The 100 most meaningful books of all time

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From http://library.christchurch.org.nz/Guides/GoodReads/100alltime.asp:

A 2002 survey of around 100 well-known authors from 54 countries voted for the "most meaningful book of all time" in a poll organised by editors at the Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo. Voters included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuentes and Norman Mailer. Miguel de Cervantes’ tale gained 50% more votes than any other book, eclipsing works by Shakespeare, Homer and Tolstoy.

Ten authors got more than one book on to the list. After Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoevsky emerged as the most worthwhile read with four books listed. The only Shakespeare plays the authors agreed on were Hamlet, King Lear and Othello. The Bard was matched by Franz Kafka whose three angst-ridden tales of grotesque alienation on the list were The Trial, The Castle and the Complete Stories. Three works by Leo Tolstoy made it: War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories. William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf both scored twice, along with the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Other than ‘Don Quixote’ in first place below, the remaining 99 titles are reproduced as published by De Norske Bokklubbene in alphabetical order and are not ranked.

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  1. 1.
    Don Quixote (P.S.)
    by Miguel de Cervantes

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  2. 2.
    Things Fall Apart
    by Chinua Achebe

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  3. 4.
    Pride and Prejudice
    by Jane Austen

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  4. 5.
    Balzac: Old Goriot (Landmarks of World Literature)
    by David Bellos

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  5. 6.
    Beckett Trilogy 'Molloy', 'Malone Dies', 'the Unnamable
    by Samuel Beckett

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  6. 7.
    The Decameron (Penguin Classics)
    by Giovanni Boccaccio

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  7. 8.
    Borges: Collected Fictions
    by Jorge Luis Borges

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  8. 9.
    Wuthering Heights (Classic Novels Series)
    by Emily Bronte

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  9. 10.
    Camus: The Stranger (Landmarks of World Literature (New))
    by Patrick McCarthy

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  10. 11.
    ?
    Poems of Paul Celan.
    by Paul. CELAN

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  11. 12.
    Journey to the End of the Night (New Directions Paperbook)
    by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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  12. 13.
    The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics)
    by Geoffrey Chaucer

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  13. 14.
    Nostromo (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by Joseph Conrad

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  14. 15.
    The Divine Comedy
    by Dante Alighieri

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  15. 16.
    Great Expectations (Penguin Classics)
    by Charles Dickens

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  16. 17.
    Jacques the Fatalist (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Denis Diderot

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  17. 19.
    Crime and Punishment (Enriched Classics)
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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  18. 20.
    ?

  19. 21.
    ?
    THE POSESSED
    by FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

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  20. 22.
    The Brothers Karamazov
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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  21. 23.
    Middlemarch (Signet Classics)
    by George Eliot

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  22. 24.
    Invisible Man: A Novel
    by Ralph Ellison

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  23. 25.
    Medea
    by Euripides

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  24. 26.
    Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text (Modern Library)
    by William Faulkner

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  25. 27.
    The Sound and the Fury
    by William Faulkner

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  26. 28.
    Madame Bovary (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Gustave Flaubert

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  27. 29.
    Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics)
    by Gustave Flaubert

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  28. 30.
    Gypsy Ballads: Romancero Gitano (Hispanic Classics)
    by Federico Garcia Lorca

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  29. 31.
    One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.)
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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  30. 32.
    Love in the Time of Cholera (MTI) (Vintage International)
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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  31. 34.
    Faust: Part One (Oxford World's Classic)
    by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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  32. 35.
    Dead Souls (Everyman's Library)
    by Nikolai Gogol

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  33. 36.
    The Tin Drum
    by Gunter Grass

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  34. 37.
    ?
    The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
    by Joao Guimaraes Rosa

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  35. 38.
    Hunger

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  36. 39.
    Old Man And The Sea (Scribner Classics)
    by Ernest Hemingway

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  37. 40.
    The Iliad (Collector's Library)

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  38. 41.
    The Odyssey (Penguin Classics)
    by Homer

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  39. 42.
    A Doll's House
    by Henrik, Ibsen

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  40. 43.
    The Book of Job and Ecclesiastes, or The Preacher
    by Anonymous

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  41. 44.
    James Joyce's Ulysses
    by Stuart Gilbert

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  42. 45.
    ?
    Franz Kafka The Complete Stories
    by Franz Kafka

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  43. 46.
    The Trial
    by Franz Kafka

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  44. 47.

  45. 49.
    The Sound of the Mountain
    by Yasunari Kawabata

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  46. 50.
    Zorba the Greek (Faber Fiction Classics)
    by Nikos Kazantzakis

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Created by ohnicole on Aug 31, 2007.
 

Comments

Untitled — 38 weeks ago

4 is a study guide for Balzac’s Old Goriot, not the novel itself


llull
Shambhala

enjoyed — 1 year ago

Hard to believe Henry Miller didn’t make the list, but I’m glad to see Montaigne, Rabelais and Rumi. And plenty of Dostoevsky!


Untitled — 1 year ago

added #7-100

they might not be the right versions, but at least a template is up :)