The 100 best books of all time

Today we bring you a list with the 100 best books ever according Norwegian Book Club. This list has been baptized with the name of "World Library" and what is tried is to bring together a large part of world literature, with books from all countries, cultures and times. The 100 best books in history could well be in the libraries of every home in the world, but how many do you have?

This list was formed by writers who were surveyed. Each of them had to propose a list with the 10 literary titles that for them were the best, their favorites, and therefore, the most recommended. We must point out that this list of the best books in history are completely alphabetical, it is not ordered according to its quality. Then we leave you with her. Have you read them all? Do you think there are still titles missing? For my taste, there are many oriental books missing and some other very popular work such as "The Miserables" by Víctor Hugo, but those who are (I have not read all of them, I base my opinion on those that I still have to read on literary reviews read by colleagues), I think they deserve the position they occupy.

World Library: The Best Books Ever

1. "Poem of Gilgamesh" (Anonymous XNUMXth century BC)
2. "Book of Job" (from the Bible. Anonymous XNUMXth century BC - IV BC)
3. "The Thousand and One Nights" (Anonymous 700–1500)
4. "Saga de Njál" (Anonymous XNUMXth century)
5. "Everything falls apart" (Chinua Achebe 1958)
6. "Children's stories" (Hans Christian Andersen 1835–37)
7. "Divine Comedy" (Dante Alighieri 1265–1321)
8. "Pride and Prejudice" (Jane Austen 1813)
9. "Papa Goriot" (Honoré de Balzac 1835)
10. "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unspeakable," a trilogy (Samuel Beckett 1951–53)
11. "Decameron" (Giovanni Boccaccio 1349–53)
12. "Fictions" (Jorge Luis Borges 1944–86)
13. "Wuthering Heights" (Emily Brontë 1847)
14. "The Stranger" (Albert Camus, 1942)
15. "Poems" (Paul Celan 1952)
16. "Journey to the End of the Night" (Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1932)
17. "Don Quixote de la Mancha" (Miguel de Cervantes 1605, 1615)
18. "The Canterbury Tales" (Geoffrey Chaucer XNUMXth century)
19. "Short stories" (Antón Chejov 1886)
20. "Nostromo" (Joseph Conrad 1904)
21. "Great Expectations" (Charles Dickens 1861)
22. "Jacques, the fatalist" (Denis Diderot 1796)
23. "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (Alfred Döblin 1929)
24. "Crime and punishment" (Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866)
25. "The idiot" (Fyodor Dostoevsky 1869)
26. "The demoniacs" (Fyodor Dostoevsky 1872)
27. "The Brothers Karamazov" (Fyodor Dostoevsky 1880)
28. "Middlemarch" (George Eliot 1871)
29. "The Invisible Man" (Ralph Ellison 1952)
30. "Medea" (Euripides 431 BC)
31. "Absalom, Absalom!" (William Faulkner 1936)
32. "The noise and the fury" (William Faulkner 1929)
33. "Madame Bovary" (Gustave Flaubert 1857)
34. "Sentimental education" (Gustave Flaubert 1869)
35. "Gypsy ballads" (Federico García Lorca 1928)
36. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (Gabriel García Márquez 1967)
37. "Love in the time of cholera" (Gabriel García Márquez 1985)
38. "Faust" (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1832)
39. "Dead souls" (Nikolai Gogol 1842)
40. "The Tin Drum" (Günter Grass 1959)
41. “Great Sertón: Sidewalks” (João Guimarães Rosa 1956)
42. "Hunger" (Knut Hamsun 1890)
43. "The Old Man and the Sea" (Ernest Hemingway 1952)
44. "Iliad" (Homer 850–750 BC)
45. "Odyssey" (Homer XNUMXth century BC)
46. "Dollhouse" (Henrik Ibsen 1879)
47. "Ulysses" (James Joyce 1922)
48. "Short stories" (Franz Kafka 1924)
49. "The process" (Franz Kafka 1925)
50. "The Castle" (Franz Kafka 1926)
51. "Shakuntala" (Kālidāsa XNUMXst century BC-XNUMXth AD)
52. "The sound of the mountain" (Yasunari Kawabata 1954)
53. "Zorba, the Greek" (Nikos Kazantzakis 1946)
54. "Sons and Lovers" (DH Lawrence 1913)
55. "Independent People" (Halldór Laxness 1934–35)
56. "Poems" (Giacomo Leopardi 1818)
57. "The Golden Notebook" (Doris Lessing 1962)
58. "Pippi Longstocking" (Astrid Lindgren 1945)
59. "Diary of a madman" (Lu Xun 1918)
60. "Children of our neighborhood" (Naguib Mahfuz 1959)
61. "The Buddenbrooks" (Thomas Mann 1901)
62. "The Magic Mountain" (Thomas Mann 1924)
63. "Moby-Dick" (Herman Melville 1851)
64. "Essays" (Michel de Montaigne 1595)
65. "The story" (Elsa Morante 1974)
66. "Beloved" (Toni Morrison 1987)
67. "Genji Monogatari" (Murasaki Shikibu XNUMXth century)
68. "The Man Without Qualities" (Robert Musil 1930–32)
69. "Lolita" (Vladimir Nabokov 1955)
70. "1984" (George Orwell 1949)
71. "The metamorphoses" (Ovid, XNUMXst century AD)
72. "Book of restlessness" (Fernando Pessoa 1928)
73. "Tales" (Edgar Allan Poe XNUMXth century)
74. "In search of lost time" (Marcel Proust)
75. "Gargantua and Pantagruel" (François Rabelais)
76. "Pedro Páramo" (Juan Rulfo 1955)
77. Masnavi Rumi 1258–73
78. "Sons of Midnight" (Salman Rushdie 1981)
79. "Bostan" (Saadi 1257)
80. "Time to migrate north" (Tayeb Salih 1966)
81. "Essay on blindness" (José Saramago 1995)
82. "Hamlet" (William Shakespeare 1603)
83. "King Lear" (William Shakespeare 1608)
84. "Othello" (William Shakespeare 1609)
85. "Oedipus the King" (Sophocles 430 BC)
86. "Red and black" (Stendhal 1830)
87. "Life and opinions of the gentleman Tristram Shandy" (Laurence Sterne 1760)
88. "The conscience of Zeno" (Italo Svevo 1923)
89. "Gulliver's Travels" (Jonathan Swift 1726)
90. "War and peace" (Lev Tolstoy 1865–1869)
91. "Anna Karenina" (Lev Tolstoy 1877)
92. "The death of Ivan Ilyich" (Lev Tolstoy 1886)
93. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (Mark Twain 1884)
94. "Ramayana" (Valmiki XNUMXrd century BC-XNUMXrd century AD)
95. “Aeneid” (Virgil 29–19 BC)
96. "Mahabhárata" (Viasa XNUMXth century BC)
97. "Blades of Grass" (Walt Whitman 1855)
98. "Mrs. Dalloway" (Virginia Woolf 1925)
99. "To the lighthouse" (Virginia Woolf 1927)
100. "Memoirs of Hadrian" (Marguerite Yourcenar 1951)

