I more or less agree with this. Only when someone praises sometimes it moves one to take a second look. I was moved in that way to start on _Clarissa_, and I'm finding it really fine. (I'm 370 pp. in, about 1200 to go.)
I'm a bit startled at your choosing P&P. It's a wonderful novel, but I prefer _Mansfield Park_ and _Emma_. Incidentally, did you know that when Lydia, in the note announcing her elopement, mentions that there is a slit in her petticoat that needs mending it is an indication that she is already no longer a virgin. I've got a book on order which sounds terrific: Jill Heydt-Stevenson "Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History," which contains that information on its first page.
Why do you select Swann's Way rather than the whole series?
I have read Bleak House around 6 times plus endless browsing in it. Its opening paragraph is perhaps the finest opening in all fiction. The first one-word sentence, "London," names the book's central character. And those characters passing each other, unseeing, in the fog mime what all the characters are more or less doing for the remainder of the novel.
All I've read by Nabakov is Lolita, so I have no strong opinion on him. You don't mention James? I've fairly recently reread _What Maisie Knew_ and _The Awkward Age_, and both are quite wonderful And _The Sacred Fount_ may be the most unfairly ignored and slandered book in English.
I think it's mostly in his later works that Faulkner is sometimes merely drunk with his own words. In _As I Lay Dying_ he has them under perfect control. In the Note on the Texts at the back of the Library of America editios they have an interesting quote from Faulkner on As I Lay Dying: "Before I began I said, I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again." I think he did it. But I'm going to reread at least Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom, and Sanctuary.
I don't think I'd want to commit myself to any list of 5 novels -- or 10 or 15. You leave out Charterhouse of Parma and Middlemarch. Our Mutual Friend. Dombey and Son. Parade's End.
I gotta stop.
Carrol
> I think that "Absalom, Absalom" is one of the 5 greatest novels ever
> written -- ( "Anna Karenina", "Lolita", "Pride and Prejudice",
> "Absalom, Absalom", "Bleak House" and my inner argument about Ulysses
> / Berlin, Alexanderplatz / Swan's Way / Madame Bovary / Pale Fire /
> and Wuthering Heights in sixth place place....) The only other novel
> I have read more often if "Anna K."
>
> But if you'll notice I respect Nabokov greatly ... having included
> him twice on this list.... So I have tried to comprehend his hatred
> of Faulkner and Dostoevsky....
>
> And in truth Faulkner can be inelegant at times. He does feel drunk
> on his own words and unable to make distinctions.
>
> This is only to say that in trying hard to understand Nabokov's
> haughty dismissal of Faulkner I have again come to the conclusion that
> there is no way we can argue over art -- we can explicate, praise,
> react, hope to reveal, and help to experience but rarely if ever
> convince someone out of their own confirmed taste.
>
> Jerry
>