Thanks to everyone who submitted a nomination for the 2011 Tournament of Novels. Over two hundred books were nominated so we need another round to weed them down to our top sixty-four contenders.
Below is the list of novels that are under consideration. Only one book per author can make the final cut. Please choose five from this list and enter them in the form at the end of this post.
The potential contenders for this year are:
1984 – Orwell
2666 – Bolano
A Bend in the River – Naipaul
A Canticle for Leibowitz – Miller
A Christmas Carol – Dickens
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Farewell to Arms – Hemingway
A Handful of Dust – Waugh
A House for Mr. Biswas – Naipaul
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – Joyce
A Soldier of the Great War – Helprin
A Tale of Two Cities – Dickens
A Time to Kill – Grisham
Absalom Absalom – Faulkner
Age of Innocence – Wharton
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Carroll
All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
American Gods – Gaiman
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
Amerika – Kafka
Anna Karenina – Tolstoy
As I Lay Dying – Faulkner
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Atonement – McEwon
August 1914 – Solzhenitsyn
Barchester Towers – Trollope
Black Mischief – Waugh
Bleak House – Dickens
Blood Meridian – McCarthy
Brave New World – Huxley
Breakfast of Champions – Vonnegut
Brideshead Revisited – Waugh
Brighton Rock – Greene
Brothers Karamazov – Dostoevsky
Busman’s Honeymoon – Sayers
Cakes and Ale – Maugham
Cat’s Cradle – Vonnegut
Catch 22 – Heller
Charlotte’s Web – White
Childhood’s End – Clarke
Cloud Atlas – Mitchell
Code of the Woosters – Wodehouse
Conscience of a King – Duggan
Count of Monte Cristo – Dumas
Cranford – Gaskell
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cry, the Beloved Country – Patton
Daniel Deronda – Eliot
Darkness At Noon – Koestler
David Copperfield – Dickens
Death Comes for the Archbishop – Cather
Death in Venice – Mann
Demons – Dostoevski
Devil in a Blue Dress – Mosely
Devil’s Advocate – West
Diary of a Country Priest – Bernanos
Doctor Zhivago – Pasternak
Don Quixote – Cervantes
Dracula – Stoker
Dune – Herbert
East of Eden – Steinbeck
Emma – Austen
End of the Affair – Greene
Ender’s Game – Card
Excellent Women – Pym
Fathers and Sons – Turgenev
Fifth Business – Davies
Fire and Hemlock – Jones
First Circle – Solshenitsyn
Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy – Goddeny
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Hemingway
Foundation – Azimov
Gaudy Night – Sayers
Gilead – Robinson
Go Down Moses – Faulkner
Good Omens – Gaiman & Pratchett
Goodbye, Columbus – Philip Roth
Gormenghast – Peake
Great Expectations – Dickens
Gulliver’s Travels – Swift
Hard Times – Dickens
Heart of Darkness – Conrad
Herzog – Bellow
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Adams
Housekeeping – Robinson
How Green Was My Valley – Llewellyn
Howl’s Moving Castle – Jones
I am the Messenger – Zusak
If This Is a Man – Levi
Imagining Argentina – Thornton
In Our Time – Hemingway
In Search of Lost Time – Proust
Infinite Jest – Wallace
Invisible Man – Ellison
Ireland – Delaney
Jane Eyre-Bronte
Jayber Crow – Berry
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – Clarke
Kristin Lavransdatter – Undset
Les Miserables – Hugo
Light in August – Faulkner
Lilith – MacDonald
Lincoln – Vidal
Lion, Witch, Wardrobe – Lewis
Little Dorrit – Dickens
Little House on the Prairie – Wilder
Little Women – Alcott
Lolita – Nabakov
Lord of the Flies – Golding
Lost Horizon – Hilton
Madame Bovary – Flaubert
Mansfield Park – Austen
Mason & Dixon – Pynchon
Master and Commander – O’Brian
Middlemarch – Eliot
Moby Dick – Melville
Mrs. Dalloway – Woolf
My Antonia – Cather
My Name is Asher Lev – Potok
Never Let Me Go – Ishiguro
North and South – Gaskell
Nostromo – Conrad
Of Mice and Men – Steinbeck
Oliver Twist – Dickens
On The Road – Keroac
Once and Future King – White
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovtich – Solzhenitsyn
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Garcia Marquez
Our Mutual Friend – Dickens
Pale Fire – Nabokov
Peace Like a River – Enger
Perelandra – Lewis
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Portrait of a Lady- James
Prayer for Owen Meany – Irving
Precious Bane – Webb
Pride and Prejudice – Austen
Quo Vadis – Sienkiewicz
Ragtime – Doctorow
Redwall – Jacques
Remains of the Day – Ishiguro
Sense and Sensibility – Austen
Shadows on the Rock – Cather
Shoeless Joe – Kinsella
Silas Marner – Eliot