Authors surveyed for the list of the best books in history

These are the authors those who were surveyed to prepare said list of the 100 best books ever:

• Chinghiz Aitmatov (Kyrgyzstan)
• Ahmet Altan (Turkey)
• Aharon Appelfel (Israel)
• Paul Auster (United States)
• Félix de Azúa (Spain)
• Julian Barnes (UK)
• Simin Behbahani (Iran)
• Robert Bly (United States)
• André Brink (South Africa)
• Suzanne Brøgger (Denmark)
• S. Byatt (UK)
• Peter Carey (Australian)
• Martha Cerda (Mexico)
• Jung Chang (China / UK)
• Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe, France)
• Mia Couto (Mozambique)
• Jim Crace (UK)
• Edwidge Danticat (Haiti)
• Bei Dao (Chinese)
• Assia Djebar (Algeria)
• Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (Iran)
• Jean Echenoz (France)
• Kerstin Ekman (Sweden)
• Nathan Englander (United States)
• Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Germany)
• Emilio Estévez (United States)
• Nuruddin Farah (Somalia)
• Kjartan Fløgstad (Norway)
• Jon Fosse (Norway)
• Janet Frame (New Zealand)
• Marilyn French (United States)
• Carlos Fuentes (Mexico)
• Izzat Ghazzawi (Palestine)
• Amitav Ghosh (India)
• Pere Gimferrer (Spain)
• Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)
• David Grossmann (Israel)
• Einar Már Guðmundsson (Iceland)
• Seamus Heaney (Ireland)
• Christoph Hein (Germany)
• Aleksandar Hemon (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
• Alice Hoffman (United States)
• Chenjerai Hove (Zimbabwe)
• Sonallah Ibrahim (Egypt)
• John Irving (United States)
• C. Jersild (Sweden)
• Yasar Kemal (Turkey)
• Jan Kjærstad (Norway)
• Milan Kundera (Czech Republic / France)
• Leena Lander (Finland)
• John Le Carré (UK)
• Siegfried Lenz (Germany)
• Doris Lessing (UK)
• Astrid Lindgren (Sweden)
• Viivi Luik (Estonian)
• Amin Maalouf (Lebanon / France)
• Claudio Magris (Italy)
• Norman Mailer (United States)
• Tomas Eloy Martinez (Argentina)
• Frank McCourt (Ireland / United States)
• Gita Mehta (India)
• Ana María Nóbrega (Brazil)
• Rohinton Mistry (India / Canada)
• Abdel Rahman Munif (Saudi Arabia)
• Herta Müller (Romania)
• S. Naipaul (Trinidad and Tobago / UK)
• Cees Nooteboom (Netherlands)
• Ben Okri (Nigeria / UK)
• Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
• Sara Paretsky (United States)
• Jayne Anne Phillips (United States)
• Valentin Rasputin (Russia)
• João Ubaldo Ribeiro (Brazil)
• Alain Robbe-Grillet (France)
• Salman Rushdie (India / UK)
• Nawal El Saadawi (Egypt)
• Hanan al-Shaykh (Lebanon)
• Nihad Sirees (Syria)
• Göran Sonnevi (Sweden)
• Susan Sontag (United States)
• Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
• Gerold Späth (Switzerland)
• Graham Swift (UK)
• Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
• Fouad al-Tikerly (Iraq)
• M. Thomas (UK)
• Adam Thorpe (UK)
• Kirsten Thorup (Denmark)
• Alexander Tkachenko (Russia)
• Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Indonesia)
• Olga Tokarczuk (Poland)
• Michel Tournier (France)
• Jean-Philippe Toussaint (Belgium)
• Mehmed Uzun (Turkey)
• Nils-Aslak Valkeapää
• Vassilis Vassilikos (Greece)
• Yvonne Vera (Zimbabwe)
• Fay Weldon (UK)
• Christa Wolf (Germany)
• B. Yehoshua (Israel)
• Spôjmaï Zariâb (Afghanistan)

Once the list of books has been reread, it could well be recommended for those undecided who want to start reading but do not know where to do it ... Regarding what concerns me, I am going to take advantage of the next Book Fair to get hold of some titles of these best books in history, as they are: "The invisible man" by Ralph Ellison, "Children of midnight" by Salman Rushdie and "Big hopes" by Charles Dickens. I have many others to read from the list, but at the moment these are the ones that have caught my attention the most. Which one would you start with?