I ran into this video from Gunpowder, Fiction, and Plot titled "The Best Fiction of the Last 150 Years." This I had to see so I watched all 25 minutes of it. The host gave few reasons as to his choices, That was fine, it makes the list fly by. It seemed like his list was well-populated with a lot of the usual suspects but there were also lots of surprises. Since he was picking just one book per year, he may have selected a book by a well-known author but one of their less known works. The host also admitted he did some fancy work with some of the dates, selecting translations, or other date related details to make them fit. For example, Anna Karenina was published in 1878, yet he has it as his opening book with a 1875 date. I looked it up and found that Tolstoy starting publishing the chapters in literary magazines in 1875, not publishing the whole book until 1878. Okay, that makes sense. But I don't know what his thinking was for Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky published it in 1866, the first English translation was published in 1886. So I don't know how he came up with a publication date after 1892????
Anyway, it was a fun activity to first watch the video (below) and then to take the test to determine how many of the books I've read from his list:
I took the list challenge test and found I'd read 58 of the 150 books. Not bad. A bunch of the unread titles are already on my TBR and I added a few more. Here are the titles I'd like to read from this list:
If I manage to read all these books, I will have read over half of the books. We'll see how much effort I put into it.
Cheers!
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