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James Joyce, author of "Ulysses"
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On both sides of the Atlantic
British select 'Ulysses' the novel for millennium
LONDON (CNN) -- The story of a single day has again been picked as the novel of the millennium.
James Joyce's 1917 novel "Ulysses" has topped a British list of the world's great English-language novels.
The Irish novel received the accolade as the book whose reputation was most likely to survive the millennium.
British bookshop Waterstone's asked 47 literary critics and writers to choose their 10 essential classic novels for the next 100 years from this century or any other.
Joyce's sprawling, epic account of a single day in the life of Dublin -- which was banned in Britain when it was first published -- scored easily more votes than any other, it said.
"'Ulysses' is the novel that many believe will stand the test of time and keep its place in the literary canon for the next hundred years," literary expert John Sutherland said.
"Arguably the last great novel in English," said Irish poet Tom Paulin. But some damned Joyce's work with the faint praise that it was admirable but mostly unreadable.
"It is over-long and there are parts which are boring. This makes it rather unreadable and very difficult," British writer Alan de Botton said.
But another writer, Andre Brink, called "Ulysses" "that inimitable fanfare for the common man in which centuries of accumulated storytelling erupt in the miraculous and exuberant celebration of a single day."
Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" were tied for second in the poll.
They were followed by Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" and George Orwell's "1984" which tied fourth in the list.
Similar lists proved controversial
The British ranking was similar to a top 100 list released in the U.S. last year by The Modern Library, a division of Random House, which ranked "Ulysses" the best English-language novel of the century, followed by "The Great Gatsby". That listing rankled many who said that the exclusion of women and minorities was "the last great gasp of the white patriarchal male literary establishment."
The reading public responded to last year's list, and reader Howard Paul Burgess summed up his opinion of "Ulysses" on a CNN Interactive message board this way: "'Ulysses' as the greatest novel of the century? Sure. And 'Plan Nine from Outer Space' was the best movie of the century, too. 'Ulysses' is the biggest pile of gobbledygook ever perpetrated on the reading public. I defy anyone to make sense of anything in that (admittedly, sometimes poetic) flow of words, words, words."
Recent writers more popular
Writers from the first half of the twentieth century fared better than authors from any other period in Waterstone's "Test of Time" list, with works by Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh and D.H. Lawrence being chosen ahead of classics by the likes of Dickens or "Gulliver's Travels" author Jonathan Swift.
This latest list of classics also contrasted with a poll conducted two years ago of 25,000 ordinary readers. On that list, "Ulysses" came fourth behind J.R.R. Tolkein's fantasy epic "The Lord of the Rings" and two George Orwell novels.
Reuters contributed
to this report.
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