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The World Library: The 100 best books of all time as compiled by Boken magazine

This list was compiled by votes from Swedish experts and was actually published around 1985, but a photocopy of it has been lying around in my office ever since. Thought I’d share it, since its significance for upper secondary school students in Sweden was massive at the time.

The Swedish magazine "Boken" (The Book) has been around for some 20 years claiming to be the biggest Nordic literary magazine. The fact that the magazine is defunct just one year after its editor in chief passed away in 2008 says something about the literary awareness in Sweden …

I tried to squeeze in as many English translations I could, though the list is heavily biased towards Swedish literature.

http://www.tidningen-boken.com

(found at: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4rldsbiblioteket)

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1. Watership Down: A Novel
by Richard Adams
 
2.
?
Drottningens juvelsmycke
by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist
 
3. The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
 
4. The Flowers of Evil (Oxford World's Classics)
by Charles Baudelaire
 
5.
?
The Bible
by
 
6. Kallocain
by Karin Boye
 
7. Death of Virgil
by Hermann Broch
 
8.
?
The Long Ships.: A Saga of the Viking Age
by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson
 
9.
?
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte
 
10.
?
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
 
11. The Baron in the Trees
by Italo Calvino
 
12.
?
The Stranger
by Albert Camus (Tr. Matthew Ward)
 
13. The Lost Steps
by Alejo Carpentier
 
14. Alice in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
 
15. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night (Landmarks of World Literature)
by John Sturrock
 
16.
?
Don Quijote
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
 
17. Heart of Darkness
by Joseph, Conrad
 
18.
?
The Divine Comedy (Borders Classics)  
19.
?
Samuels bok
by Sven Delblanc
 
20.
?
Dickens, Charles-The Pickwick Papers  
21. David Copperfield (Penguin Classics)
by Charles Dickens
 
22.
?
The brothers Karamasov: Selections (The Great books. Third year)
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
 
23.
?
The Idiot By Fyodor Dostoyevski  
24.
?
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
 
25.
?
An American Tragedy
by Theodore Dreiser
 
26.
?
Hunden
by Kerstin Ekman
 
27. Second-Class Citizen
by Buchi Emecheta
 
28.
?
LIGHT IN AUGUST
by William Faulkner
 
29.
?
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
 
30.
?
Stad-serien
by Per Anders Fogelström
 
31.
?
Simons Family: A Novel of Mothers and Sons
by Marianne Fredriksson
 
32.
?
The Women's Room
by Marilyn French
 
33.
?
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
 
34. The Counterfeiters: A Novel
by Andre Gide
 
35. Faust I & II (Goethe : The Collected Works, Vol 2)
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 
36.
?
Childhood
by Maxim Gorky
 
37. The Wind in the Willows (Signet Classics)
by Kenneth Grahame
 
38. Brighton Rock: (Penguin Classic Deluxe Edition) (Penguin Classics Deluxe Editio)
by Graham Greene
 
39. The Good Soldier Svejk: and His Fortunes in the World War (Penguin Classics)
by Jaroslav Hasek
 
40. Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
 
41. The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
 
42.
?
The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
 
43.
?
Steppenwolf
by Herman Hesse
 
44. The Odyssey
by Homer
 
45.
?
The World According to Garp
by John Irving
 
46.
?
Efter floden
by P C Jersild
 
47.
?
Hans nådes tid
by Eyvind Johnson
 
48.
?
Ulysses By James Joyce
by James Joyce
 
49. The Trial
by Franz Kafka
 
50.
?
America by Franz Kafka  
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Created by almq88 on Apr 05, 2009.