Silence – Endo
Slouching Towards Kalamazoo – De Vries
So Brave, So Young, So handsome – Enger
Soldier of the Great War -Helprin
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Bradbury
Sons and Lovers – Lawrence
Starship Troopers – Heinlein
Summerland – Chabon
Suttree – McCarthy
Sword of Honour – Waugh
Tender is the Night – Fitzgerald
Thank You, Jeeves – Wodehouse
That Hideous Strength – Lewis
The Ambassadors – James
The Anubis Gates – Powers
The Armies of the Night – Norman Mailer
The Art of Racing in the Rain – Stein
The Betrothed – Manzoni
The Blood of the Lamb – De Vries
The Book of Bebb – Buechner
The Book Thief – Zusak
The Catcher in the Rye – Salinger
The Chosen Place, the Timeless People – Marshall
The Count of Monte Cristo – Dumas
The Cruel Sea – Monserrat
The Crying of Lot 49 – Pynchon
The Daughter of Time – Tey
The Eagle of the Ninth – Sutcliff
The Edge of Sadness – O’Connor
The End of the Affair – Greene
The First Circle – Solzhenitsyn
The Gates of Fire – Pressfield
The Gift of Asher Lev – Potok
The Golden Bowl – James
The Good Soldier – Ford
The Great Gatsby – Fitzgerald
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – McCullers
The Heart of the Matter – Greene
The Heaven Tree – Pargeter
The Hobbit – Tolkein
The Horse’s Mouth – Cary
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Doyle
The Idiot – Dostoevsky
The Illustrated man – Bradbury
The King of Attolia – Turner
The Long Goodbye – Chandler
The Magic Mountain – Mann
The Man on a Donkey – Prescott
The Man Who Was Thursday – Chesterton
The Master and Margarita – Bulgakov
The Moonstone – Collins
The Moviegoer – Percy
The Once and Future King – White
The Phantom Tollbooth – Norman Juster
The Power and the Glory – Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Spark
The Red Horse – Corti
The Road – McCarthy
The Scarlet Letter – Hawthorne
The Sot-weed Factor – Barth
The Sound and the Fury – Faulkner
The Stand – King
The Storm – Buechner
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Stevenson
The Things They Carried – O’Brien
The Tin Drum – Grass
The Violent Bear it Away – O’Connor
The War of the Worlds – Wells
The Way We Live Now – Trollope
The Wind in the Willows – Grahame
Things Fall Apart – Achebe
Tigana – Kay
Til We Have Faces – Lewis
To Kill a Mockingbird – Lee
Tom Jones – Fielding
Tristram Shandy – Sterne
Ulysses – Joyce
Uncle Fred in the Springtime – Wodehouse
Underworld – DeLillo
USA – Dos Passos
Vanity Fair – Thackeray
War and Peace – Tolstoy
Watership Down – Adams
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Wind in the Willows – Grahame
Winters Tale – Helprin
Wise Blood – O’Connor
With Fire And Sword – Sienkiewicz
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Pirsig




March 7th, 2011 | 10:03 am
I suggest changing the name of “The First Circle” to “In the First Circle,” the name Solznenitsyn intended and how it is now named in it’s uncensored version.
March 7th, 2011 | 11:21 am
Could you have meant “Till We Have Faces” in place of “A Myth Retold”?
March 7th, 2011 | 11:28 am
Great list, though. I see someone gave a protest vote for “The Lord of the Rings.” I’m surprised none of the novels of Charles Williams showed up on the list, since the Inklings as a whole are in such fine form.
March 7th, 2011 | 12:04 pm
Shoot — I voted without seeing Jayber Crow on the list. If it misses out by that one vote, I ask only that someone reading this post will go buy the book and read it.
March 7th, 2011 | 2:47 pm
No Robinson Crusoe?
March 7th, 2011 | 3:17 pm
Please, please tell me “The Children of Men” is not on the list because it was previously chosen.
March 7th, 2011 | 3:51 pm
“I’m surprised none of the novels of Charles Williams showed up on the list, since the Inklings as a whole are in such fine form.”
I’m surprised too, especially since I submitted one for consideration myself…
March 7th, 2011 | 3:57 pm
Hey folks, you could have nominated as many books as you wanted last week. No point in complaining about what’s missing now.
March 7th, 2011 | 8:01 pm
The reason LOTR is not on the list is that it blew the competition out of the water last year. No point having a repeat of the same in this tournament, which is what would surely happen.
March 7th, 2011 | 9:00 pm
On the list above, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Wind in the Willows, The Once and Future King, The First Circle, The End of the Affair (and perhaps others) all appear twice.
March 7th, 2011 | 9:16 pm
I’ll try to catch it next year and nominate Williams’ “Descent into Hell” at the very least.
