And the winner is . . .
Pride and Prejudice
By a margin of 55 to 44 percent, Pride and Prejudice beat The Hobbit—and 62 other contenders—to win the second annual Tournament of Novels.
Thanks to everyone that participated. Beginning next March we’ll once again take nominations to determine the seeding for the 2012 brackets.
In the meantime, let’s hear who you think should have won. List one novel—any novel, it doesn’t have to be one listed in the tournament—that you think should have beat our reigning champion.
March 24th, 2011 | 8:11 am
The Da Vinci Code
Never even showed up in the brackets, you unenlightened swine!
March 24th, 2011 | 8:34 am
Crime and Punishment.
March 24th, 2011 | 8:53 am
Brothers Karamazov
March 24th, 2011 | 9:02 am
Great. A borefest about women in long dresses beat the progenitor of modern fantasy. You clearly have some odd people voting here.
March 24th, 2011 | 9:17 am
What Ho, Jeeves?
March 24th, 2011 | 9:37 am
The Once and Future King. Hands Down, the best work of fiction EVER!!!
March 24th, 2011 | 9:38 am
Either of those two Dostoevskys. Or The Power and the Glory. And I’d love to see Viper’s Tangle in the brackets next year, along with any Walker Percy novel besides the justly remembered The Moviegoer. How about Love in the Ruins, or The Second Coming?
March 24th, 2011 | 9:40 am
+1 to anything by Dostoevsky. Maybe a solid science fiction novel can win one day, too.
Who won last year? It could give some perspective.
March 24th, 2011 | 9:56 am
Death in Venice
March 24th, 2011 | 9:57 am
War and Peace. I don’t care what y’all say, it’s still the best novel ever written, by the best novelist ever.
March 24th, 2011 | 9:58 am
War and Peace or Brothers Karamazov (although I always have a hard time finishing the second part of the latter).
March 24th, 2011 | 10:05 am
Kristin Lavransdatter.
March 24th, 2011 | 10:06 am
Taras Bulba
March 24th, 2011 | 10:08 am
I’m torn between Crime and Punishment and The Fountainhead.
March 24th, 2011 | 10:17 am
The contest is always interesting, but it kind of fizzled out this year. How about a contest of reader favorites, a sort of “Best Novels That Nobody Ever Reads”? That would be fun, and it might lead many of us to take a different path.
March 24th, 2011 | 10:27 am
East of Eden
March 24th, 2011 | 10:36 am
brothers k or war and peace.
I am rather shocked at the margin.
March 24th, 2011 | 10:42 am
This is one of the only instances in which the book I voted for won… but while I’m pleased, I’m not ecstatic. This is like seeing Carole King’s “Tapestry” winning over “Frampton Comes Alive” in a contest for Greatest Album of All Time. That is, there’s no doubt the proper book won in the finals… but one can’t help thinking there were many better choices available.
March 24th, 2011 | 10:46 am
Best novel ever published: Brothers Karamazov
Best American novel: Moby Dick
That is all.
March 24th, 2011 | 10:47 am
Moby-Dick
March 24th, 2011 | 10:50 am
Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street
March 24th, 2011 | 11:04 am
Brothers Karamazov
Bleak House
Madame Bovary
The Sound and the Fury
Brideshead Revisited
March 24th, 2011 | 11:04 am
All the King’s Men.
March 24th, 2011 | 11:05 am
Heart of Darkness
March 24th, 2011 | 11:38 am
A Tale of Two Cities
March 24th, 2011 | 11:43 am
My book doesn’t win…doesn’t even make the first round of voting…and until this post didn’t even make a comment field. Was James Joyce wrong when he called it’s author “the Father of the English novel”? Was publisher John Ballantyne wrong when he called it “the most universally admired book of all time?” Was Samuel Johnson wrong when he asked “was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers?” Edgar Allan Poe described the experience of reading it as one of the reader “becoming perfect abstractions in the intensity of our interest.” In 1851, George Borrow said that to this book is owed: “England’s many astonishing discoveries both by sea and land, and no inconsiderable part of her naval glory!” Even the jackass Jean-Jacques Rousseau called it a “natural treatise on education…it will afford us the text, to which all our conversations on the objects of natural science, will serve only as a comment. It will serve as a guide during our progress to a state of reason; and will even afterwards give us constant pleasure unless our taste be totally vitiated. You ask impatiently, what is the title of this wonderful book? Is it Aristotle, Pliny, or Buffon? No. It is Robinson Crusoe.”
March 24th, 2011 | 12:02 pm
One more thing, if this 1995 First Things article by Philip Zaleski doesn’t make you go out and purchase the Norton Critical Edition of Robinson Crusoe, nothing will.
March 24th, 2011 | 12:27 pm
The Da Vinci Code does not deserve to be on any list of top novels. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. To compare it with Pride and Prejudice or any one of a hundred similar novels would be akin to comparing actors such as Anthony Hopkins with the likes of Sylvester Stallone. Will Stallone ever win an Oscar for best actor? Don’t think so.
March 24th, 2011 | 12:44 pm
The Brothers Karamazov
March 24th, 2011 | 12:50 pm
Mistress Masham’s Repose
March 24th, 2011 | 1:09 pm
The Brothers Karamazov.
March 24th, 2011 | 1:09 pm
David Copperfield
March 24th, 2011 | 1:15 pm
Farmer Giles of Ham
March 24th, 2011 | 1:44 pm
Emma
March 24th, 2011 | 1:57 pm
Tintin and the Picaros
March 24th, 2011 | 2:10 pm
Either “David Copperfield” or “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.”
