The 100 most meaningful books of all time

A 2002 survey of around 100 well-known authors from 54 countries voted for the "
most meaningful book of all time" in a poll organised by editors at the Norwegia
n Book Clubs in Oslo. Voters included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuen
tes and Norman Mailer. Miguel de Cervantes tale gained 50% more votes than any ot
her book, eclipsing works by Shakespeare, Homer and Tolstoy.
Ten authors got more than one book on to the list. After Cervantes, Fyodor Dosto
evsky emerged as the most worthwhile read with four books listed. The only Shake
speare plays the authors agreed on were Hamlet, King Lear and Othello. The Bard
was matched by Franz Kafka whose three angst-ridden tales of grotesque alienatio
n on the list were The Trial, The Castle and the Complete Stories. Three works b
y Leo Tolstoy made it: War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich
and Other Stories. William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf both scored twice, along
with the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Other than Don Quixote in first place below, the remaining 99 titles are reprodu
ced as published by De Norske Bokklubbene in alphabetical order and are not rank
ed.
Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes
Things fall apart Chinua Achebe
Fairy tales and stories Hans Christian Andersen
Pride and prejudice Jane Austen
Old Goriot Honore de Balzac
Trilogy: Molloy, Malone dies, The Unnamable Samuel Beckett
Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio
Collected fictions Jorge Luis Borges
Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
The Outsider (The Stranger) Albert Camus
Poems Paul Celan
Journey to the end of the night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer
Nostromo Joseph Conrad
The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri
Great expectations Charles Dickens
Jacques the fatalist and his master Denis Diderot
Berlin Alexanderplatz Alfred Doblin
Crime and punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Idiot Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Possessed Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Middlemarch George Eliot
Invisible man Ralph Ellison
Medea Euripides
Absalom, Absalom William Faulkner
The Sound and the fury William Faulkner
Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
A Sentimental education Gustave Flaubert
Gypsy Ballads Federico Garcia Lorca
One hundred years of solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in the time of cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dead souls Nikolai Gogol
The Tin Drum Gnter Grass
The Devil to pay in the backlands Joao Guimaraes Rosa
Hunger Knut Hamsun
The Old man and the sea Ernest Hemingway

The Iliad Homer

The Odyssey Homer
A Doll s house Henrik Ibsen
The Book of Job Anon
Ulysses James Joyce
The Complete Stories Franz Kafka
The Trial Franz Kafka
The Castle Franz Kafka
The Recognition of Sakuntala Kalidasa
The Sound of the mountain Yasunari Kawabata
Zorba the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis
Sons and lovers D H Lawrence
Independent people Halldor K Laxness
Complete poems Giacomo Leopardi
The Golden notebook Doris Lessing
Pippi Longstocking Astrid Lindgren
Diary of a madman and other stories Lu Xun
Mahabharata Anon
Children of Gebelawi Naguib Mahfouz
Buddenbrooks Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann
Moby Dick Herman Melville
Essays Michel de Montaigne
History Elsa Morante
Beloved Toni Morrison
The Tale of Genji Murasaki Shikibu
The Man without qualities Robert Musil
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Njal s saga
1984 George Orwell
Metamorphoses Ovid
The Book of Disquiet Fernando Pessoa
The Complete tales Edgar Allan Poe
Remembrance of things past Marcel Proust
Gargantua and Pantagruel Francois Rabelais
Pedro Paramo Juan Rulfo
The Mathnawi Jalalu l-Din Rumi
Midnight s children Salman Rushdie
The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard) Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz
A Season of migration to the north Tayeb Salih
Blindness Jose Saramago
Hamlet William Shakespeare
King Lear William Shakespeare
Othello William Shakespeare
Oedipus the King Sophocles
The Red and the black Stendhal
The Life and opinions of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
Confessions of Zeno Italo Svevo
Gulliver s travels Jonathan Swift
War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories Leo Tolstoy
Selected Stories Anton Chekhov
Thousand and One Nights
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
Ramayana Valmiki
The Aeneid Virgil
Leaves of grass Walt Whitman
Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf
To the lighthouse Virginia Woolf

Memoirs of Hadrian Marguerite Yourcenar