The 100 Most Meaningful Books of All Time

Selected by around 100 authors from 54 countries in a poll organized by the Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo.  Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes received more votes than any other book, otherwise, the list is unranked.  For more information, see the article from the Guardian.

	Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart Achebe's masterpiece tells the story of Okonkwo, strongman of an Ibo village in Nigeria, as he witnesses the destruction of his culture and the loss of his own place within it.
	Hans Christian Andersen. Fairy Tales and Stories "The Princess and the Pea", "The Little Mermaid", and other great Andersen fairy tales have enchanted children since the first ones appeared in Danish in the 1830s and '40s.
	Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice A headstrong young woman and her aristocratic suitor must overcome their respective impediments to a happy ending--his pride must be humbled and her prejudice dissolved. The consummate artistry of the author transforms this effervescent tale of a rural romance into a witty, shrewdly observed satire of English country life.
	Honore de Balzac. Old Goriot Balzac's great theme was money, and he explored its uses and abuses with all the particularity of the masterful poet he was. Old Goriot, betrayed by rapacious daughters, and Rastignac, an ambitious provincial youth alive to his opportunities, form the twin foci around which the grasping Parisian society of the 1820s revolves, in this, his most economical and universally loved novel.
	Samuel Beckett. Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
	Giovanni Boccaccio. Decameron An entertaining series of 100 stories told in a country villa outside the city of Florence by ten young noble men and women seeking to escape the plague. Vivid portraits of people from all stations in life.
	Jorge Luis Borges. Collected Fictions
	Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights Heathcliff comes to the brooding mansion of Wuthering Heights as an orphan child. Cathy is the daughter of the wealthy family that takes him in. They fall in love but cannot be together, and yet they cannot stay apart.
	Albert Camus. The Stranger Story of a man who commits a pointless murder, in which the author asks if there is a God or just a cold indifferent universe.
	Paul Celan. Poems
	Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Journey to the End of the Night The picaresque adventures of Bardamu move from the battlefields of World War I, to French West Africa, the United States, and back to France in a style of prose that's lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilariously scathing toward nearly everybody and everything.
	Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quixote Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain.
	Geoffrey Chaucer. Canterbury Tales Chaucer's most celebrated work, The Canterbury Tales (c.1387), in which a group of pilgrims entertain each other with stories on the road to Canterbury, is a masterpiece of narration, description, and character portrayal. The tellers and their tales are as fresh and vivid today as they were six centuries ago.
	Joseph Conrad. Nostromo In his evocation of the republic of Costaguana, set amid the exotic and grandiose scenery of South America, Conrad reveals not only the lives and fates of his characters but also the physical and political composition of a whole country.
	Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy The poem is a spiritual autobiography in journey form - the poet travels from the dark circles of the Inferno, up the mountain of Purgatory, where Virgil, his guide, leaves him to encounter Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise.
	Charles Dickens. Great Expectations "Great Expectations" is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mastery and a profound examination of moral values. Here, some of Dickens's most memorable characters come to play their part in a story whose title itself reflects the deep irony that shaped Dickens's searching reappraisal of the Victorian middle class.
	Denis Diderot. Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
	Alfred Doblin. Berlin Alexanderplatz
	Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Brothers Karamazov A tragedy of Shakespearean force and intensity, Dostoyevsky's drama of parricide and family rivalry chronicles the murder of depraved landowner Fyodor Karamazov and the subsequent investigation and trial.
	Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment A desperate young man plans the perfect crime -- the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old women no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law -- if it will ultimately benefit humanity? Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in a garret in the gloomy slums of St. Petersburg, carries out his grotesque scheme and plunges into a hell of persecution, madness and terror.
	Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Idiot The tragic story of the saintly Prince Myshkin's undoing at the hands of unsympathetic friends.
	Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Possessed
	George Eliot. Middlemarch With sure and subtle touch, Eliot paints a luminous and spacious landscape of life in a provincial town, interweaving her themes with a proliferation of characters: an innocent idealist; a self-defeated young doctor; a naive young woman; and a cold man, who "lives too much with the dead".
	Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man An African-American man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.
	Euripides. Medea A woman is driven by emotion beyond the brink of rationality.
	William Faulkner. Absalom, Absalom! The story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."
