Thread by @aymanfadel

How many of the novels in #pbsgreatamericanread #GreatReadPBS are for #peace #antiwar? Here's the ones I know or hope are:

1) 1984 by George Orwell
2) A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
3) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Others can be read to contain anti-war messages

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
Dune (esp later books in the series) by Frank Herbert
Game of Thrones series by George RR Martin
Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
War & Peace by Tolstoy

I haven't read all of them. I expect Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan" to be anti-war.

On the flip side, The Left Behind series is fanatically sectarian hate speech celebrating mass killing. One wonders if PBS would have allowed Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries to make the list.

.@PBS claims that it put the list together by surveying thousands of readers in the USA using a method which balanced age, gender, ethnicity, region, etc. Assuming this is the case, what does it say that the most famous anti-war novels didn't make the list? I'm thinking of

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut

I've read those, but there are others
inktank.fi/10-wars-novels…

Here's some other novels which probably aren't famous enough to enter a Top 100 list, but they should have been if our culture truly valued #peace

The Prisoners of Quai Dong by Victor Kolpacoff muslimmediareview.blogspot.com/2018/01/hey-cr…

Forever War by Joe Haldeman

If you can recommend some good anti-war novels, let me know. But, more importantly, assuming the @PBS #GreatReadPBS survey was accurate, the nation that spends more on war & is involved in more wars than any other on the planet has corresponding disdain for peace in its novels.

@threadreaderapp unroll