Kate Playground Archive

almost three years ago I decided to compile a list of basic novels. Say you mean by "basic novels" which should include a pack that an alien mandásemos interested in understanding the human novel representative and key milestones.

I did a query from my contacts on Facebook and my students at the University of Navarra. So ments come out a list, of course, will not satisfy everyone, so are these things. But again, it comes to making a list of ten titles "representative and essential" to condense the narrative effort of man in the eyes of, say, a being from another galaxy.

Nor is ten book recommendations. I'm sure more than one of these titles and indigestion may confuse some readers.

conclude with two indications:

• The list was virtually closed and collated with opinions of friends (and wife) in autumn 2008. But it was a list of nine titles. I confess that I had difficulty choosing the tenth novel. This is Dickens Great Expectations ... yes, Great Expectations, provided to read it in the conditions indicated the list.

• But what makes a list like this in the blog of Homer? It is true that the list proposed here transcends all boundaries of the blog (linguistic and historical). Of course it is also true that the first of ten novels is the work of Heliodorus, in case anyone thought (any) that the novel is an invention S. XVI. What "Ten Ten" we still looks a bit classical input? Then the next mission is to decant the ten basic landmarks of Greek literature.

But that is for another post. Would that give you these ten titles to think, reflect and comment.

Heliodorus and Charicleia Theagenes

Chrétien de Troyes, Erec and Enid

Primero

M. de Cervantes, Don Quixote

H. Fielding, Tom Jones

Ch Dickens, Great Expectations [if you read the original ending]

F. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

M. Proust, Swann's Way

Th Mann, Magic Mountain

V. Woolf, Waves

PS. In a post on the corner of Alexandria quote this post. In a commentary ADDED I will explain why around the alien, here I copied it:

"What the alien comes from something I read in a comic book as a child. Lower Mars with a mission to get the most representative works of literature human. Then go into a bookstore, asks to make the selection and the manager will choose the Iliad, the Odyssey and Quixote. But the young man who prepares the package is wrong, and involves two stories for children and Phone Directory of Madrid. A Martian's heads like children's stories but they seem very simple. The phone book, however, exhausts them and makes them abandon any plan to invade Earth, for ever and ever. "

José B. Torres Guerra