	William Faulkner. The Sound And The Fury By turns lyrical and dramatic, hilarious and heartbreaking, The Sound and the Fury is the tragic story of beautiful Caddy Comapson and the dissolution of her family.
	Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary Set amidst the stifling atmosphere of 19th-century bourgeois France, Flaubert's classic is at once an unsparing depiction of a woman's gradual corruption and a savagely ironic study of human stupidity.
	Gustave Flaubert. A Sentimental Education Frederic Moreau, a moderately gifted young provincial, is ambitious in many ways: he dreams of fame, of vast wealth, of literary and artistic achievement, of a grand passion. On the Paris paddle-steamer which transports him to his home town of Nogent-sur-Seine at the outset of the novel, he becomes transfixed by the demure Madame Arnoux and, back in Paris, cultivates her ebullient and enterprising husband in order to be near her. Frederic's devotion fluctuates like his other enthusiasms, and he is caught up in the intense pleasures and the inevitable ennuis of Parisian life.
	Federico Garcia Lorca. Gypsy Ballads
	Gabriel Garcia Marquez Love in the Time of Cholera Set in a country on the Caribbean coast of South America, this is a story about a woman and two men and their entwined lives.
	Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude A classic of world literature for all time--and probably Marquez's most famous work. "The first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race . . . with more lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry than is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man".--Washington Post Book World.
	The Epic of Gilgamesh The Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates from the third millenium BC, is one of the finest surviving epic poems in world literature.Miraculously preserved on clay tablets deciphered only in the last century, the cycle of poems collected around the character of Gilgamesh, the great king of Uruk, tells of his long and arduous journey to the Spring of Youth, of his encounters with monsters and gods and of his friendship with Enkidu, the wild man from the hills.
	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust In his retelling of the tale of the legendary fifteenth-century medical doctor, theologian, and magician, Goethe attains a mythological level of human greatness and failure, pride and humility, faith and deception.
	Nikolai Gogol. Dead Souls In this surreally funny classic of Russian literature, Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, is in the business of buying up "dead souls"--deceased serfs who exist only on paper. (eBook)
	Günter Grass. The Tin Drum The autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world.
	Joao Guimaraes Rosa. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
	Knut Hamsun. Hunger
	Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway's triumphant yet tragic story of an old Cuban fisherman and his relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream combines the simplicity of a fable, the significance of a parable, and the drama of an epic.
	Homer. The Iliad Epic masterpiece chronicles last days of Trojan War--quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon, siege of Troy, death of Hector, Trojan Horse, many other incidents and events.
	Homer. The Odyssey Homer's epic poem of the 9th century B.C. recounts one of the most glorious tales of Western literature, a treasury of Greek folklore, and a myth that has held ageless fascination.
	Henrik Ibsen. A Doll's House Ibsen's seminal play, which changed modern drama, is a searing view of a male-dominated and authoritarian society, presented with a realism that elevates theatre to a level above mere entertainment. The reverberations of NoraUs slamming the door as she leaves Torvald continue to the present day.
	The Book of Job The theme of "The Book of Job" is nothing less than human suffering and the transcendence of it: it pulses with moral energy, outrage, and spiritual insight.
	James Joyce. Ulysses Leopold Bloom wanders through Dublin, talking, observing, musing -- and always remembering Molly, his passionate, wayward wife. Set in the shadow of Homer's Odyssey, internal thoughts give physical reality extra color and perspective.
	Franz Kafka. The Castle Teen-age Carol befriends the lonely daughter of the richest man in town, whose family has lots of money but little pleasure in life.
	Franz Kafka. The Complete Stories
	Franz Kafka. The Trial The terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information.
	Kalidasa. The Recognition of Sakuntala
	Yasunari Kawabata. The Sound of the Mountain
	Nikos Kazantzakis. Zorba the Greek Set on the Greek island of Crete, this is the story of an inhibited English writer who is befriended by a boisterous peasant named Zorba and in the process the young man moves from an observer of the world to a participant.
	DH Lawrence. Sons and Lovers Included here are poems about the tie to the mother, about Miriam, about the trauma of the mother's lingering mortal illness, and about the poignant aftermath of her death during which the son suffered self-abandonment to grief and a sense of desolation described in the novel as a nuit blanche or 'white night.'
