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.

Pages: 1

  1. 1.
    Don Quixote
    by Miguel De Cervantes

  2. 2.
    Things Fall Apart
    by Chinua Achebe

  3. 4.
    Pride and Prejudice
    by Jane Austen

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

  5. 6.
    Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
    by Samuel Beckett

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

  7. 8.
    Collected Fictions
    by Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

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

  11. 12.
    Journey to the End of the Night
    by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

  12. 13.
    The Canterbury Tales
    by Geoffrey Chaucer

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

  14. 15.

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

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

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

  18. 20.
    The Idiot
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  19. 21.
    ?
    THE POSESSED
    by FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

  20. 22.
    The Brothers Karamazov
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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

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

  23. 25.
    Medea - Literary Touchstone Classic
    by Euripides

  24. 26.
    Absalom, Absalom! (Modern Library)
    by William Faulkner

  25. 27.
    The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text
    by William Faulkner

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

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

  28. 31.
    One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.)
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  29. 32.
    Love in the Time of Cholera (Vintage International)
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  30. 34.
    Faust: Part One (Oxford World's Classic)
    by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  31. 35.
    Dead Souls (Everyman's Library)
    by Nikolai Gogol

  32. 36.
    The Tin Drum
    by Gunter Grass

  33. 38.
    Hunger

  34. 39.
    Old Man And The Sea (Scribner Classics)
    by Ernest Hemingway

  35. 41.
    The Odyssey (Penguin Classics)
    by Homer

  36. 42.
    A Doll's House
    by Henrik, Ibsen

  37. 43.
    The Book of Job and Ecclesiastes, or The Preacher
    by Anonymous

  38. 44.
    James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study
    by Stuart Gilbert

  39. 45.
    ?
    Franz Kafka The Complete Stories
    by Franz Kafka

  40. 46.
    The Trial
    by Franz Kafka

  41. 47.

  42. 49.
    The Sound of the Mountain
    by Yasunari Kawabata

  43. 50.
    Zorba the Greek (Faber Fiction Classics)
    by Nikos Kazantzakis

Pages: 1

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Created by ohnicole on Aug 31, 2007.
 

Comments

Untitled — 3 years ago

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

Untitled — 4 years ago

added #7-100

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




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