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Discussion: ATRL's 100 Greatest Books Of All Time
Member Since: 3/12/2012
Posts: 11,474
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ATRL's 100 Greatest Books Of All Time
#71
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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a 1964 children's book by British author Roald Dahl. The story features the adventures of young Charlie Bucket inside the chocolate factory of eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964 and in the United Kingdom by George Allen & Unwin in 1967. The book was adapted into two major motion pictures: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005. The book's sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, was written by Roald Dahl in 1972. Dahl had also planned to write a third book in the series but never finished it.
The story was originally inspired by Roald Dahl's experience of chocolate companies during his schooldays. Cadbury would often send test packages to the schoolchildren in exchange for their opinions on the new products. At that time (around the 1920s), Cadbury and Rowntree's were England's two largest chocolate makers and they each often tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies, posing as employees, into the other's factory. Because of this, both companies became highly protective of their chocolate making processes. It was a combination of this secrecy and the elaborate, often gigantic, machines in the factory that inspired Dahl to write the story.
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Member Since: 9/16/2011
Posts: 50,981
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Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. 
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Member Since: 8/17/2010
Posts: 3,155
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It is a pretty iconic story...
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Member Since: 3/12/2012
Posts: 11,474
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ATRL's 100 Greatest Books Of All Time
#70
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The Bell Jar is American writer and poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, which was originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed. The book is often regarded as a roman à clef, with the protagonist's descent into mental illness paralleling Plath's own experiences with what may have been clinical depression. Plath committed suicide a month after its first UK publication. The novel was published under Plath's name for the first time in 1967 and was not published in the United States until 1971, pursuant to the wishes of Plath's mother and husband, Ted Hughes. The novel has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.
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Member Since: 3/12/2012
Posts: 11,474
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ATRL's 100 Greatest Books Of All Time
#69
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The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, the play dramatizes the revenge Prince Hamlet exacts on his uncle Claudius for murdering King Hamlet, Claudius's brother and Prince Hamlet's father, and then succeeding to the throne and taking as his wife Gertrude, the old king's widow and Prince Hamlet's mother. The play vividly portrays both true and feigned madness – from overwhelming grief to seething rage – and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.
Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play and among the most powerful and influential tragedies in the English language, with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others." The play was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime and still ranks among his most-performed, topping the Royal Shakespeare Company's performance list since 1879. It has inspired writers from Goethe and Dickens to Joyce and Murdoch, and has been described as "the world's most filmed story after Cinderella".
Shakespeare based Hamlet on the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum as subsequently retold by 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. He may also have drawn on or perhaps written an earlier (hypothetical) Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet. He almost certainly created the title role for Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare's time. In the 400 years since, the role has been performed by highly acclaimed actors and actresses from each successive age.
Three different early versions of the play are extant, the First Quarto (Q1, 1603), the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604), and the First Folio (F1, 1623). Each version includes lines, and even entire scenes, missing from the others. The play's structure and depth of characterisation have inspired much critical scrutiny. One such example is the centuries-old debate about Hamlet's hesitation to kill his uncle, which some see as a mere plot device to prolong the action, but which others argue is a dramatization of the complex philosophical and ethical issues that surround cold-blooded murder, calculated revenge, and thwarted desire. More recently, psychoanalytic critics have examined Hamlet's unconscious desires, and feminist critics have re-evaluated and rehabilitated the often maligned characters of Ophelia and Gertrude.
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Member Since: 4/7/2009
Posts: 34,961
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Hamlet. 
Haven't read it in a long time, only read it while in H.S. though. 
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Member Since: 9/16/2011
Posts: 50,981
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I need to read both of these; especially Hamlet.
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Member Since: 6/25/2010
Posts: 18,931
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ATRL Moderator
Member Since: 3/18/2009
Posts: 35,164
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The Bell Jar is amazing! It should be higher.
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Member Since: 2/22/2008
Posts: 46,108
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Finished reading Catching Fire today. It better be really really high. THG too.
Has anyone read "Mi Vida Con Hailey"? Is it any good? I'm starting it today.
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ATRL Moderator
Member Since: 11/16/2004
Posts: 28,450
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While you wait for the next batch to be released, join the Official ATRL Book Club!
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Member Since: 3/12/2012
Posts: 11,474
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New batch 68-61 today!
ATRL's 100 Greatest Books Of All Time
#68
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective). It is a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Satirizing a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.
Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics since its publication. It was criticized upon release because of its coarse language and became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur "******", despite strong arguments that the protagonist, and the tenor of the book, is anti-racist
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Member Since: 9/16/2011
Posts: 50,981
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Mark Twain 
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ATRL Moderator
Member Since: 3/18/2009
Posts: 35,164
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Great book! I finally read it for the first time in a class last year. It's such a rich, funny story—and so much deeper than the n-word controversy.
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Member Since: 3/12/2012
Posts: 11,474
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ATRL's 100 Greatest Books Of All Time
#67
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The War of the Worlds (1898), a science fiction novel by Herbert George Wells, is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist's adventures in London and the countryside southwest of London as Earth is invaded by Martians. Written in 1895-1897, it is one of the earliest stories that details a conflict between mankind and an extraterrestrial race.
The War of the Worlds has two parts, Book One: The Coming of the Martians and Book Two: The Earth under the Martians. The narrator, a philosophically inclined author, struggles to return to his wife while seeing the Martians lay waste to southern England. Book One (Chapters 14, 16, and 17) imparts the experience of his brother, also unnamed, who describes events in the capital and escapes the Martians by boarding a ship near Tillingham on the coast sixty-five miles northeast of London and is not mentioned again.
The plot has been related to invasion literature of the time. The novel has been variously interpreted as a commentary on evolutionary theory, British imperialism, and generally Victorian superstitions, fears and prejudices. At the time of publication it was classified as a scientific romance, like his earlier novel The Time Machine. The War of the Worlds has been both popular (it has never gone out of print) and influential, spawning half a dozen feature films, radio dramas, various comic book adaptations, a television series, and sequels or parallel stories by other authors. It has even influenced the work of scientists, notably Robert Hutchings Goddard.
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Member Since: 8/19/2006
Posts: 6,475
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Yas Huck Finn (one for each time I've read it)
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Member Since: 8/17/2010
Posts: 3,155
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The Bell Jar...one of my favorite novels of all time. I love Plath. It should be higher.
And Huck Finn is great, too.
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Member Since: 3/12/2012
Posts: 11,474
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ATRL's 100 Greatest Books Of All Time
#66
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The Iliad (sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium) is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles.
Although the story covers only a few weeks in the final year of the war, the Iliad mentions or alludes to many of the Greek legends about the siege; the earlier events, such as the gathering of warriors for the siege, the cause of the war, and related concerns tend to appear near the beginning. Then the epic narrative takes up events prophesied for the future, such as Achilles' looming death and the sack of Troy, prefigured and alluded to more and more vividly, so that when it reaches an end, the poem has told a more or less complete tale of the Trojan War.
Along with the Odyssey, also attributed to Homer, the Iliad is among the oldest extant works of Western literature, and its written version is usually dated to around the eighth century BC. The Iliad contains 15,693 lines, and is written in Homeric Greek, a literary amalgam of Ionic Greek and other dialects.
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Member Since: 9/16/2011
Posts: 50,981
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Three more great books I still need to read.
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Member Since: 3/12/2012
Posts: 11,474
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ATRL's 100 Greatest Books Of All Time
#65
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Ethan Frome is a novel published in 1911 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Edith Wharton. It is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. The novel was adapted into a film Ethan Frome in 1993.
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