	Halldor K Laxness. Independent People
	Giacomo Leopardi. Complete Poems
	Doris M. Lessing. The Golden Notebook The experiences of two women provide the framework for an intense literary study of liberated womanhood.
	Astrid Lindgren. Pippi Longstocking Escapades of a lucky little girl who lives with a horse and a monkey--but without any parents--at the edge of a Swedish village.
	Lu Xun. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
	Mahabharata The Mahabharata is an Indian epic, in its original Sanskrit probably the largest ever composed. Combined with the Ramayana, it embodies the essence of the Indian cultural heritage.... The Mahabharata is an absorbing tale of a feud between two branches of a single Indian ruling family that culminates in a vast, cataclysmic battle.
	Naguib Mahfouz. Children of Gebelawi (Children of the Alley) First published in Arabic in 1959, the story of an Egyptian family mirrors the spiritual history of humankind as a feudal lord disowns one son for diabolical pride and puts another son to the ultimate test.
	Thomas Mann. Buddenbrooks The classic story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany captures the triumphs and tragedies, successes and failures, relationships, loves, and ordinary events of middle-class life.
	Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality.
	Herman Melville. Moby Dick One of the most widely-read and respected books in all American literature, "Moby Dick" is the saga of Captain Ahab and his unrelenting pursuit of Moby Dick, the great white whale who maimed him during their last encounter. A novel blending high-seas romantic adventure, symbolic allegory, and the conflicting ideals of heroic determination and undying hatred, "Moby Dick" is also revered for its historical accounts of the whaling industry of the 1800s.
	Michel de Montaigne. Essays Nobody in Western civilization had ever tried to do what Montaigne set out to do. In a vivid, contemporary style he moves swiftly from thought to thought, often digressing from an idea only to return, having caught up with it elsewhere. In these essays, Montaigne lays out for his contemporaries and for us his plan for how a man might wisely live and wisely die - as he sets out to discover himself.
	Elsa Morante. History
	Toni Morrison. Beloved Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade.
	Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji At the core of this epic is Prince Genji, the son of an emperor, whose passionate character, love affairs and shifting political fortunes offer a glimpse into the golden age of Japan.
	Robert Musil. The Man Without Qualities Set in Vienna on the eve of WWI, adn peopled with some of the most memorable characters in literature, this novel presents a profound, witty, and striking portrait of life as it dissects and tries to define the individual in the modern world.
	Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is aroused to erotic desire only by a young girl.
	Vladimir Nabokov. Njal's Saga
	George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four To Winston Smith, a young man who works in the Ministry of Truth (Minitru for short), come two people who transform his life completely. One is Julia, whom he meets after she hands him a slip reading, "I love you." The other is O'Brien, who tells him, "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." The way in which Winston is betrayed by the one and, against his own desires and instincts, ultimately betrays the other, makes a story of mounting drama and suspense.
	Ovid. Metamorphoses A cohesive collection of stories from Greek and Roman mythology that recount recorded transformations. Includes over 50 tales that chronicle the legends of King Midas, Hercules, the Trojan War, and more.
	Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet
	Edgar Allan Poe. The Complete Tales All of the tales by the master of the detective and the macabre story.
	Marcel Proust. Remembrance of Things Past The novel, told in seven parts, is the story of Proust's own life, told as an allegorical search for truth.
	Francois Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel Collective title of five comic novels by Francois Rabelais, published between 1532 and 1564. The novels present the comic and satiric story of the giant Gargantua and his son Pantagruel.
	Juan Rulfo. Pedro Paramo Beseeched by his dying mother to locate his father, Pedro Paramo, whom they fled from years ago, Juan Preciado sets out for Comala. Comala is a town alive with whispers and shadows--a place seemingly populated only by memory and hallucinations.
	Jalalu'l-Din Rumi. The Mathnawi
	Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children A fascinating family saga about the birth and maturity of a land and its people - a brilliant incarnation of the human comedy.
	Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz. The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard)
	Tayeb Salih. A Season of Migration to the North
	José Saramago. Blindness A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century.
	William Shakespeare. Hamlet The towering tragedy of the Danish prince who feigns madness to trap his father's murderer.
	William Shakespeare. King Lear The story of a foolish king who divides his kingdom among his three daughters based on how much they love him with tragic results.
