Articles

The best books of all time

Published: July 25, 2002

Norwegian Book Clubs asked 100 well-known writers--Doris Lessing, Carlos Fuentes, Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka, among others--from 54 countries to vote for the "most meaningful book of all time." Here are the results:

Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart

Hans Christian Andersen
Fairy Tales and Stories

Anonymous
The Book of Job

Anonymous
The Epic of Gilgamesh

Anonymous
Mahabharata

Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice

Honore de Balzac
Old Goriot

Samuel Beckett
Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

Giovanni Boccaccio
Decameron

Jorge Luis Borges
Collected Fictions

Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights

Albert Camus
The Stranger

Paul Celan
Poems

Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Journey to the End of the Night

Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote

Geoffrey Chaucer
Canterbury Tales

Anton Chekhov
Selected Stories; Thousand and One Nights

Joseph Conrad
Nostromo

Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy

Charles Dickens
Great Expectations

Denis Diderot
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master

Alfred Doblin
Berlin Alexanderplatz

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov

George Eliot
Middlemarch

Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man

Euripides
Medea

William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury

Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education

Federico García Lorca
Gypsy Ballads

Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust

Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls

Günter Grass
The Tin Drum

Joao Guimaraes Rosa
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands

Knut Hamsun
Hunger

Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea

Homer
The Iliad; The Odyssey

Henrik Ibsen
A Doll's House

James Joyce
Ulysses

Franz Kafka
The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle

Kalidasa
The Recognition of Sakuntala

Yasunari Kawabata
The Sound of the Mountain

Nikos Kazantzakis
Zorba the Greek

D.H. Lawrence
Sons and Lovers

Halldor K. Laxness
Independent People

Giacomo Leopardi
Complete Poems

Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook

Astrid Lindgren
Pippi Longstocking

Lu Xun
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories

Naguib Mahfouz
Children of Gebelawi

Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks; The Magic Mountain

Herman Melville
Moby Dick

Michel de Montaigne
Essays

Elsa Morante
History

Toni Morrison
Beloved

Murasaki Shikibu
The Tale of Genji

Robert Musil
The Man Without Qualities

Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita; Njal's Saga

George Orwell
1984

Ovid
Metamorphoses

Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

Edgar Allan Poe
The Complete Tales

Marcel Proust
Remembrance of Things Past

Francois Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel

Juan Rulfo
Pedro Paramo

Jalalu'l-Din Rumi
The Mathnawi

Salman Rushdie
Midnight's Children

Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz
The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard)

Tayeb Salih
A Season of Migration to the North

Jose Saramago
Blindness

William Shakespeare
Hamlet; King Lear; Othello

Sophocles
Oedipus the King

Stendhal
The Red and the Black

Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Italo Svevo
Confessions of Zeno

Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels

Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Valmiki
Ramayana

Virgil
The Aeneid

Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass

Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse

Marguerite Yourcenar
Memoirs of Hadrian

Source: Toronto Globe and Mail

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