Squiggly air good

Goethe in the top five *novels*?

Other than George Eliot, the English wrote mediocre novels, such that even translations from other languages have trumped their best. Imagine what Levin's visit to the cowshed to see Pava's newborn calf in Anna Karenina, or Natasha waiting for someone to ask her to dance at her first ball in War and Peace, must read like in the original Russian, and then compare them to all that Dickens or the Bronte sisters ever wrote in their native tongue. In fact, a single shelf of good Bengali novels is worth more than the whole native literature of post-Shakespearean England. So, there is no reason to get agitated about the Guardian's Top 100 list.

People nowadays are under-read, and ill-read. They have either not read enough, or they have read the wrong books.

I understand not being able to read Thomas Hardy, Evelyn Waugh, DH Lawrence, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Iris Murdoch or Graham Greene, but god forbid I openly brag about it!

In one of those purposeless but entertaining exercises, the Guardian polled more than 170 novelists, critics, and academics to come up with a list of the best 100 novels of all time. Here's Salman Rushdie's top 10.

Did anyone ever ask Cormac McCarthy why he hated commas so much

whys mumbai's intellectual culture so shit compared to dehli? fewer unis?

This is how friendships end.

why are so many of the most acclaimed pieces of american art about a guy slowly becoming a piece of shit? citizen kane, the godfather, the sopranos, breaking bad. is the tale of the ego embedded into america as much as cowboys and hot dogs?

In Türkiye, a man gave up his suicide attempt after being offered a döner kebab.

We need a 10-year ban on all polisci majors from talking about Lee Kuan Yew