	William Shakespeare. Othello Jealousy in love is one of the most common of human emotions. In Othello , Shakespeare combines this universal theme with perfectly structured scenes, a storyline that lingers in the memory and a prime example of a tragic hero, Othello himself. The result is perhaps his greatest triumph as a stage play. When the evil Iago plants the seeds of doubt in Othello 's mind about Desdemona's fidelity, audiences around the world have been held spellbound.
	Sophocles. Oedipus the King The anguished tale of Oedipus, who having solved the riddle of the Sphinx, and become King of Thebes, gradually realizes the crimes he unwittingly committed, remains a drama of unremitting power 2,500 years after it was written.
	Stendhal. The Red and the Black Based on a real crime that Stendhal read about in a French tabloid in 1827, the Red and the Black is a brilliant psychological portrait of passion, opportunism, and political intrigue set in nineteenth-century France. It is the story of Julien Sorel, a young man of humble origins but high aspirations, whose prospects for a respectable public career are cut short by boundless egotism, tragic love, and revenge.
	Laurence Sterne. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy A comic masterpiece -- bawdy, profane, irreverent, brazenly illogical -- and one of the most entertaining and original works in English literature The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is a brilliant pastiche of character sketches, obscene and hilarious vignettes, parodies of scholarly treatises on theology, art, and science, comments to the reader, blank pages, playful typography and graphics, narrative threads that appear, disappear, and reappear at whim, and incidents and images that relate, at one and the same time, to the characters and to the novel itself.
	Italo Svevo. Confessions of Zeno
	Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels Shipwrecked castaway Lemuel Gulliver's encounters with strange creatures in strange lands give him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Swift's fantastic and subversive book remains supremely relevant in our own age of distortion, hypocrisy, and irony.
	Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace At once a sweeping historical study of the Napoleonic Wars, a profound examination of the individual's place in the world, and a powerful narrative filled with truly realized characters, War and Peace is an epic full of life in every detail.
	Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina Anna Karenina has beauty, social position, wealth, a husband, and an adored son, but her existence seems empty. When she meets the dashing officer Count Vronsky she rejects her marriage and turns to him to fulfill her passionate nature -- with devastating results. One of the world's greatest novels, Anna Karenina is both an immortal drama of personal conflict and social scandal and a vivid, richly textured panorama of nineteenth-century Russia.
	Leo Tolstoy. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories The story of a worldly careerist who must consider death for the first time and examine his own mortality.
	Anton Chekhov. Selected Stories
	Thousand and One Nights The timeless collection of stories, told by Sheherezade in an attempt to save her life, explores an amazing world of sorcerers and sages, as well as ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations.
	Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The classic story of the flight of Huck Finn and the slave Jim down the Mississippi, and their encounters with the world at large.
	Valmiki. Ramayana Composed in Sanskrit sometime before 300 B.C.E., it is a good adventure and love story as well as a guide to spiritual practice and a reflection of the cultural, social, and religious beliefs of India at the time.
	Virgil. The Aeneid Filled with history and legend, Virgil's classic narrative poem glorifying the genesis of the Roman Empire is one of the towering works of Western civilization.
	Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, contained twelve long untitled poems, but Whitman continued to expand it throughout his life.Whitman's poetry was unprecedented in its unapologetic joy in the physical and its inextricable link to the spiritual. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to him: "I am very happy in reading ["Leaves of Grass], as great power makes us happy ... I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be."
	Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway Direct and vivid in its telling of the details of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the novel manages ultimately to deliver much more. It is the feelings that loom behind those daily events--the social alliances, the shopkeeper's exchange, the fact of death--that give Mrs. Dalloway texture and richness.
	Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse A landmark of modern fiction, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse explores the subjective reality of everyday life in the Hebrides for the Ramsay family.
	Marguerite Yourcenar. Memoirs of Hadrian Written in the form of a testamentary letter from the Emperor Hadrian to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius, this work is as extraordinary for its psychological depth as for its accurate reconstruction of the second century of our era. The author describes the book as a meditation upon history, but this meditation is built upon intensive study of the personal and political life of a great and complex character as seen by himself and his contemporaries, both friends and enemies. Marguerite Yourcenar reconstructs Hadrian's arduous early years, his triumphs and reversals, and his gradual reordering of a war-torn world.