Those who passionately love books cherish the dream of reading the best books of all time while still they are alive. Making a list of best books whether in fiction or non-fiction is a controversial and difficult task as tastes and opinions of people vary from one another.
“The World Library is a list of the 100 best books, as proposed by one hundred writers from fifty-four different countries, compiled and organized in 2002 by the Norwegian Book Club . This list endeavours to reflect world literature, with books from all countries, cultures, and time periods. Eleven of the books included on the list are written by women, eighty-five are written by men and four have an unknown author.
Each writer had to select his or her own list of ten books.
The books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way; the organizers have stated that “they are all on an equal footing,” with the exception of Don Quixote which was given the distinction “best literary work ever written.” The following list organizes the works alphabetically by author” (Source: wikipedia)
The List
1) To the Lighthouse
Buy From Amazon
2) Memoirs of Hadrian
Buy From Amazon
3) Mrs Dalloway
Buy From Amazon
4) Leaves of Grass
Buy From Amazon
5) The Mahabharata
Buy From Amazon
6) The Aeneid
Buy From Amazon
7) The Ramayana
Buy From Amazon
8) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Buy From Amazon
9) The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Buy From Amazon
10) Anna Karenina
Buy From Amazon
11) War and Peace
Buy From Amazon
12) Gulliver’s Travels
Buy From Amazon
13) Confessions of Zeno
Buy From Amazon
14) Tristram Shandy. Laurence Sterne
Buy From Amazon
15) The Red And The Black
Buy From Amazon
16) Oedipus the King
Buy From Amazon
17) Othello
Buy From Amazon
18) King Lear
Buy From Amazon
19) Hamlet
Buy From Amazon
20) Blindness
Buy From Amazon
21) Season of Migration to the North
Buy From Amazon
22) The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard), Books I and II
Buy From Amazon
23) Midnight’s Children
Buy From Amazon
24) The Masnavi
Buy From Amazon
25) Pedro Paramo
Buy From Amazon
26) Gargantua and Pantagruel
27) In Search of Lost Time
Buy From Amazon
28) Tales
Buy From Amazon
29) The Book of Disquiet
Buy From Amazon
30) The Metamorphoses
Buy From Amazon
31) Nineteen Eighty-Four
Buy From Amazon
32) Lolita
Buy From Amazon
33) The Man Without Qualities
Buy From Amazon
34) The Tale of Genji
Buy From Amazon
35) Beloved
Buy From Amazon
36) History
Buy From Amazon
37) The Essays
Buy From Amazon
38) Moby-Dick
Buy From Amazon
39) The Magic Mountain
Buy From Amazon
40) Buddenbrooks
Buy From Amazon
41) Children of Gebelawi
Buy From Amazon
42) Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Buy From Amazon
43) Pippi Longstocking
Buy From Amazon
44) The Golden Notebook
Buy From Amazon
45) Leopardi: Poems
Buy From Amazon
46) Independent People
Buy From Amazon
47) Sons and Lovers
Buy From Amazon
48) Zorba the Greek
Buy From Amazon
49) The Sound of the Mountain
Buy From Amazon
50) Abhijana Sakuntalam
Buy From Amazon
51) The Castle
Buy From Amazon
52) The Trial
Buy From Amazon
53) The Complete Stories
Buy From Amazon
54) Ulysses
Buy From Amazon
55) A Doll
Buy From Amazon
56) The Odyssey
Buy From Amazon
57) The Iliad
Buy From Amazon
58) The Old Man and the Sea
Buy From Amazon
59) Hunger
Buy From Amazon
60) The Tin Drum
Buy From Amazon
61) Dead Souls
Buy From Amazon
62) Faust
Buy From Amazon
63) Love in the Time of Cholera
Buy From Amazon
64) One Hundred Years of Solitude
Buy From Amazon
65) Gypsy Ballads
Buy From Amazon
66) A Sentimental Education
Buy From Amazon
67) MADAME BOVARY
Buy From Amazon
68) The Sound and the Fury
Buy From Amazon
69) Absalom, Absalom!
Buy From Amazon
70) Medea
Buy From Amazon
71) Invisible Man
Invisible Man
Buy From Amazon
72) Middlemarch
Buy From Amazon
73) The Brothers Karamazov
Buy From Amazon
74) The Possessed
Buy From Amazon
75) The Idiot
Buy From Amazon
76) Crime and Punishment
Buy From Amazon
77) Berlin Alexanderplatz
Buy From Amazon
78) Jacques The Fatalist
Buy From Amazon
79) Great Expectations
Buy From Amazon
80) Nostromo
Buy From Amazon
81) Anton Chekhov-Stories
Buy From Amazon
82) The Canterbury Tales
Buy From Amazon
83) Don Quixote
Buy From Amazon
84) Journey to the End of the Night
Buy From Amazon
85) Paul Celan: 70 Poems
Buy From Amazon
86) Camus: The Stranger
Buy From Amazon
87) Wuthering Heights
Buy From Amazon
88) Ficciones
Buy From Amazon
89) The Decameron
Buy From Amazon
90) Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable: A Trilogy
Buy From Amazon
91) Le Pere Goriot
Buy From Amazon
92) Pride and Prejudice
Buy From Amazon
93) Njal’s Saga
Buy From Amazon
94) One Thousand and One Nights
Buy From Amazon
95) The Book of Job
Buy From Amazon
96) The Epic of Gilgamesh
Buy From Amazon
97) The Divine Comedy
Buy From Amazon
98) Fairy Tales
Buy From Amazon
99) Things Fall Apart
Buy From Amazon
100) The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (“”The Devil in the Street, In the Middle of the Whirlwind”)
Buy From Amazon
LIST OF AUTHORS WHO PROPOSED THE ABOVE BOOKS