Book Magazine's The Best of Bookish Characters

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Voila, another list to wrangle over. This time it is other people’s choices of the 100 "best" characters in fiction since 1900. Chosen by a panel appointed by Book magazine, the list leaves loads of room for impassioned disagreement — what constitutes "best," anyway? The panelists include authors, editors, academics and actors, Michael York and Rod Steiger among them, and the outcome is eclectic and fun. Read on.

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  1. 1.
    The Great Gatsby
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  2. 2.
    The Catcher in the Rye
    by J.D. Salinger
  3. 3.
    Lolita, 50th Anniversary Edition
    by Vladimir Nabokov
  4. 4.
    Ulysses
    by James Joyce
  5. 5.
    Rabbit, Run
    by John Updike
  6. 6.
  7. 7.
    To Kill a Mockingbird
    by Harper Lee
  8. 8.
  9. 9.
    The House of Mirth (Signet Classics)
    by Edith Wharton
  11. 11.
  12. 12.
    Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison
  13. 13.
    One Hundred Years of Solitude (Oprah's Book Club)
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  14. 14.
    Mrs. Dalloway
    by Virginia Woolf
  15. 15.
    A Confederacy of Dunces
    by John Kennedy Toole
  16. 16.
    Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
    by John le Carre
  17. 17.
    To the Lighthouse
    by Virginia Woolf
  18. 18.
    Native Son (Perennial Classics)
    by Richard A. Wright
  19. 19.
    In Our Time
    by Ernest Hemingway
  20. 20.
    Catch-22
    by Joseph Heller
  21. 21.
    Gone with the Wind
    by Margaret Mitchell
  22. 22.
    The Big Sleep
    by Raymond Chandler
  23. 23.
    Heart of Darkness (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by Joseph Conrad
  24. 24.
    The Remains of the Day
    by Kazuo Ishiguro
  25. 25.
    The Baron In The Trees
    by Italo Calvino
  26. 26.
    The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh
    by A. A. Milne
  27. 27.
    The Tin Drum (Vintage International)
    by Gunter Grass
  28. 28.
    Wise Blood: A Novel
    by Flannery O'Connor
  29. 29.
    Portnoy's Complaint
    by Philip Roth
  30. 30.
    The Moviegoer
    by Walker Percy
  31. 31.
    Brideshead Revisited
    by Evelyn Waugh
  32. 32.
    My Man Jeeves
    by P. G. Wodehouse
  33. 33.
  34. 34.
    Swann's Way: Remembrance of Things Past
    by Marcel Proust
  37. 37.
    The Wind in the Willows
    by Kenneth Grahame
  38. 38.
    The Cat in the Hat
    by Dr. Seuss
  39. 39.
    Little White Bird, The
    by James Matthew Barrie
  40. 40.
    Lonesome Dove
    by Larry McMurtry
  41. 41.
    The Maltese Falcon
    by Dashiell Hammett
  42. 42.
    Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
    by Cormac McCarthy
  43. 43.
    All the King's Men
    by Robert Penn Warren
  44. 44.
    Master and Commander
    by Patrick O'Brian
  45. 45.
    The Little Prince
    by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  46. 46.
    ?
    The Old Man and The Sea
    by Ernest Hemingway
  47. 47.
    The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Perennial Classics)
    by Muriel Spark
  48. 48.
    The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics)
    by Graham Greene
  49. 49.
    The Stories of John Cheever
    by John Cheever
  50. 50.
    Sula (Oprah's Book Club)
    by Toni Morrison

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Created by starlagurl on Mar 26, 2006.
 

Comments

starlagurl

92 actually — 2 years ago

It’s only 92 because a few of the books had more than one character on the list.

Jan 31, 11:31AM | 0 comments | Reply to this

southernbohemian

94? — 4 years ago

Is this list supposed to be 100 long? I couldn’t find a source list to check.

Aug 22, 02:27PM | 1 comment | Reply to this



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