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Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List

Declaring the best book ever written is tricky business. Who’s to say what the best is? We went one step further: we crunched the numbers from 10 top books lists (Modern Library, the New York Public Library, St. John’s College reading list, Oprah’s, and more) to come up with The Top 100 Books of All Time. It’s a list of lists — a meta-list. Let the debate begin.

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1. War and Peace (Vintage Classics)
by Leo Tolstoy
  
2. Nineteen Eighty-four (Penguin Modern Classics)
by George Orwell
  
3. Ulysses (Penguin Modern Classics)
by James Joyce
  
4. Lolita (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
by Vladimir Nabokov
  
5. The Sound and the Fury (Norton Critical Editions)
by William Faulkner
  
6. Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
  
7. To The Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
  
8. Iliad and Odyssey boxed set
by Homer
  
9. Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics)
by Jane Austen
  
10. The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri
  
11.
?
 The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics)
by Geoffrey Chaucer
  
12. Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics)
by Jonathan Swift
  
13. Middlemarch (Oxford World's Classics)
by George Eliot
  
14.
?
 Things Fall Apart (Norton Critical Editions)
by Chinua Achebe
  
15. The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
  
16. Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
  
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.)
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  
18. The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  
19. Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
  
20. Beloved
by Toni Morrison
  
21. The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition)
by John Steinbeck
  
22. Midnight's Children: A Novel
by Salman Rushdie
  
23. Brave New World (P.S.)
by Aldous Huxley
  
24. Mrs. Dalloway (Penguin Modern Classics)
by Virginia Woolf
  
25.
?
 Native Son (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)
by Richard Wright
  
26. Democracy in America (Penguin Classics)
by Alexis de Tocqueville
  
27. On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection (Thrift Edition)
by Charles Darwin
  
28. The Histories (Penguin Classics)
by Herodotus
  
29. The Social Contract and Discourses
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  
30. Karl Marx's "Das Kapital": A Modern-day Interpretation of a True Classic (Infinite Success Series)
by Steve Shipside
  
31. The Prince
by Niccolo Machiavelli
  
32. Confessions. Saint Augustine (Oxford World's Classics)
by Henry Chadwick
  
33.
?
 Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes (Oxford World's Classics)
by Thomas Hobbes
  
34. The History of the Peloponnesian War
by Thucydides Thucydides
  
35. The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary, One Vol. Edition
by J.R.R. Tolkien
  
36. Winnie-the-Pooh (Pooh Original Edition)
by A. A. Milne
  
37. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia)
by C.S. Lewis
  
38. A Passage to India (Penguin Classics)
by E.M. Forster
  
39. On the Road (Penguin Classics)
by Jack Kerouac
  
40. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Pernnial Moderns Classics)
by Harper Lee
  
41. Holy Bible
by Anonymous
  
42. A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess
  
43. Light in August
by William Faulkner
  
44. The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford World's Classics)
by W. E. B. Du Bois
  
45. Wide Sargasso Sea (Essential.penguin)
by Jean Rhys
  
46. Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)
by Gustave Flaubert
  
47. Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics)
by John Milton
  
48. Anna Karenina (Oprah's Book Club)
by Leo Tolstoy
  
49. Hamlet (Folger Shakespeare Library)
by William Shakespeare
  
50. King Lear (New Folger Library Shakespeare)
by William Shakespeare
  
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Created by pjboud on Jul 04, 2009.