Maybe next year, rather than having a novel tournament, we can have an epic poem tournament. Milton and Dante would be heavy favorites for the final round, leading to much commentary on the religious divisions of the readership of this blog, but “The Faerie Queene” would sweep in and knock out the Comedy in the final two rounds. Then everyone who had ever read and loved “Orlando Furioso” would riot.
March 24th, 2011 | 2:11 pm
Call it Sleep
March 24th, 2011 | 3:19 pm
I wanted to second an earlier comment that Jayber Crow (or any of the other Port William Membership novels) deserved to do much better in this tournament.
I also vote for The Heaven Tree Trilogy by Edith Pargeter.
March 24th, 2011 | 3:27 pm
*Douglas* has got me interested in “Robinson Crusoe”. Next on my list.
March 24th, 2011 | 3:32 pm
Lord Dunsany’s The Charwoman’s Shadow
March 24th, 2011 | 3:38 pm
Great. A borefest about women in long dresses beat the progenitor of modern fantasy. You clearly have some odd people voting here.
Maybe just a lot of female ones?
(hey don’t blame me, I didn’t vote)
March 24th, 2011 | 4:36 pm
Results may vary depending on whether one votes for personal favorites or for those of significance for Western Literature.
March 24th, 2011 | 5:06 pm
The Silmarillion!
No- just messing with you all.
How about All the King’s Men?
Or one of my dad’s favorites, The Sandpebbles?
March 24th, 2011 | 5:09 pm
Instead of voting on books we all, may or may not have read, it would be interesting to read a book a month for the next year and then vote on the books we actually read together.
March 24th, 2011 | 5:24 pm
Matters of the Heart, by Danielle Steele.
March 24th, 2011 | 5:24 pm
Ulysses.
March 24th, 2011 | 5:38 pm
Kristin Lavransdatter
March 24th, 2011 | 5:39 pm
Or, indeed, “The Master of Hestviken”
March 24th, 2011 | 6:18 pm
Dear David Elton,
Great day in Heaven! You made my day!
I don’t know if you read the Philip Zaleski article I linked to, but give it a look before you start. And make sure you stick with the Norton Critical Edition to avoid all the editing the novel has been through over the years. Also, the critical commentary both pre and post 20th C. is in the back and is excellent.
March 24th, 2011 | 6:53 pm
*Douglas* OK, will do. Yes, I did read the Zaleski article. Excellent! “Crusoe” was one of the first books I ever read, probably in a children’s edition. Thanks!
March 24th, 2011 | 11:06 pm
The Brothers Karamazov
March 24th, 2011 | 11:10 pm
1st: The Brothers Karamazov.
2nd: Kristin Lavransdatter.
3rd: Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry.
4th: The Source, by James Michener.
Greatest American novel:
Big Rock Candy Mountain, by Wallace Stegner.
March 25th, 2011 | 9:46 am
One day, the overlooked “Valley of the Dolls” by Jacqueline Susann will get the recognition it so richly deserves.
March 25th, 2011 | 12:01 pm
Where is Tom Wolfe in the discussion?
March 25th, 2011 | 2:26 pm
Its been fun.
Joe, one thing you might consider is having separate competitions through the year: best american novel, best european, best non european, best novel of the 20th century, best dissident novel, best comedy, best fantasy, best western, holiday inn, best noir, best novel by a woman, best novel by a man, sorry for categories I may have slighted by not mentioning.
then again, maybe once a year is enough.
March 25th, 2011 | 6:38 pm
I submitted my top ten above — Brothers K, Don Quixote, Bleak House, Moby-Dick, Tom Jones, Lord of the Rings, The Betrothed, War and Peace, Middlemarch, David Copperfield…
And I sure would give Honorable Mentions to Kristin Lavransdatter, Crime and Punishment (or really anything by Dostoyevsky), Anna Karenina, Taras Bulba, Dead Souls, With Fire and Sword, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Vipers’ Tangle, Joseph Andrews, The Scarlet Letter, Lord of the Flies, The Sound and the Fury, Jane Eyre …
I haven’t noticed any strong support for Don Quixote, and for the greatest novel of the 18th century, Tom Jones. Cervantes is one of those very few writers — Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Keats, Faulkner — whom one can dare to compare with the Bard or with Dante. One can make a case — I don’t, but I can see it — that Don Quixote is the greatest work of literature ever. One can make a similar case for The Brothers Karamazov. Fielding’s Tom Jones is not quite in that class, but a good friend of mine used to say that it is the most philosophical novel ever written. It is profoundly human and wise, brilliantly constructed, with rich characters, and very funny to boot.
The argument that Jane Austen is all about women in long dresses who don’t do anything all day long — although in fact they do — misses the point. If we applied the same reasoning to other works, we’d have to discount them too — what do we care about a disgruntled Italian poet-politician? Or about a marauding chieftain trying to get home after a long war? Or a bunch of half-civilized men in a boat, trying to kill large mammals? What makes the works great is their deep insight into human nature, our pride and our folly, our longings, our joys, our self-knowledge, our ignorance; and, if we have a Christian author, as we most certainly do in Jane Austen, our sins and our hope for forgiveness and redemption.
March 25th, 2011 | 8:03 pm
[...] First Thoughts 2011 Tournament of Novels crowned its champion. (There’s always next [...]
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