March 7th, 2011 | 9:29 pm
So I suppose the smart money is on “The Hobbit” this year.
(He said gloomily.)
March 7th, 2011 | 11:27 pm
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a fun series of gags, but it’s hardly a novel.
March 8th, 2011 | 1:10 am
LOTR and the Hobbit should not be on any list other than a Dungeons and Dragons or Star Trek club reading list. Elves? Underground people smoking pipes and drinking port? Monsters and mayhem? Sorry for the heresy in conservative circles but come on folks, lets wake up and anticipate the no longer in print date.
March 8th, 2011 | 3:40 am
Anyone who votes for LOTR is not to be trusted. I was upset by the results last year. Almost as upset as when Pitchfork called B.O.B. by Outkast best song of the 90s. Or when AFI called The Godfather best film of all time. Huckleberry Finn had better win this year or i’ll find another list to take way too seriously.
March 8th, 2011 | 10:05 am
Don’t support LOTR if you don’t like, but it belongs on the list at least as much (and probably more than):
Charlotte’s Web
A Time to Kill
Ender’s Game
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(Three of which I actually like very much, but none are “great novels.”)
Just because it has fantasy elements and is beloved of geeks does not mean it is not a well-written, complex literary novel. It is both of those things.
But people who vote for it in violation of the rules and after it’s already won anyway, are fanboys and girls, not people who seriously want to consider good writing. With that, I agree.
March 8th, 2011 | 10:23 am
Huckleberry Finn is a fun series of gags, but it’s hardly a novel. :)
March 8th, 2011 | 10:28 am
I’ll try to catch it next year and nominate Williams’ “Descent into Hell” at the very least.
I thought I did nominate it last week, on the same list in which I submitted Gormenghast (which is on there). Perhaps I’m mistaken.
March 8th, 2011 | 12:58 pm
On the contrary, I live by the maxim that someone who can’t appreciate Lord of the Rings is not to be trusted. You might as well say Homer is ridiculous with all that talk about nymphs and godesses and heroes. Everything can be found in the Lord of the Rings, it is epic in the truest sense. The elves and dwarves and hobbits and the rest are all reflections of some part of our humanity. Even the orcs, for that matter. It belongs as surely in any Great Books list as Homer or Virgil or Tolstoy. If someone can’t handle a book with mythical creatures, that’s not a sign of maturity but it’s opposite. It’s the “maturity” of an adolecent. If we were given the capacity to imagine, we ought to use it once in a while…
March 8th, 2011 | 1:26 pm
At least no Catcher in the Rye. (“Razzies” in the future, perhaps?)
March 8th, 2011 | 3:58 pm
I had to go thru the list to find the books I’d actually read, thus narrowing down my selections as well as probably warping the outcome. I just finished the Sackett novels of Louis Lamour. Does that count for anything?
March 8th, 2011 | 9:31 pm
Ethan — you warm the cockles of my heart. Now I happen to believe Huck Finn deserves respect if only because of its place in the formation of the American imagination, but you’re right — if Lord of the Rings can justly be criticized on the grounds that much of it is merely Tolkien amusing himself with his inventiveness, Huck comes in for that criticism, squared. And I say that, as one who, as I said above, regards LotR as a genuine work of literature. Miguel said it beautifully. I’d only add that seeing an elf fighting monsters in a story and automatically concluding from that, that there can be no literary merit to the story, is not merely a sign of immaturity, but of lack of understanding of literature itself.
And I don’t actually think “port” made an appearance anywhere in the book. It really couldn’t have — there’s no Portugal in Middle Earth. ;-)
March 9th, 2011 | 1:43 am
Miguel and Pentamom,
Glad that you enjoy LOTR. I have very good friends that do as well. Reading should above all be enjoyed. For you and the many others that enjoy LOTR I hope it remains widely discussed, and for your children and grandchildren’s sake I hope it continues to do well and remain long in print. By all indications it will. Cheers.
March 9th, 2011 | 11:54 am
“I’ll try to catch it next year and nominate Williams’ “Descent into Hell” at the very least.”
“Descent into Hell” is my favorite of his novels, so I’ll gladly support you (though in fairness, I’ve never finished reading “All Hallows’ Eve”).
I’m surprised at the number of people who voted for “Gormenghast”…
March 9th, 2011 | 2:17 pm
Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” should be on the list. It is a masterpiece.
The two worst books on the list (of those that I have read): Gore Vidal’s “Lincoln” and Ian McEwan’s “Atonement.” “Lincoln” is a real clunker. “Atonement” is marked by the narrowness of vision that is a logical consequence of fervent atheistic secularism.
March 11th, 2011 | 2:54 pm
I’m surprised at the number of people who voted for “Gormenghast”…
Really! I thought I was the only one who had ever heard of it! It’s my favorite novel.
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