(no subject)

Inferential Bloom's Top 100 Novels list:

Don Quixote, Hadji Murad

Remembrance of Things Past, Clarissa
Tale of a Tub, Gargantua and Pantagruel

War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Finnegans Wake, How It Is, Malone Dies, Unnameable

Bleak House, Ulysses, Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Brothers Karamazov

Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit
Huck Finn, Moby Dick, Persuasion, Pilgrim's Progress


Emma, Mill on the Floss, Our Mutual Friend, Scarlet Letter, As I Lay Dying
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Molloy, Watt, Murphy, Nostromo

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Pride and Prejudice, Women in Love
Charterhouse of Parma, Portrait of a Lady, Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers
Crime and Punishment, Silas Marner, Pere Goriot, A Harlot High and Low
Red and Black, Blood Meridian, Light in August, Miss Lonelyhearts


The Relic, Bras Cubas, Demons, Notes from Underground
Daniel Deronda, Victory, The Rainbow, Between the Acts, To the Lighthouse
Doctor Faustus, Pickwick Papers, Hard Times, Death in Venice
Mansfield Park, Sanctuary, Explosion in a Cathedral, Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Ivan Ilych, Benito Cereno, Master and Man, Kreutzer Sonata
Wings of the Dove, Sartor Resartus, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy


Woodlanders, Return of the Native, Voyage to Arcturus, Encantadas
Invisible Man, Mason and Dixon, Sabbath's Theater, Everyman
Underworld, Little Big, History of the Siege of Lisbon
Kingdom of This World, Cossacks, Under Western Eyes, Secret Agent, Adam Bede
Marble Faun, Ambassadors, Bostonians, Golden Bowl, The Waves
Violent Bear It Away, American Tragedy, Lost Lady, Wuthering Heights


Inferential Bloom's Next Top 50:

American Pastoral, Prague Orgy, Anatomy Lesson, Mysterious Stranger
Blindness, Baltasar and Blimunda, Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Gravity's Rainbow, Crying of Lot 49, Aegypt, All the Pretty Horses
Mrs. Dalloway, Howard's End, A Passage to India, Sister Carrie
Radetzky March, Man Without Qualities, Berlin Alexanderplatz
Mayor of Casterbridge, Rasselas, Julie, Stone Raft
Sound and the Fury, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass


Great Gatsby, Red Badge of Courage, Wind in the Willows
Kim, Felix Krull, Lotte in Weimar, Jude the Obscure, Tess
Love in the Time of Cholera, Suttree, Lord Jim, Confidence Man
My Life as a Man, Operation Shylock, Human Stain, I Married a Communist
Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, Counterlife, Recognitions
White Noise, My Antonia

Left Hand of Darkness, Song of Solomon, Messiah of Stockholm


Inferential Bunch of Novels that Might Should Fit Somewhere on Above Lists:

? Resurrection, Sentimental Education, Dom Casmurro, Lost Steps
? The Cave, All the Names, Oblomov, Sir Charles Grandison, Emile
? The Crossing, Princess Casamassima, Plot Against America, Billy Budd
? Christmas Carol, Marius the Epicurean, Frankenstein, Cards of Identity
? Wise Blood, Orlando, The Years, Narrative of Gordon Pym, Libra
? Far from the Madding Crowd, Werther, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby
? Unfortunate Traveler, Sun Also Rises, Cousin Bette, Lost Illusions
? Various Scott, Various Zola, Various Stevenson, Various Gaskell
? Various Waugh, A High Wind to Jamaica, Gulliver's Travels, Sula
? The Hamlet, Go Down Moses, The Unvanquished, The Wild Palms
? Various Greene, Portnoy's Complaint, Mao II, Custom of the Country
? A Cool Million, A Hundred Years of Solitude, Absalom Absalom!, St. Mawr

Spaces left between approx. quality levels. It gets increasingly hazy after the top 50, to the point where, about many of these, all you could say is he likes them a lot (for the question-marked ones I'm not sure one can even say that).

He's mentioned special personal interest in a number of books: love, for Pickwick Papers, Miss Lonelyhearts, Balzac's Vautrin novels, Murphy, A History of the Siege of Lisbon, The Woodlanders, A Lost Lady, I believe Silas Marner and As I Lay Dying, The Charterhouse of Parma, Little Big and the Aegypt books--and Hadji Murad, clearly; obsession with A Voyage to Arcturus, The Unfortunate Traveler; preference for The Crying of Lot 49 over later Pynchons, and Tales of Jacob in Mann's Joseph sequence.

I've doubtless left things out. I tag along, increasingly fail to disagree.