Pour une Bibliotheque Ideale

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In the early 1950s Raymond Queneau asked several dozen French (or living in France) authors and critics to list the hundred books they would choose if they had to limit themselves to that number. He reproduced all their responses in the book Pour une Bibliothèque Idéale (Gallimard, 1956), along with the overall top 100 list reproduced bellow.

The list of respondents can be seen at

http://web.archive.org/web/20010223073820/w3.tvi.cc.nm.us/~rswigg/BIAuthorsPolled.html

I’m not sure if all of them have a list in the book, or just an answer explaining why they did not vote.

On the above page you can also find a link to Queneau’s own list.

Two more individual lists from the book are also online

Henry Miller’s:

http://web.archive.org/web/20001021225726/literarycritic.com/miller.htm

and Marianne Moore’s:

http://web.archive.org/web/20001022025805/literarycritic.com/moore1.htm

Other famous names include Jean Anouilh, Andre Breton, Paul Claudel (the only one who had a book included in the overall top 100), Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, and Georges Simenon.

Pages: 1

  1. 1.
  2. 2.
    The Bible

  3. 3.
    In Search of Lost Time: Proust 6-pack (Proust Complete)
    by Marcel Proust
  4. 4.
    Montaigne: Essays
    by Michel de Montaigne
  5. 5.
    Gargantua and Pantagruel
    by François Rabelais
  6. 6.
    The Flowers of Evil (Wesleyan Poetry)
    by Charles Baudelaire
  7. 7.
    Pensées
    by Blaise Pascal
  9. 9.
    Confessions (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  10. 10.
    The Red and the Black (Modern Library Classics)
    by Stendhal
  11. 11.
    The Dialogues of Plato (Bantam Classic)
    by Plato
  12. 12.
    The Charterhouse of Parma
    by Stendhal
  13. 13.
    Francois Villon's The Legacy & The Testament
    by Louis Simpson
  14. 14.
    Rimbaud: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)
    by Arthur Rimbaud
  15. 15.
    The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz (Complete)
    by Cardinal de Retz
  16. 16.
    War and Peace
    by Leo Tolstoy
  17. 17.
    Memoirs: Duc de Saint-Simon Volume One: 1691-1709
    by Duc De Saint-Simon
  18. 18.
    Don Quixote
    by Miguel De Cervantes
  20. 20.
    Collected Works of Aeschylus
    by Aeschylus
  21. 21.
    The Brothers Karamazov
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  22. 22.
    Collected Poems and Other Verse (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Stéphane Mallarmé
  23. 23.
    The Fables of La Fontaine
    by Jean De La Fontaine
  24. 24.
    Faust (Bantam Classics) (Part I) (English and German Edition)
    by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  25. 25.
    Alcools: Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
    by Guillaume Apollinaire
  26. 26.
    A Sentimental Education (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Gustave Flaubert
  27. 27.
    The Odyssey
    by Homer
  28. 28.
    Corneille: Three Masterpieces (Absolute Classics)
    by Pierre Corneille
  29. 29.
  30. 30.
    Memoires d'Outre Tombe
    by Francois­ Rene de Chateaubriand
  31. 31.
    ?
    THE NOVELS OF HONORE DE BALZAC (45 VOLUMES)The Human Comedy
    by HONORE DE BALZAC
  32. 32.
    The Complete Plays of Sophocles
    by Sophocles
  33. 33.
    Ulysses
    by James Joyce
  34. 34.
    Dangerous Liaisons (Penguin Classics)
    by Pierre-Ambrois-Francois Choderlos de Laclos
  35. 35.
    Gulliver's Travels
    by Jonathan Swift
  36. 36.
    Poems of Paul Verlaine
    by Paul Verlaine
  37. 37.
    Madame Bovary
    by Gustave Flaubert
  38. 38.
    A Season in Hell
    by Arthur Rimbaud
  39. 39.
    A Discourse on the Method (Oxford World's Classics)
    by René Descartes
  40. 40.
    Manon Lescaut
    by Francoise Prevost
  41. 41.
    Selected Poems (Penguin Classics)
    by Pierre Ronsard
  42. 42.
    Aristophanes: The Complete Plays
    by Aristophanes
  43. 43.
  44. 44.
    Ethics (Penguin Classics)
    by Benedict de Spinoza
  45. 45.
    Selected Poems
    by Friedrich Holderlin
  46. 46.
  47. 47.
    Robinson Crusoe
    by Daniel Defoe
  48. 48.
    The Confessions of Saint Augustine
    by St. Augustine of Hippo
  49. 49.
    Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror)
    by Comte de Lautreamont
  50. 50.
    Les Miserables
    by Victor Hugo

Pages: 1

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Created by frbrown on Oct 10, 2008.
 

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