The 10 most ambitious books of all time

At Collider Jeremy Urquhart tagged ten of the most ambitious (and longest) books of all time, including:

Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo

If Underworld progressed in chronological order, it would still qualify as quite ambitious, what with it being dense, covering a great deal of history (much of the second half of the 20th century), and being lengthy, at over 800 pages. Structurally, though, it’s all those things plus something told largely in reverse, starting with a story about a prized baseball from a match in the early 1950s, and then jumping forward to the 1990s.

It’s about people who had – or wanted to have – that baseball in their possession, but everything keeps jumping back, and though there are some people in it who are sort of main characters, Underworld goes off on tangents fairly often. It does so in a way that works unusually well, with there being something powerful about the novel overall, even if it sometimes feels hard to say just what exactly makes it feel such a way.

Read about the other books on the list.

Underworld is among Andrew O'Hagan's six favorite books, Gabe Habash's nine best art-and-book-cover matches, Alex Clark's top ten long books, and Chad Harbach's top five notable novels with sporting themes.

--Marshal Zeringue