Sunday, June 28, 2009

Newsweek: Top 100 Books

First posted 6/9/2020.

Newsweek:

Top 100 Books

Newsweek’s list was assembled by aggregating ten other lists. Unfortunately, the ten are not all referenced, but the article does say it included Modern Library, Oprah Winfrey’s book club selections, a reading list for St. John’s College, and Britain’s Daily Telegraph list of “the perfect library.”

  1. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)
  2. George Orwell 1984 (1949)
  3. James Joyce Ulysses (1922)
  4. Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955)
  5. William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  6. Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
  7. Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927)
  8. Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) / The Iliad (800 B.C.)
  9. Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
  10. Dante Alighieri Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) (1304)

  11. Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales (1387)
  12. Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
  13. George Eliot Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life (1872)
  14. Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
  15. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
  16. Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
  17. Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
  18. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
  19. Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
  20. Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)

  21. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
  22. Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981)
  23. Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
  24. Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
  25. James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son (1955)
  26. Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (1840)
  27. Charles Darwin The Origin of Species (1859)
  28. Herodotus The Histories of Herodotus (5th century)
  29. Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract (1762)
  30. Karl Marx Das Kapital (1867)

  31. Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (1532)
  32. St. Augustine of Hippo The Confessions (400 A.D.)
  33. Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651)
  34. Thucydides The History of the Peloponnesian War (5th century)
  35. J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55)
  36. A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
  37. C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series, 1950-1956)
  38. E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924)
  39. Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
  40. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

  41. various writers The Holy Bible: King James Version (1451)
  42. Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962)
  43. William Faulkner Light in August (1932)
  44. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903)
  45. Jean Rhys Wide Saragosso Sea (1966)
  46. Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857)
  47. John Milton Paradise Lost (1667)
  48. Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877)
  49. William Shakespeare Hamlet (1603)
  50. William Shakespeare King Lear (1608)

  51. William Shakespeare Othello (1609)
  52. William Shakespeare The Sonnets (1609)
  53. Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass (1855)
  54. Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
  55. Rudyard Kipling Kim (1901)
  56. Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
  57. Toni Morrison Song of Solomon (1977)
  58. Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
  59. Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
  60. Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

  61. George Orwell Animal Farm (1954)
  62. William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
  63. Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966)
  64. Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)
  65. Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time (1913)
  66. Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939)
  67. William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930)
  68. Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
  69. Robert Graves I, Claudius (1934)
  70. Carson McCullers The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

  71. D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913)
  72. Robert Penn Warren All the King’s Men (1946)
  73. James Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
  74. E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
  75. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
  76. Elie Wiesel Night (Un di Velt Hot Geshvign) (1958)
  77. John Updike Rabbit, Run (1960)
  78. Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920)
  79. Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
  80. Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy (1925)

  81. Nathanael West The Day of the Locust (1939)
  82. Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer (1934)
  83. Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon (1929)
  84. Philip Pullman His Dark Materials (trilogy: 1995-2000)
  85. Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
  86. Sigmund Freud The Interpreation of Dreams (1900)
  87. Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
  88. Mao Zedong Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Little Red Book) (1966)
  89. William James The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
  90. Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945)

  91. Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)
  92. John Maynard Keynes General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936)
  93. Joseph Conrad Lord Jim (1900)
  94. Robert Graves Goodbye to All That (1929)
  95. John Kenneth Galbraith The Affluent Society (1958)
  96. William Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908)
  97. Alex Haley & Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
  98. Lytton Strachey Eminent Victorians (1918)
  99. Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)
  100. Winston Churchill The Second World War (6 volumes, 1953)

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